Christiaan Rollich

My name is Christiaan Röllich, and this is my book of cocktails. I’ve been mixing up cocktails and serving a wide variety of crowds in Los Angeles for the last twenty years. For the last decade I’ve worked where I do now, with the Lucques family of restaurants in Los Angeles, one of the most acclaimed restaurant groups in the country.

I love the art and craft of making cocktails, and that’s what I want to share with you through the recipes and stories in this book. The kind of cocktails that I make are “craft cocktails.”

If you’ve ordered a cocktail in your favorite high-end restaurant or craft cocktail bar in the last decade, you know what I’m talking about. These aren’t your usual Manhattans and Martinis. I invent my own drinks, and I give them names, as I did for my children. I make my own liqueurs, vermouths, syrups, and bitters. I squeeze all my fruit and vegetable juices. I often rim a cocktail glass with things beyond the usual salt. Hell, in the world of craft cocktails, even the shape and size of the ice is considered. In the world of the handcrafted cocktail, bartenders are often referred to as mixologists, although I prefer bartender or barman. We have a saying in Dutch, my native language, “Just be normal; that’s already crazy enough.”