“You can’t teach passion”, says award-winning chef/co-owner Damian Leach of Cocktail Kitchen.

He’s talking about his new bartender Christopher Alleyne, who’s at this moment concentrating on muddling coriander leaves into Scotch bonnet pepper-infused local Mount Gay white rum. Passion, it seems, is a requirement at this restaurant and bar in the St. Lawrence Gap, despite the fact that a sign above its three shelves of rum, whisky and gin says: “We have mixed cocktails about feelings”.

Alleyne’s feelings, however, aren’t mixed about this mango and rum cocktail – he’s a big fan! It’s one of the restaurant’s signature drinks and the perfect balance of sweet, sour and spicy, with muddled pieces of fresh coriander adding herbaceous notes to each sip. “I love that it’s sweet at first from the mango and then you get the chilli at the back of your palette”, says Alleyne. Hopefully, when you drink this cocktail, your feelings will match.

Mango Chow
Makes 1 cocktail

Half a handful of fresh coriander leaves
½ oz. fresh lime juice
½ oz. simple syrup
½ oz. Scotch bonnet pepper-infused Mount Gay Silver rum
1 ½ oz. regular Mount Gay Silver rum
2 oz. mango purée
1 wedge of lime, to garnish

Instructions

1. Muddle the coriander with the lime juice, simple syrup and infused rum. Add the non-infused rum and the mango purée.

2. Pour everything into a cocktail shaker with ice and shake to combine. Test it and adjust to taste (more mango or simple syrup for sweetness, more lime for sour).

3. Pour into a highball glass (don’t strain it) and garnish with a wedge of lime.

Good luck finding a bottle of scotch bonnet-infused rum at your local store – even in Barbados! At Cocktail Kitchen, Christopher and his fellow bartenders make their own by slicing fresh Scotch bonnets (seeds and all) into a bottle of Mount Gay Silver rum and leaving it for a few weeks or up to a month, until it’s spicy enough, then straining out the peppers.

“We normally do two or three peppers for a 1.75-liter bottle of rum”, he says. If you don’t want to make a whole bottle, cut just half a chilli into slices and combine them with a quarter bottle of rum in a clean glass jar. You can use any white rum, but Cocktail Kitchen likes keeping it local.