Craft cocktail party, with scratch-made pizza, coming soon to Norfolk
Source: The Virginian Pilot; January 24, 2019
Drink a fancy cocktail in Hampton Roads, and there’s a solid chance it owes a debt somehow to Crudo Nudo’s Josh Seaburg.
Maybe he used to run the bar — he put together the early menus for Twist, Saint Germain and the restaurants at The Main. Maybe he consulted, as at Hot Tuna and Shorebreak and Cafe Stella. Or maybe he just helped train the bartender.
But one way or the other, Seaburg is the most visible evangelist for the well-made drink in Norfolk, whether that means meticulous execution on a daiquiri or spending months testing recipes for house-made chocolate cordials or tiki syrups made with peanuts.
Since July, he’s been slinging drinks at chef Eric Nelson’s pasta and raw-fish spot Crudo Nudo in Ghent — turning out adventurous cocktail menus that might run from a martini softened with chartreuse to zany one-offs like a carrot cocktail named after a Bugs Bunny joke in the movie “Wayne’s World.”
But starting Sunday, Seaburg will begin a series of cocktail pop-ups called Model Citizen at Crudo Nudo — a mix of esoteric new-school cocktails, obscure and forgotten classics, scratch-made pizzas and creative bar snacks.
“This is a cocktail bar with a little food, making superlative, classic-inspired drinks with high-prep ingredients,” Seaburg said.
Model Citizen is a name Seaburg’s been carting around for a while. It is the name of his cocktail consulting company, and also the name of a weekly night at Saint Germain, in downtown Norfolk, when he was tending bar.
But while those Model Citizen nights differed greatly from week to week, Seaburg says this new version of Model Citizen will be more focused. The night is conceived as a pop-up version of the bar he’d open if he had his own.
“There will be a few classics that probably shift around, and it’ll be based on guest reaction, of course, but I plan for it to be pretty consistent,” Seaburg said.
The drinks on the advance menu are more pared down than the more adventurous drinks at Crudo Nudo — in part, Seaburg said, to “highlight the fact that you don’t need four Amari in one drink to have a decent cocktail.”
The menu sports three different takes on the martini, including a near-austere one garnished with orange bitters, olive and a twist. But the espresso drink will likely be a corker, made with Seaburg’s own house coffee liqueur that’s the alcoholic equivalent of snorting pure cocoa powder.
A “Rye Tye,” meanwhile, is a peanut-infused tiki drink. A Singani cocktail will be made with liquors distilled from very different grapes: a brandy made with French wine grapes from Jura, and a Bolivian-style grappa called Singani owned by director Steven Soderbergh.
The event will start at 6:30 p.m. and go until midnight or so. Seaburg said he expects Model Citizen to happen roughly every two weeks at Crudo Nudo.
While the focus is on the cocktails, there will be a food menu by Crudo Nudo sous chef Nick Lautieri, with four scratch-made pizzas for $9-$14, and bar snacks like roasted and seasoned chickpeas.
In the future, Seaburg hopes to bolster that snack list with an unlikely highbrow-lowbrow hybrid: caviar on Pringles.
“It’s legit my favorite way to eat caviar,” Seaburg said. “Got it from a bar in Brooklyn — because of course.”