What’s the easiest way to describe Modernist’s new menu? In a phrase, “sense memories.”
If the downtown cocktail bar’s first six and half years in business and 15 previous menus were about reintroducing vintage cocktails and showing Fresno “what a modern cocktail bar is like in tier one cities,” general manager Ace Fabionar says, the new one is their attempt to tell personal stories.
Their new “storybook,” entitled “Nostalgia,” features 16 original cocktails, each one accompanied by artwork and a story written by the bartender who created it, encapsulating the drink’s inspiration. That might look like a short story, a poem, or haiku – “Whatever format felt most authentic to them,” says Fabionar.
If that all sounds a little highbrow and artsy-fartsy for a tasty thing that you drink, to quench your thirst and give you a little buzz, it is. That being said, what is it that elevates a good drink to a great status if not a story?
Introspection is the secret ingredient, and the folks at Modernist aren’t alone in thinking so. This season’s Top Chef, for instance, just ended with a finale in which the chefs were challenged to create four-course progressive menus with dishes that were “a toast to the things and people that matter to them.”
When separate groups of people arrive at the same conclusion independently like this, it’s generally a good sign that it was something on the tip of the collective tongue all along. If TV chefs can be challenged to “own their story,” so to speak, why should local mixologists be any different?
“It’s a little scary to see how Fresno will respond to this,” said Modernist bar director Aline Tongkhuya, introducing her own contribution, the Vinai N. 1-15.
A child of Hmong immigrants and native Fresnan, Tongkhuya’s cocktail mixes blanco tequila, blanc vermouth, sour lime cordial, and curry leaf for a mildly-fizzy highball meant to evoke the feeling of sneaking one too many guava candies from the Hmong market. The menu includes a story about binging on the individually-wrapped hard candies, one of which comes attached to the rim of the drink. Putting one in your mouth before you take a sip (Tongkhuya’s suggestion) changes the whole vibe of the thing, from complex and herbal to slightly sweet.
Most of Modernist’s other new cocktails follow similar lines, albeit with wildly different flavors.
“This is the most creative freedom we’ve ever had,” says Tongkhuya, adding that the new menu includes contributions from the crew at Modernist as well as their sister bar, Bespoke, next door, which has long specialized in making drinks based on a few things a customer says they like, or even feelings or memories they had.
I’ve been fortunate enough myself to visit distilleries and sample cocktails all over the world, and while I can’t tell you that every new drink I sampled at the Modernist was the best that I ever had, I can say, without exaggeration, that they all felt like something new and different. And that feels like a good way to describe Modernist’s evolution: From trying to prove that Fresno can have things that other major cities have, to proving that what Fresno has is actually singular and unique.
More than one of Modernist’s new cocktails had me doing double takes at the glass in my hand, thinking “Wow, I’ve never had anything like that before.”
One of Fabionar’s own contributions, the “Home Grown,” is a perfect example. Alongside a tone poem about growing up in the Central Valley (Fabionar is an Edison grad who returned to Fresno after a chunk of years in San Luis Obispo), the menu lists “milk-washed Nikka Japanese vodka, green chile, strawberry, olive, and habanero.”
Served in a whiskey glass with a big ice cube that has a well in the middle to hold an olive (Castelvetrano, the Cadillac of olives), the nose is somehow salty, milky, and vaguely spicy, all at the same time. It smells almost exactly like my kitchen when I’m blistering chiles for a salsa or sauce.
On the palate, it’s somehow exactly that, but also salty, sweet, and with a spice tempered by a hint of dairy. I find the combination downright bizarre, in the best way, where I keep going back to try to understand what I’m tasting. As much as I love spicy food, I generally hate spicy drinks, but this somehow captures the taste and feeling of charred chilis without any of the burn.
“I’m a strong advocate for salty, funky cocktails,” Fabionar says, which doesn’t entirely do it justice.
Alongside the traditional concoctions, meanwhile, are nearly as many “free-spirited cocktails,” aka non-alcoholic. Like the “Endless Days In My Chaise,” the brainchild of mixologist Kennedy Brotemarkle, combining Ritual zero-proof gin, floreale aperitif, zero-proof elderflower liqueur, and blueberry shrub.
I was ignorant to what most of those things even are, but the nose was so complex it had me writing rhetorical questions in my notes. Herbal, fruity, tea? Curry? It was strange and complex and refreshing, but not too sweet (a rarity for many NA drinks).
Brotemarkle, a child of Hanford with memories of driving past the Rancho Notso Grande blueberry patch, explains that a blueberry “shrub” is a syrup made with vinegar as part of the base. And so its crispness and acidity comes not from traditional citrus, but from white wine vinegar.
This becomes a segue for the Modernist team to discuss the ways in which they’re using essential oil mists to add complexity to some of their cocktails, in many cases replacing the more common dehydrated fruit garnishes performing a similar function in many drinks.
Does that make their drinks better? Not necessarily (I love a simple old fashioned at home), but they’re doing things I’d never think to try at my home bar cart, assuming I even knew what a shrub or a floreale liqueur was (spoiler alert: I didn’t).
And that is probably most of the point: to go beyond the kinds of drinks you’d get at home or at just any high-end cocktail bar. The Modernist has managed to survive all the adversity that running a business in downtown Fresno from 2020 to 2026 could throw at it, from COVID to high-speed rail construction to “event parking” rates that occasionally climb into (gasp) double digits.
To do that, you have to be more than just an inviting space that can convert foot traffic into customers. Anyone downtown will probably tell you that you can’t always count on that foot traffic. You have to be a destination. That means offering something that folks from north Fresno (like me) would deem worthy of a 20-minute drive.
Modernist’s path to that, in their eyes, is through adding great storytelling to the great drinks they’ve always tried to serve. It’s hard to tell at this stage how well it’s working, but to this writer at least, it seems promising.
