For the closing reception of Amelia Island’s annual Restaurant Week last year, Carilyn Powers, the director of restaurants at the Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, and the mixologists at the resort’s Coast restaurant, wanted to create a sumptuous cocktail to meet the five-course dinner’s theme: “Low Country Meets Florida.” A key lime pie martini seemed to fit the bill.
Powers, then the restaurant’s manager; bartender Rachel Kearney; and assistant manager Claire Miller brainstormed recipes and played with different types of syrups. “Perfecting the syrup was the biggest challenge,” Powers says. Cocktails can alter tremendously based on “how much effort you put into a syrup; it really brings out the flavors of everything else.” Ultimately, they created a graham cracker syrup—derived from a blend of cinnamon sticks, vanilla beans, honey, brown sugar, and vanilla beans—from scratch.
“We fell in love with it,” Powers says of the finished cocktail. “We were so impressed with ourselves.” She laughs. “This one fully worked.” So much so that at the event, attendees wanted seconds, thirds, fourths. Managers and other waitstaff had to jump behind the bar to help mix them up. “It was intense,” Powers recalls. “I will never forget that night and how popular the drink was.”
Within a month, the key lime pie martini had found a permanently place on Coast’s menu, and now reigns as the restaurant’s signature cocktail, with patrons ordering the martini before dinner or even afterward, as dessert.
