To access San Antonio cocktail spot Maeve, ignore the door facing the street at the top of some unwelcome stairs. Instead, take the crushed-stone path to the left of the historic cottage. At a small entrance patio you'll now have two choices. Pick the unlabeled steel door. Although it looks heavy and impenetrable, it opens surprisingly smoothly and provides a portal between Maeve's staid street-side impressions and a wide-open interior that gives way to a huge back yard.
Those wide-open spaces were unpopulated during a weekday-afternoon, Fiesta-week visit to the Government Hill cocktail oasis that opened last fall. Ceiling-strung papel picado suggested festivity, but for a while anyway, I was a party of one. Waiting for friends to appear allowed time to scan the space. Both indoors and out, it's furnished in a scattershot style that's not exactly thrilling for daytime viewing. However, online photos of dance nights with swarming crowds suggest an entirely different ambiance after dark — one in which colored lights and thumping music take center stage.
Maeve's drinks menu, accessible via QR code, isn't large, but it displays ambition. Among the nine "signature" cocktails and four "classics," you'll find neither a stirred martini nor Manhattan, though we assume the bar could rustle them up if needed.
Service & Engagement is a simple enough drink on its face: rye, pineapple gomme, lime and Angostura bitters. Gomme, in case you haven't come across it before, is a viscous syrup containing sugar and powdered gum arabic that adds sweetness, silky mouth feel and, in this case, subtle fruit flavor. The combination made S&E the best of show, a drink we all said we'd order again.
The Yerba-Motxo is a spin on Spanish summertime favorite the Kalimoxto, an equal-parts mixture of red wine and cola with an added splash of lemon juice. (It's better than it sounds.) Maeve's substitutes yerba mate tea for the cola and adds cucumber. At the very least, it sounds like a bold interpretation.
The menu also includes an espresso martini. In this case, it's more of a transmogrification than a mere twist, employing vodka, coconut water, salted caramel and fermented honey. I couldn't go there — and not just because of the vodka — but feel free.
Once my party arrived, one of them ordered the Under Pressure, the name a nod to the method of the cocktail's delivery via tap. Pre-batched from gin, passion fruit purée, lime and sparkling wine, and featuring a floating bay leaf, the drink looked good on paper — or on a phone's screen, actually. However, in real life, it was a tad too polite, perhaps missing its advertised guajillo "glaze," which sparked much discussion about how such a thing might be applied and to what. The rim? The bay leaf?
Moving on to the classics on Maeve's menu, the Oaxaca Old Fashioned is a modern one, having been invented at New York's famed Death & Co. in 2007. I had the drink — which substitutes reposado tequila, mezcal and agave nectar for the original's bourbon and sugar — at that particular bar during its heyday, and I loved it.
At Maeve, the drink gets a new spin on the young classic — my, but they grow up fast these days — adding in Combier, a French orange liqueur, and subbing chocolate bitters for the Angostura. It also includes grapefruit oil that should have worked well — had it made its presence known. The end result was OK for unexamined sipping but not necessarily an improvement on the original.
If you're ever in London with an afternoon or evening to kill creatively, let me recommend the American Bar of the Savoy Hotel. It's both a swanky watering hole and the home of the Hanky Panky, a true classic invented by legendary bartender Ada Coleman in the early years of the 20th century. Her recipe was simple: equal parts gin and sweet vermouth with a couple of dashes of Fernet-Branca amaro for added depth.
I suspect Maeve amps up the Fernet-Branca in the version I ordered, since that's pretty much all I got. It's easy to overdo, because the popular bartender's shift-change shot can be a bitter bully. That said, Fernetophiles are likely to find this a pleasing drink. Served in a diminutive Nick and Nora glass, it will also make you seem sophisticated as you contemplate in its depths the many faces of Maeve.
Maeve
818 Austin St. maevesa.com | Hours: 5 p.m.-2 a.m. Tuesday through Friday, 2 p.m.-2 a.m. Saturday, 12 pm-midnight Sunday.
Price range: Signature and classic cocktails run $10-$15.
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