“This one actually started off as a winter drink, and Kendall and I were calling it ‘The Yule Log,’” Lisa Malinovskaya says as she sets the cocktail down before me, “but I think it works even better for summer. So we changed the name to the Bonfire!”

Malinovskaya and her co-owner, Kendall Murphy, are Seattle industry veterans who’re living the dream: opening a lovely cocktail bar with your bestie. Now in its fifth year of business—and second location, after pulling up stakes in Lake City and moving to Wallingford in 2020—Korochka Tavern is a glittering little jewel box on 45th and Sunnyside, in the old Grizzled Wizard space. This is the number-one place I send people when they ask where to take a first date: an exquisite mix of beauty and novelty, with its live edge wooden bar, splashy floral wallpaper, patterned vintage glassware, and cultivated comfort food. It’s somewhere between a Russian tea parlor and a ryumochnaya, a Soviet-era snack bar that serves real stiff drinks. 

 

 

 

 

 

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The menu of small plates here is all hits, featuring dumplings and pickles and earthy bits like mushrooms and cabbage and walnuts and beets. Murphy and Malinovskaya are both avid foragers and items like dill and nettle tinctures will pop up, especially in the spring. My faves include the creamy borscht, the beef/pork pelmeni with spicy Georgian adjika on the side—"I make the adjika myself!” Malinovskaya adds—and the pepperly-garlicky koreyskaya morkovka or Korean carrot salad. The many-layered honey cream cake cannot be skipped (by me), and whatever brand of Bulgarian feta they add to the pickle-and-rye-bread plate always leaves me searching Slavic markets for weeks after. 

Korochka also has a beverage list full of ingredients you don’t often see in cocktails around Seattle. As Malinovskaya told me in 2019, they don’t really have cocktail culture in her hometown, Moscow, and so she and Murphy have freestyled their own menu of Eastern European flavors, such as kvass, birch juice, horseradish-infused vodka, eucalyptus bitters, and rose cordial. 

Back to the Bonfire specifically, though. I agree with Malinovskaya—this smoky mezcal-based cocktail is absolutely a summer drink if it’s being served in Seattle, now that the whole coast is just gonna annually be on fire. The Bonfire comprises mezcal, pine liqueur, green walnut liqueur, Bénédictine, and Angostura bitters, served up in a Nick & Nora glass, all prim and pretty. It tastes exactly like the sky last week, but it will fuck you up in a totally different way. The sweet nutty flavor evens out the smoke and the coniferousness, and the herbal notes from the Bénédictine and the bitters brighten it all up. It’s also 100% booze, so this one’s a sipper. Or, I mean, not, depending on how Russian you wanna get in here.

Oaxaca-based El Mero Mero makes the mezcal in this cocktail, the brand styling itself as “the mezcalero’s mezcal.” Started by master mezcalero Justino García Cruz, the production operations were later taken over by his now-ex-wife Hidelberta Martínez Hipólito, herself a master mezcalera and one of the few women working at the top level in the mezcal world. I confess that mezcal is a liquor that I sometimes shy away from, as it tends to be too intense for my wimpy palate, and it usually hits my branes like a cartoon anvil the next morning too. But the very high quality of El Mero Mero changes the game–this mezcal is clean and brilliant like a pearl. No next-day whammies so far, and it’s smoky but it’s not like drinking a glass of kielbasa juice, as mezcals can sometimes feel (to me). This mezcal wants to be paired with richness, a fatty sausage or a slab of brisket. 

El Mero Mero, by the way, means “the boss of the boss,” or the grandboss, and it’s a good name. No bullshit here. This one’s in charge.  

