Golden Ratio Is a Truly ‘Local’ Cocktail Bar for Everyone

1. It’s a truly ‘local’ bar.

“The spirit of our restaurants has always been rooted in ‘You’re right here, right now,” Kristensen says. “It’s about a time and a place,” adds partner Steve Wong. The idea here is the same. Unlike other topflight cocktail bars that are opening carbon copies of themselves around the country, the team at Golden Ratio wants their bar to express precisely where they are. “If we [were to] open Golden Ratio in Detroit, all the drinks would be totally different,” Kristensen says.

Many of the spirits, including ones made with spent ingredients from the group’s restaurants, will be infused by their friend Joe McDowell (known as “Acid Joe”) at Acid Spirits nearby in Prospect Heights. Kristensen also notes their proximity to Faccia Brutto and Forthave Spirits, and mentions that New York Distilling Co.’s Allen Katz lives nearby and often hand-delivers product to the team. “With the diversity of products in Brooklyn, you can make just about any cocktail,” Kristensen says.

2. Every cocktail has a non-alcoholic counterpart — but they’re not all the same.

Kristensen’s interest in non-alcoholic cocktails goes back to 2018 when the team first opened Oxalis, their Michelin-starred tasting menu restaurant that’s currently on hiatus. They didn’t have a liquor license at the start, so he was forced to get creative with his drink menu. “It kind of changed my brain chemistry into the way I think about drinks, and really helped shape the way I develop drinks,” he says.

At Golden Ratio, “The spirits program and the cocktail program is really about flavors that I haven’t experienced before, and I’m excited about sharing,” Kristensen adds. There are 16 different flavors like purple shiso, apple, and toothache tree listed on the menu and each is interpreted in two ways, one with alcohol and the other without. The drinks are entirely different, sometimes showing off two sides of one ingredient. “I think we’d be doing a disservice to the ingredient to make them identical for the sake of being identical,” he says.

Take the purple shiso drinks, for example: The one prepared with alcohol plays up the herb’s fennel and bright acidic notes in a shaken cocktail with lemon, a green fennel seed spirit, and a citrus leaf distillate. The non-alcoholic interpretation, meanwhile, is a sparkling highball that leans into the savoriness of the herb with a tea brewed from shiso stems and water distillates made from bread and lemon-verbena. Both taste very much like shiso, but are distinct from one another, Kristensen notes.

3. The team is aspiring to be zero waste.

“I’ve always been really dismayed at the amount of waste that’s in the spirits and wine world, like the amount of glass that we’re throwing away and boxes,” Kristensen notes. Here, the team concedes that zero waste may be a step too far, but they are aspiring to it by making spirits and non-alcoholic distillates from kitchen and bar trim like spent Meyer lemons, leftover olive brine, herb stems, and Tango mandarins. Ingredients from their forager, like the invasive spice bush, which has a tingly, nutty flavor, are also finding their way into the spirits. “Acid Joe” shares their passion for zero waste and his space is so close by he can bike over to pick up empty bottles.

Kristensen is also concocting water distillates or hydrosols — non-alcoholic liquids he makes with a still — in-house with flavors like day-old bread from Redwood’s Laurel Bakery, which smells distinctly like a sourdough with a bien cuit, or well-done crust. He uses a rotary evaporator, which works at a low temperature, preserving a lot of volatile flavors.

In keeping with the low-waste focus, the space is decked out with found and secondhand items, including speakers, which will play Japanese funk from the 1970s as well as more contemporary music. The playlist “will remain a work in progress, probably for the first year,” Kristensen says.

4. The food menu is very vegetable-forward and mostly pescatarian.

There are no burgers or fries here. Culinary director Daniel Martignon’s menu was designed to reflect the ethos of the cocktail program. Fittingly, it will evolve with the seasons, but expect snackable starters, like sourdough from Laurel with bonito butter and anchovies as well as cucumber and celtuce, which are cured using a method called kobujime, which is often used for fish, and topped with toasted kombu.

There are just a couple of larger dishes, if you’re looking for dinner, including crispy lion’s mane mushrooms. Coated in a gluten-free crust and fried, the dish is inspired by Martignon and Kristensen’s love of schnitzel and might remind you of something you would get at a beer hall, Martignon says.

For dessert, there’s chocolate mousse topped with caramel, unsweetened whipped cream, and salted peanuts. Martignon is also working on an apple fritter made with glutinous rice flour, which gives it a mochi-like consistency.

5. While the cocktails are destination-worthy, Golden Ratio is also for the neighbors.

The corner location used to house a bodega and before that, a beloved little grocery store. In a nod to the history, the team is leaving up the Greene Valley Market Corp. awning in all its patina-ed glory.

They will also serve beer and wine for those who want them and accommodate requests for classic cocktails like a Negroni or Martini. But don’t expect the big name brands of spirits you’re used to, like Beefeater or Grey Goose. “You’ll get a martini, [but] you’ll get the one that we’ve thought about a lot,” Wong says.

The service style is also meant to reflect this balance. While the staff is prepared to explain every element of the drinks and how they are made, that information won’t be forced on guests either. “That’s been a service philosophy across all of our spaces, this idea of meeting somebody where they’re at,” Wong says. “The core of the drinks program is that they’re really delicious, and they stand up on their own without explanation,” Kristensen adds.

Golden Ratio will be open Wednesday to Sunday from 5:30 p.m. to midnight. Expect nightly service to launch down the line.  

Devra Ferst is a Brooklyn-based food and travel writer who has contributed to The New York Times, Bon Appétit, Eater, NPR, and numerous other publications. She is co-author of “The Jewish Holiday Table: A World of Recipes, Traditions & Stories to Celebrate All Year Long.” Follow her on  Instagram. Follow Resy, too.