Vinepair: The Legend, Myth, and Majesty of the Pickleback

Let’s talk about hangovers.

Hangovers are like 10th grade math. They get more difficult, and then nearly impossible to deal with as we get older. Hangovers in your 30s are no longer a badge of honor from last night’s exploits; they’re a scarlet letter, a not-so-friendly reminder from the universe that you aren’t that young anymore.

Avoiding hangovers becomes a “Good Will Hunting”-type of equation as you age, a rich tapestry of densely competing concerns. Did I eat enough? Will I be okay if I have wine after that cocktail? What time do I have to wake up tomorrow? Nobody needs a shot, Matt.

Whether you are a 22-year-old who feels good as new after a greasy breakfast, or a drinker of a certain age for whom the all-day struggle is real, hangover cures abound. A Google search for “best hangover cure” reveals no fewer than 1.27 million results, ranging from water to herbal supplements to FDA-disapproved substances.

As you squint through the pain, you wonder: Is it B12? Bananas? Raw eggs? Cold-pressed juice? Greasy food? Is it… more booze?

Yes. As both a term and concept, the hair of the dog has been around for a while. John Heywood coined the term in a 1546 six-volume collection of writings titled, “A Dialogue Conteinyng the Nomber in Effect of All the Prouerbes in the Englishe Tongue, Compacte in a Matter Concernyng Two Maner of Mariages.” If you really feel like impressing no one at all, then go ahead and recite this Heywood ditty the next time a friend has enjoyed too much of the sacrament:

“I pray thee let me and my fellow have
A hair of the dog that bit us last night –
And bitten were we both to the brain aright.
We saw each other drunk in the good ale glass.”

Heywood’s term “hair of the dog” hails from an ancient remedy for rabies. According to extremely questionable science, the cure for a rabid dog bite was once believed to involve putting burned hair of said dog on the wound. I’m not a medical doctor, but I did used to be a lifeguard and strongly do not recommend this.

That said, many believe drinking a Bloody Mary or downing a beer first thing in the morning is the best way to cure what ails you, which, if you think about it, is kind of like treating a third-degree burn with more fire.

Which brings us to the pickleback, or pickle juice paired with a shot of whiskey. If it seems counterintuitive to put more booze into your system after putting too much in the night before, how about consuming booze alongside salty liquid, a known dehydrator? The concept strikes most of us former lifeguard types as an unlikely hangover preventer, yet that’s exactly what pickleback adherents claim.

“Pickle Brine is Why the Polish Don’t Get Hangovers,” Munchies wrote in 2017. “Why Pickle Juice is the Ultimate Hangover Cure, According to Science,” a Notre Dame undergrad posted on Spoon University two years prior.

Most drinking fads, unless they’re something like Four Loko, are based on longstanding traditions. Swigging pickle juice with your booze isn’t anything new. If you’re Russian, it’s practically required.

The pickleback shot became popular in America, however, in 2006, thanks to bartender Reggie Cunningham. The salty solution came to his attention one very hungover day when he was working at lovable Brooklyn dive, Bushwick Country Club.

Documented in what looks to be a found footage YouTube interview, Cunningham says that a woman from Florida with a raspy voice parked herself at his bar and asked for a shot of Old Crow bourbon with a side of pickle juice. Luckily for Cunningham, the now-famous McClure’s Pickles retailer was located just two doors down, and happened to be storing jars in the bar’s basement.

Served alongside a shot, the salty brine seemed to eliminate the taste of the whiskey, which certainly helps if you’re not into whiskey. Cunningham begrudgingly joined his patron for one pickleback shot, and then several more. There in that hazy moment a Brooklyn legend was born.

The pickleback craze exploded, becoming a bartender’s handshake of sorts. It spawned all sorts of salty variations, too. Tequila plus pickled watermelon. Pickled beet juice with vodka. Mezcal alongside pico de gallo juice. And a whole bunch more.

In addition to finding picklebacks delicious, advocates insisted that pickle brine served as a panacea to dehydration; that somehow the combination of water, spices, and cucumbers unlocks secret powers of re-hydration and muscle un-cramping.

The craze spread so far that a company even went as far as monetizing it as a Gatorade-esque sports drink. So the next time you’re parched after a hot day on the gridiron reach for a cold Pickle Juice Sport (picklepower.com).

*

But the real question is: Does it work?

And the short answer is: no.

Kevin Miller, PhD, of Central Michigan University, tackled the pickle juice postulation in a 2009 academic paper, “Electrolyte and Plasma Changes After Ingestion of Pickle Juice, Water, and a Common Carbohydrate-Electrolyte Solution.” The question he set out to answer is whether pickle brine (because of its sodium content) could effectively increase plasma electrolytes in a person experiencing exercise-associated muscle cramps. If so, it would make for a useful athletic supplement — and, thus, a helluva hangover cure.

