The cocktail artist

WORK OF ART Bridget Albert takes a cue from Seurat to create the Sunday in the Park cocktail.

Squinting at the lemon-lime tones of Degas’s Yellow Dancers, her head tilted to one side, master mixologist Bridget Albert (pictured, above) says only one word: “Chartreuse.” She says it with the childlike awe of somebody who loves the color. But today it’s not the color she’s concerned with; it’s the French liquor of the same name.

The Art Institute has asked Albert to create a cocktail program for its restaurant and catering business, and now she’s on what she calls her “fact-finding mission.” It’s the kind of work she typically does in a restaurant’s kitchen, where she takes note of which fruits it uses and what’s in the spice rack. She’ll look at the restaurant’s glassware, taking an example of each glass back with her to her lab. But for this job she’s making it a point to get lost in the museum, to float from the Impressionists to the Cubists, taking notes along the way about the colors she sees and the year the paintings were made. “Nineteen thirty,” she says, looking at American Gothic. And then she mutters something about Prohibition.

To Albert, Prohibition was an unthinkable injustice, and she’s doing everything she can to make up for lost time—right now, she is the single most influential person on the Chicago cocktail scene. As the master mixologist for the Illinois chapter of liquor distributor Southern Wine & Spirits, Albert spends her days hopping from restaurants to hotels to catering companies, creating exclusive, one-of-a-kind cocktail lists. (Albert doesn’t get paid by the restaurants for her consultations; it’s considered an added benefit to the bar for buying the brands of her employer, Southern Wine & Spirits.) She works as both instigator—concocting lists for brand-new restaurants—and doctor—breathing life into cocktail lists that have become stale (such as Gibsons, which she rejuvenated about a year ago). After thoroughly raiding a restaurant, Albert goes back to her lab in Bolingbrook and starts creating recipes. Fresh juices, house-made syrups and balance are her key concerns, but having worked behind the bar for 12 years—seven of those at Las Vegas’ Bellagio Hotel under her mentor Tony Abou-Ganim—she also has a sharp eye for making the drinks bartender-friendly. “I never want my bartenders swearing my name under their breath,” she says.

It takes two to three weeks for Albert to develop a cocktail list, and then about another week to train the staff. When she’s done, the staff is completely self-sufficient (at least when it comes to the bar), and Albert can take off, leaving her card behind in case the restaurant wants her to create a new cocktail list when the seasons change. But she doesn’t just leave and not look back. Albert is a woman who is uncommonly concerned with the state of cocktail culture, and more often than not she will take at least one bartender from each restaurant under her wing and enroll him or her in the Academy of Spirits and Fine Service in Glen Ellyn, which she founded last year. At the beginning of the 12-week program, which teaches bartenders the basics of mixology, Albert typically asks the class if it knows how to make a Tom Collins. Usually at least one bartender won’t even know what it is. But if the pre-Prohibition cocktail programs created by academy alums at Fulton Lounge, Hop Haus and Graze are any indication, students know the Tom Collins—and much more—by the time they graduate.

Based on the way Albert acts when she talks about cocktails—a sort of deathly seriousness mixed with dreamy awe—it’s obvious she trains bartenders because she wants others to carry the torch, to feel the same pride about cocktails that she does. That, and she also wants to kick some cocktail ass. Part of being in the academy means enrolling in the United States Bartenders’ Guild, the Illinois chapter of which Albert also founded. USBG members regularly participate in cocktail competitions, such as the Bacardi-Martini Grand Prix, the Olympics of mixology. In 2005, Albert (the first woman from America ever to compete) took home second prize. If she has her way, Chicago bartenders will become international mixology stars by winning the World Cocktail Competition Nationals, taking place in Chicago on May 5.

But first, she has to deal with the Art Institute. She gravitates toward A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and takes in the colors (“You need to keep them soft”), the pixelation, the monkey in the lower right-hand corner. “Ever seen, in tropical cocktails, those little plastic monkeys?” she asks. Her mind is racing. The painting, of course, is already a classic. If Albert gets her way, the cocktail will be, too.

Get this recipe for Albert's Sunday in the Parkcocktail.