Prohibition in the United States - a nationwide ban on the making, selling and transport of alcohol - lasted from 1920 to 1933. That's a long time to endure gangster-controlled bootlegging, a boost in organised crime and rampant corruption - not to mention breaking the law just for having a cold one at the end of a hard week.
It also spawned the drinking culture of speakeasies (statistics suggest there were as many as 100,000 in New York City at one point), and the drinking of liquor from tea cups and in paper bags.
While that nation's relationship with alcohol has often been contentious, Hong Kong's is far more straightforward, but it can still take a New Yorker to show us how to do it. Blue Butcher is the New York City-style restaurant with an eyebrow-raising cocktail list created by general manager Danielle Giambattista that muddles influences from the Prohibition era with the restaurant's signature beastly, bloody plates of meat.
Blue Butcher took over the space that was Republik and made the huge restaurant its own by filling it with wooden tables, leather furniture, a meat ageing cabinet and a corner bar from which flames occasionally emanate as a cocktail is flambeed. Platters weighed down with slabs of steak take centre place at many tables, but what's really fascinating are the brown paper bags dotted around that hide the signature Maddy's Apple Pie Moonshine.
With an overt gory glow about it on the page, but thankfully less bloody in the flesh, is the Pig's Blood Martini. You wonder if anyone would drink a cocktail that had been set under a draining pig's carcass and served, perhaps, with pork scratching crumbs artfully dusting the rim of the glass. Happily, that's not how the cocktail is made. It's a delicately sweet concoction of vodka infused with cooked beetroot and oranges, plus a little beet syrup, served with orange peel twisted over the surface then rubbed around the rim of the chalice it's served in. The citrus peel fragrance instantly wakes up the taste buds, and the vegetable flavours balance the tang of the peel and the fruitiness of the orange, making it dangerously easy to gulp.
Ingredients 30ml beetroot-infused vodka