Miller tested blood samples from nine men around the age of 25 (sorry, women) after they ingested small volumes of pickle juice, and determined that there was little to no change in the plasma sodium concentration. Large quantities? That’s a different story for a different study. “Ingesting greater quantities of pickle juice has the potential to increase plasma sodium concentration; however, the effect of such a practice is unknown,” he writes.

Sounds like a challenge.

https://vinepair.com/articles/pickleback-history-hangover-cure/

EOS: Magic on the Dark Streets of Gotham

The train of her dress floats in her wake as Juliette Campbell, creative director of Shanghai Mermaid, the renowned underground cabaret, strides from room to room making sure every detail is just so. A man in a fez follows close behind, clipboard in hand. The theme for this evening’s fete is Egyptian, and the time, about 1927. The historic Down Town Association in Manhattan has been transformed, looking, in the dim red light, less like the cavernous halls of Wayne Manor and more like late-Empire beau monde Cairo.

An hour later, the partygoers arrive, decked out in sequined dresses and chic suits. And in no time, a sea of fezzes, fedoras, and flapper headpieces is bobbing on the dance floor to the haunting, serpentine melodies of live Egyptian and Arabic folk music. The belly dancer’s gyrations stop, perfectly timed with the band’s final note, and Juliette introduces the next act: a performance honoring the Egyptian cat goddess Bast. Two masked women in black bodysuits prowl through the crowd and slink into a synchronized dance that looks as if it were taken from the hieroglyphs on a dusty wall in Alexandria. Later, a fire performer cavorts through the room, sprinkling rose petals to tantalize the entranced onlookers. These are the meticulous touches on which Juliette has built her reputation. She carries herself like a queen, lips fire-engine red, finessing technical hitches here and there, overseeing her magnificent creation.


Two weeks later, she is telling me stories over whiskey and garlicky asparagus at Café Argentino in Brooklyn. A streak of hot pink offsets her otherwise jet black hair, and her smile is engaging and warm. Juliette laughs between bites of empanadas and theatrically recounts the year she spent assisting the notoriously brash Hollywood executive, Harvey Weinstein. She describes how at eighteen she escaped conservative Orange County, California, to be an actor in the wilds of New York, just like everybody else. She entered the NYU undergraduate program in theater to mollify her parents, but the itch to work overcame her, and she dropped out after two years to join a national tour. She did that for a few years, deciding eventually to step away from the frenetic pace to “become a person,” as she puts it.


She grew into herself in her new city, a process she describes as tremendously underrated. “Aging is a wonderfully empowering thing,” she says with gusto. “I feel like I could do fucking anything.” And as her CV attests, she has. She shot a documentary on witches in New York City, spent years designing custom jewelry, and toiled away as an assistant at Miramax – just a few items in her lengthy repertoire.

All the while, though, Juliette’s subconscious was nudging her back to the stage. One day, as she sat in Barbès, a tiny bar and performance space in Park Slope, the music and setting lulled her into a vivid daydream. “I was in a nightclub in Paris in the ‘20s. And it was all very clear to me … everyone was dressed in the styles of that era, and there was a great band playing,” she reflects with a nostalgia-soaked voice. Her next venture had revealed itself.

That was eight years ago.

Juliette’s idle daydream turned into Shanghai Mermaid, and its inaugural soirée took place in a humble basement in Brooklyn. After an exhausting year of getting shut down by the police and the chronic anxiety of eleventh-hour bookings, the search was on for a permanent venue. Eventually she found an empty warehouse in Crown Heights and set up shop, christening it the Red Lotus Room. Neglected for sixteen years, the building was in desperate need of attention. “I did everything at first,” she sighs. “I cleaned the floors, scrubbed the toilets.” She pauses, and her eyes glimmer. “But there was magic in there. I wish you could have seen it.” Unfortunately, gentrification of the neighborhood forced the building’s owners to sell, and Juliette had to close the doors of her successful venture and move on. The consistency of one location had been comforting, but never to be deterred, she once again began combing the city for worthy haunts like the early days, giving the footloose cabaret some of its old extemporaneous charm.

A few weeks after our chat, I make my way to the Down Town Association once more, which buzzes with life on the night following Halloween. The theme is a celebration of late-Victorian decadence, and a tinge of the occult seeps into the evening air; in one room a séance is under way. As I drift toward the dance floor, I encounter a smattering of top hats, bow ties, and a variety of gowns. On the far side of the hazy room, a bespectacled man croons into the mic, a Western Electric 600A, between silky runs from the clarinetist. Laughter and chatter and the clinking of glasses are all I hear as I shoulder my way through the crowd and the hot jazz roars to life. Lost in the moment, I twirl and dip a grinning beauty in a beaded drop-waist dress, and suddenly I experience the magic about which Juliette coos. I gaze around me, struck by the notion that I have slipped out of the present and into a different time altogether.


