This month, offer clients a minty-fresh beverage with a chocolatey twist!
When it comes to cocktails, Mirko Marchi, bartender at Miramonte Resort & Spa in Indian Wells near Palm Springs, California, likes to create a stir using fresh ingredients and memorable flavors. Take Miramonte’s signature Chocolate Mint Mojito, made with chocolate mint leaves—a delicately chocolate-flavored variety of the herb that’s packed with fiber and vitamin A—plucked from Miramonte’s on-site garden. Clients love sipping it as a refreshing prelude to a meal from the resort’s Grove Artisan Kitchen or a soothing finale to a day of relaxation at THE WELL Spa.
“We incorporate the herbs and citrus grown on property into many of our food and beverage recipes,” says Marchi. “Rum drinks like the mojito are a great complement to salty snack foods and our fish taco appetizers.” Other lighter accompaniments might include pita chips or vegetable spears with fresh guacamole.
The libation is simple to put together, and easy to tailor to different tastes. For an uplifting non-alcoholic mock-jito, Marchi gamely subs out the rum and Cointreau for the juice of half a Meyer lemon, and replaces two of the lime wedges with two thick lemon slices or wedges. The result is a tongue-tingling, vitamin C-rich mocktail that pairs perfectly with the spa’s Lemon Vitality sugar scrub, a body treatment that showcases detoxifying essential oils from lemons, thyme and clary sage. What bliss—now clients can have their treatment and toast with it too!
Chocolate Mint Mojito
In a glass, muddle*:
10 chocolate mint (or mint) leaves
4 lime wedges
½ oz. simple syrup
Add:
1½ oz. Bacardi Silver rum
¼ oz. CointreauAdd ice to glass’s halfway mark, then pour in soda water to fill. Garnish with a mint sprig and an additional lime wedge.
* To “muddle” is to gently crush the whole herbs with a utensil such as a wooden spoon handle to release the essential oils.
