55 South

Don Draper’s signature cocktail, the Old Fashioned, gets a delightful twist at 55 South, a new cocktail lounge on 1st Street in San Jose. “Rather than muddle an orange and cherry in a glass, we substitute the orange with an orange bitter,” says Paul Chun, one of the owners of the San Jose lounge. “The cherry is actually a maraschino cherry that’s imported from Italy.” The drink is served with an ice ball, which “has a surface area that keeps the drink cold without diluting it too much,” he says. Located at the former home A Perfect Finish wine bar at 55 S. 1st St. in San Jose, Chun and his co-owners, Andre Chenoweth (former owner of A Perfect Finish), Eric Nielsen (a former bartender at Blue Fin Sushi) and Michael Nguyen (a DJ) aim to elevate the emerging cocktail revolution with what they call “Cocktail Culture 2.0.” The “2.0” is a homage to Silicon Valley but also a revival of the cocktail culture inspired from bars such as Single Barrel, a few blocks down the street from 55 South, San Francisco’s Bloodhound and other cocktail lounges in the South Bay and Bay Area. Chun says 55 South uses locally sourced ingredients such as fresh organic herbs and fruit from local farmer’s markets and modern techniques, such as using an Enomatic wine dispenser feeds nitrogen into bottles to keep them fresh. The owners aim to add their own twist to classic cocktails by adding or removing different ingredients from the recipe, such as making their own simple syrup and using<