Orahavoc is a walnut liqueur, and the one Malinovskaya uses is made in Croatia by Maraska, a distillery best known for making maraschino cherry liqueur. By itself, the orahavoc is way too sweet, reminiscent of cola concentrate, but it really blooms in this cocktail, with the herbal/bitter tang from the other components to tone it down to a nutty little whisper. Orahavoc’s a popular digestif along the Dalmatian coast of the Adriatic, and Maraska is the only orahavoc producer that starts with green walnuts, which is reportedly the legit homestyle way to make it. Although it’s about 17 times sweeter, it still might be good as a pinch-hitter for nocino, like in a Manhattan, or just a drop of it in your milky coffee.

The pine liqueur’s full royal name is Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur of the Alps, and it comes to us from the Austrian Alps. This floral, super-aromatic amaro is made not from the needles but the pinecones of the arolla pine tree, aka the Swiss stone pine. It’s got a syrupy consistency and a deep orangey-red tone not unlike Campari, and it tastes like if you made a sun tea out of pinecones and sugar and then threw a few cherries in there. Zirbenz is made to be drunk après-ski to warm your frozen ass up and get your blood flowing—it’s redolent of the woods but not sharp and jabby, as conifer-flavored things go, with a spearminty menthol effect. I’ve only ever had it in scotch before, but pairing it with mezcal seems like a lateral move here, flavor-wise, so… sure! This is the element that really completes the whole forest fire arc in the Bonfire, for better or worse. 

After a straight shot of Zirbenz, my friend Mark commented, “Drinking this is like when you’re trying to carry a Christmas tree up the stairs and it’s all in your face and stabbing you in the eye and getting in your mouth and shit. But in a good way? Like, now I kind of miss doing that.”

The cumulative effect of this cocktail is like drinking a tree, which seems to be a theme on Korochka’s menu. “Yeah, I guess we eat and drink a lot of trees in Russia,” Malinovskaya laughs, as she recounts collecting birch juice in the forest as a kid. “By the way, I know that none of these bottles are actually from Russia, but they have lots of walnut and pine trees in Russia, I promise. Lots.”

 

 

 

 

 

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When I ask Malinovskaya what her inspiration was when creating this cocktail, she says, “It was honestly just a vehicle for Bénédictine, because lately I always want to put Bénédictine in everything. I just like it! Bénédictine itself inspires me.”

I’m glad she did because it’s what makes that round walnut flavor really shine. Like, I know you guys know Bénédictine so I won’t explain it, but it has such a complicated flavor of its own, with 27 different herbs commingling together, that it can’t help but add some poetry to every cocktail it’s in, I think. And can really rescue a drink from being a sugar bomb, as it has probably done here. Malinovskaya’s a wise and clever bartender for knowing this. 

She’s also wielded her mastery of subtle flavor combos in the bar’s current cocktail special, the Date Night, which combines rum, banana liqueur, cold brew, date molasses, Amargo Chuncho bitters, and a grapefruit twist. Once again, the tropical sugars are balanced right down to the milliliter by the medicinal Peruvian bitters, the coffee tannins, and the citric acid. Expert work, bravo.

By the way, if you’re not into cocktails and you really wanna go hard, Korochka’s housemade horseradish vodka deserves a callout. The fumes from this stuff will open up all your pores simultaneously and sting your eyes a little bit. A powerful, bone-crushing elixir. It’s meant to be drunk on ice, but maybe try it as a vodka soda as an introduction? I poured it into my glass of silky birch juice once, and that was pretty good too. 

Oh, also, whenever I write about Korochka Tavern, I always have to point out that korochka means “the heel of the bread” and was Malinovskaya’s nickname when she was little, for being stubborn. Don’t you love that? I just love that. 

 

 

 

 

 

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My only regret writing about Korochka this time around is that it’s summer and not winter, and this is for real the city’s coziest bar to stumble into when it’s fucking freezing outside. I don’t know about you, but I tire of this season, and I can’t wait to seek shelter here from the pissing rain in a few months. Peel all my gloves and overclothes off into a heap, pour myself into a booth, and devour a steaming bowl of mushroom/potato vareniki with smetana and an arborescent cocktail in an elegant glass. Maybe even a Bonfire. I mean a Yule Log. It’ll be a Yule Log by then.