You don’t need to throw out the classic cocktail spec to get to new and interesting (and delicious) places with your recipes; instead, as you’ll see in this recipe from Lee Potter Cavanagh, by bringing in different and unlikely ingredients, you can stay close to a classic recipe, but come to a more delicious place.

That’s what Lee has done here — he’s taken the classic Remember The Maine cocktail, and given it more of everything: flavour, delight, taste.

And like the that classic cocktail, Lee’s drink has a vaguely nautical moniker, Banana Boat (the Maine was a ship sunk by Spain, during the Spanish-American War at the start of the last century, and which lent its name to the cocktail). But I think Lee’s take is an altogether more delicious drink.

You can find the drink on the menu at Penelope’s, the restaurant which opened last year in Circular Quay from chef Cuong Nyguen. There, the menu embraces the food and influences of Sydney, according to Lee, the restaurant’s general manager and an award-wining bartender.

It’s food that “reflects, from our point of view, all of the migrants that have been here for ages,” he says. “But it’s also just the food that works in this climate — it’s Mediterranean food meets Middle Eastern, meets Southeast Asian, meets subcontinent.”

They’ve got a short, sharp menu of signature cocktails at Penelope’s, and — it’s a place where you can stop in just for a drink and a snack, or for a more substantial, longer experience.

For the Banana Boat — you can see the recipe below — Lee brings miso into play with bourbon, beeswax, native botanical vermouth and a local amaro.

“It’s still boozy and bitter, but you know, it’s still very approachable,” Lee says. “It’s moreish.”

And the moreishness is thanks to the miso.

“The miso just plays with the banana and the bourbon nicely,” he says.

“It’s making a concentrated miso soup and then just adding a small amount [to the drink]. It’s similar to how you’d make a saline solution. If you put a little bit of salt into something, it’s the same idea, but it obviously carries some more savoury flavours.”

Banana Boat

Ingredients

• 40ml banana chip & white miso-infused Buffalo Trace Bourbon (10% weight of bourbon in chips for a day then strain out, 10% weight white miso dissolved into bourbon)
• 20ml Beechworth A Walk In The Black Forest amaro
• 10ml Maidenii sweet vermouth
• 10ml salted raw sugar syrup (2:1 by weight, 2% salt)
• 1 drop of absinthe

Instructions

1. Infuse in a Malfroy’s beeswax-lined bottle for at least a week.
2. To serve, stir over ice for 20-30 seconds until sufficiently diluted and chilled.
3. Strain into a small cocktail glass and serve the rest in a sidecar over ice in case the guest doesn’t drink quickly.
4. Garnish with three house spiced rum-infused morello cherries.

Recipe by Lee Potter Cavanagh.