Q&A | How to create great cocktails with quirky ingredients, according to Four Seasons Hong Kong’s Argo

The futuristic bar’s playful new cocktail menu is a deep dive into flavour combinations that draw on ingredients that are available all year long

Reading Time:3 minutes

Argo’s beverage manager Federico Balzarini. Photo: Courtesy of Argo

Published: 6:15pm, 15 Oct 2024

When Federico Balzarini, beverage manager at the Four Seasons Hotel Hong Kong’s Argo bar, produces its latest cocktail menu, I can’t help but feel a little perplexed. First of all, the book is triangular. Second, it’s a bright shade of fuchsia. Third, the cover is adorned with a diagram resembling one arm of a six-sided Chinese checkers board.

“I think I did it myself one afternoon in the office when I was on a lunch break,” he says.

Rendered in fuchsia pink, Argo’s triangular Combinations menu is as eye-catching as it gets. Photo: Courtesy of Argo

The Combinations menu presents an intriguing proposition. Within the triangular diagram are 10 nodes, representing 10 ingredients that are available year-round, the corner nodes being ingredients with dedicated cocktails: pineapple, grapes and marigold. Towards the centre are nodes linked into two-ingredient recipes: cacao with grapefruit, bergamot with wood, hops with kumquat. At the centre, corn is the friendliest ingredient, bridging with neighbouring nodes to form a triplet of three-ingredient cocktails. Then, tying all the peripheral nodes together are the four-ingredient cocktails.

Bar bites from the Combinations menu. Photo: Courtesy of Argo

The resulting 12 thus reinterpret 10 ingredients between them, iterations of the classics, from a Tex-Mex Alexander (grapefruit, corn and wood) to a Bergamot & Wood Gimlet (in collaboration with the hotel’s spa, arriving at the table with a small dispenser of hand cream made using the same botanicals).

At a time when bars are falling back on oft-trodden classics with a twist, or leaping far, far ahead with cocktails that have been redistilled and rotovapped to death, Combinations carves out a middle path that manages to look both forward and back. To find out how, we sat down for a few rounds with Balzarini.

How did the concept for Combinations come about?

The team at Argo. Photo: Courtesy of Argo

We involved not only the bar team, but also the floor team and the back-of-house team, because the goal was to create a menu that was made not only for bartenders, but for everyone. We all started to throw ideas on the table until we decided to make a menu (based on) ingredients we can source locally all year long, and then combine. The problem (with ingredients) is, of course, their seasonality, and since we are launching a menu that is one year in duration, we had to deal with the supply of these ingredients. In Combinations, we are using the same ingredients in different forms, so that means we can play around with seasonality.