When she speaks about old jazz, a Mae West scene, or the nightclubs of Hemingway’s Paris, you realize Juliette was born in the wrong era; she would seem more comfortable, perhaps, wearing a sleek ivory gown on the silver screen, trading wanton glances with some Phillip Marlowe type, a glowing cigarette between his lips. She is a curator of the past, reconstructing the tastes, sounds, and feelings of days gone by. It’s an exercise in immersion for her loyal followers and newcomers alike, both groups multiplying with every event. “Sometimes,” she says, “we really need to feel like we’re transported,” and her Shanghai Mermaid, this ever-evolving, sentient artistic expression, is a means to that end. The handsomely-clad devotees come in droves because they yearn for the sensation conjured by these dimly lit nights, an aesthetic as subtle and seductive as the olives in the martini or the muted whimper of the trumpet solo.

Juliette, like that beautiful daydream, has undergone her own maturation, a far cry from the California teenager staring up at the flickering minarets of a new city, wondering with childlike awe what would come of it all. She looks forward now, down the dark streets that are strange to her no longer. Though uncertainty may lie ahead, she arches her eyebrow and smiles in knowing anticipation, for what’s to follow is sure to be dazzling. The magic made in Brooklyn eight years ago rests in the palm of her hand, at the ready until the moment beckons, and all of New York waits to see what she’ll do with it next.

Image courtesy of Elizabeth Waterman

Images courtesy of Elizabeth Waterman

http://eosisnow.com/juliette_campbell/

57 Degrees: Holding the Onion

He paddles out for one last set. His legs are tired but adrenaline gallops through his body, keeping him steady and agile on the board. This is Mark Sullivan’s reprieve before he heads into the office. The calm before the cluster of white shirts dance around grills and fryers and prep stations. The printer shrieks orders as spatulas ting, pans clink, and rib eyes hiss in the symphonic maelstrom of a Friday night.

Executive Chef at Bacchus Management Group, Sullivan joined Tim Stannard in 2001 to open the now Michelin-starred Village Pub in Woodside. Since then, the group has opened eight restaurants, including a single origin coffee roasting company, a five-acre organic farm, and San Francisco favorite Spruce in 2007, which garnered its first Michelin star in 2011 and, like the Pub, has kept it since. I ask how the star feels and he takes a long pause. “It feels like you’ve made it,” he says. Chef is modest about the accolades, and expresses gratitude for all the moving parts that make the big wheel turn. The star belongs to the dishwasher and the line cook and the food runner, just as much as it does to him.

When Chef talks about cooking or the art of hospitality, his eyes glimmer. This predilection for taste began in his parents’ kitchen. He pestered his mother to help make breakfast. With saintly patience, she taught her four-year-old how to cook a proper French omelet, a mainstay on his menus and something Sullivan has all his new hires learn. “From a very early age, I can remember the idea that one can make a profession out of making food,” he says, “which excited me.” He sat his parents down and presented a business plan to open their house up as a restaurant to friends and family. He was six.

Chef speaks in measured tones now, with the journeyed timbre of someone who’s been in a thousand kitchens, shouldered between the precious few who find solace in the chaos. He learned all this by getting behind the grill or the pan or the cutting board, and doing it, not in the pricey classrooms of culinary school. Admittedly carefree in his 20s, Sullivan ventured to France to refine his craft in the old world kitchens. He returned with direction in a career that, he says in the fondest of ways, swallowed him whole.

The philosophy degree on his wall from St. John’s University only accentuates his perspective on cooking. “It’s mystical, it’s like a vision,” he says, reflecting on his creative process. The ingredients appear in his mind and he pores over cookbooks in his study, but it’s not until he’s in the field smelling the eggplant or deconstructing the pig that the bulb flickers on and the dish appears. This tactile, sensory experience transports the philosopher outfitted in kitchen whites to the deep recesses of his subconscious. Only then the dots begin to connect and the once empty plate comes to life.

It’s been a while since Chef’s humble beginnings as a line cook at Jack In The Box or even the first few months at the Pub. Bacchus has flourished and his work is needed outside the kitchen. “I can’t be the guy writing the menu everyday,” he says. His chefs de cuisine take point in the kitchen, with Sullivan close by until he feels it’s time to pull back. His philosophy is concise but weighty: keep it simple and cook good food. He has no formal training, but this is in his bones. You see it when he speaks with a prep cook, or arranges the tenderloin, or holds the onion.

Chef knows that things come and go, and counsels his motley crew to never strive for the star. The purpose will always be to create goodness and ensure nobody leaves hungry. Customers visit the mystic because they want the unknown. An ingredient they’ve never tried, a dish that hushes the picky, or a stretch of time where numbers blur on the clock and all that matters is in between the knife and fork. They’ve eaten these things before, but maybe, just maybe, they’ll taste it for the very first time.

Photos by Hemali Acharya Zaveri