How To Make The World’s Best Bar’s Old Fashioned

What's up my friends, welcome to the second episode of World's Best Bar Cocktails, a series where I share recipes from some of the world's best bar and most importantly recipes you can make at home. Today we're making Barlioni's Ortega Old Fashioned. Barlioni's was ranked number one in 2025 at the world's best bar, so it's almost like saying today we're making the world's best old fashioned. So if you guys are ready, let's go make one of the Alright, so when I first had the idea for this series, I wanted to help you bring some of the world's best bars into your home, but also to show you that best doesn't always have to be overly complicated and Barlioni transcends exactly that concept. It's a bar where quality ingredients and hospitality will always be more important than novelty and overly engineered For those who are not so familiar with Barlioni, it's best described as an Italian neighborhood bar in Hong Kong. The owner, Lorenzo Antinori, is a Roman bartender who wanted to bring that warm and Italian hospitality in Hong Kong, so the bar program is developed all around that. So the cocktails are often inspired by Italian classics, the food is simple and inspired by the aperitivo culture, and the bar design has that 80s, 90s vibe and it's super warm and welcoming. Lorenzo calls his concept the Cocktail Popolari, which literally translates to Cocktail for the People, and he actually sent me personally the Ortega Old Fashioned's recipe, giving me the permission to share it with you, so he truly lives up to it. So now for the ingredients, we're gonna need some bourbon, calvados, anchovies verde, a honey date syrup and chocolate bitters. Now to make the honey syrup the way they do it at Barlioni, you will need a vacuum sealer and an immersion cooker. If you don't have that, there's a workaround, obviously it's not going to be the same, but it's still going to work well enough so you can still make the cocktail. So the way to do it is simply to make a regular honey syrup and add a little bit of date molasses in there before adding the other ingredients. But if you want to make the real recipe, you will need honey dates, which are a little bit pricey and sometimes hard to get, so if you can't find any, I recommend you just use the best medjool dates you can find. So you're going to start by removing the pits from the dates, cutting and weighting 30 grams of that. Then in a sous vide bag, you will add 300 grams of a floral honey, 100 grams of water and your dates. You're going to seal the bag and cook it for one hour at 60 Celsius. After one hour, you simply plunge it in ice water to cool, filter it through a fine mesh strainer, squeezing out as much syrup as possible and then you will add half a gram of orange blossom water and a generous pinch of salt. That's it for the mise en place, so now let's build the cocktail. So we're going to start with one ounce of bourbon, same amount of calvados and if you are a calvados aficionado, I highly recommend you use something a little bit funky, something like Regis Gros 8 Years for example would be absolutely fantastic. So now we're gonna follow this up with 10 mils of our syrup, one teaspoon of Anchoréas Verde and two dashes of chocolate bitters. Now we just add ice and stir until nice and cold. Then we're going to strain this over ice and for the garnish, we're going to add a thin slice of apple and if you want to prepare those ahead of time, just squish a little bit of lime and lemon juice on the slices so they're not going to oxidize. So we simply place the apple slice in the glass like this and there have it, Barley Odie or take old-fashioned. Cheers! So we really get that classic old-fashioned vibe right off the bat, no questions asked, but it's fruitier and more complex than the regular old fashion. The calvados pair so well with the spiciness and green notes of the Anchoréas Verde and the date flavor infused in the honey syrup kind of brings a brown sugar vibe to the floral syrup which creates a beautiful balance. Now the chocolate bitters for me seemed kind of out of the blue at first when I read the recipe, but it works beautifully. It adds a lot of depth and honestly, the flavors just work. So Barley Odie or take old-fashioned is a great cocktail and I highly recommend it. So my friends, this is it for me today. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you liked this video. Leave a thumbs up if you did. Don't forget to subscribe before you go to turn the bell if you want to make sure you don't miss the next one and then watch this video which was number one of the series. So once again, thank you very much, have a great day and see you very soon. Cheers!