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“Hmmm. I don’t know what that is, but it sounds delicious.”
Ignacio slides his plate aside and skates his eyes over the table, looking for something. He dumps the sugars out of the ramekin, tossing the artificial sweeteners to the side.
“I’ll be right back.”
He disappears behind the bar, gathering stuff in his arms. He returns with an empty glass, some bar fruit, and a bottle of something.
“There’s not one type of cuisine you can say is pure,” he says, dropping limes and lemons inside the glass.
“Everything is a mixture.”
He produces a tiny baseball bat looking thing and begins to smash the citrus to a pulp.
“Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China. Sugar…” He opens a packet of Sugar in the Raw, pouring it on top of the fruit, “was originally cultivated in New Guinea.”
He pops in a couple of maraschino cherries and mint, smashing that, too, because why not?
“Tomatoes are from the Americas, yet you think of marinara as an Italian sauce.”
Here he throws in all the bar fruit. Pineapple, strawberries, oranges. Is he making some kind of strange smoothie?
“You think of potatoes as Irish or German. But they’re native to Peru.”
I understand the point he’s trying to make, but that weird witch’s brew is starting to look a little questionable.
“You’re kind of making a mess there,” I say with a grimace.
“Exactly. This is what it means to be human. We’re all a mess of DNA soup.”
“Well, there’s probably an indigenous tribe somewhere…”
He tops the mixture with the contents of the bottle, which I now see is club soda. With a spoon, he scoops out ice from my horchata and drops it in the glass. Then he guzzles his water in one long gulp, covers the empty cup over the other glass, and shakes the thing like a martini.
“I’m getting a whole Tom Cruise vibe from you right now,” I say. “Please tell me you’re going to flip the bottle behind your back and catch it without looking.”
He cracks a smile and sets the concoction in front of me with a flourish.
“The best way to experience a culture is with your mouth.”
I squint at him. “I think maybe you should rephrase that slogan if you plan to put it on your website. Just sayin’.”
“Okay. How’s this? You don’t learn culture. You eat it.”
“Better. But this is a drink.”
“For Pete’s sake, just taste it.”
“For realzies? You want me to actually drink this?
“Yes, I do.”
“Ohhh-kay. Because I thought you were just demonstrating the DNA soup thing with a bunch of random ingredients and fanfare.”
He shrugs. “Maybe I was.”
I grimace, slowly lifting the glass to my lips. “I might regret this, but here goes.”
I pinch my nose as if that will help, and take a sip. Then I take a bigger sip.
