Tilman Fertitta’s five-star hotel has a summer treat for hotel guests and visitors. Beginning this Friday, July 25, The Post Oak Hotel will host Navi’s, a limited-time pop-up cocktail bar.
Discreetly located near Stella’s Wine Wine, Navi’s takes it name from Navidad, the Fertitta family’s beloved dog. Judith Piotrowski, the hotel’s director of bars and spirits, tells CultureMap that she and her team took inspiration from the qualities people love about dogs to guide the direction of Navi’s.
“We wanted to take the ideas of loyalty and unconditional love and connect that to the same experience that a bar can give us,” she explains. “These memories, these pieces of our lives that we want to hold onto them for as long as we could.”
What they created is a carefully crafted, five-course tasting menu ($125) of cocktails paired with light bites from The Post Oak’s culinary team. The progression begins with The Green Triangle, made with vodka, peach yogurt, and absinthe that’s paired with a goat cheese tart. The Red Cloud, made with mezcal and grilled pineapple, is paired with a birria empanada. Piotrowski notes that the she created the cocktails and then tasked the hotel’s chefs with creating dishes, an inversion of the usual procedure where beverages are matched to existing food items.
“It was a really fun experiment and a good example of how a team works when you’ve built relationships and understand each other,” she says.
As for the cocktails themselves, they’re partially inspired by Piotrowski’s recent trip to France, where she noted bartenders using lab equipment like a Rotovap and techniques like clarification to create complex flavors that can’t be made à la minute in a shaker or a glass. As befits a premium experience, drinkers can expect theatrical presentations, too.
“There will be some theatrics, because I’m a little theatrical,” Piotrowski says with a laugh.
Reservations are available via the Post Oak Hotel website for seatings at 8 pm and 10:30 pm on Fridays and Saturdays. For Houston’s cocktail enthusiasts, it promises to be a can’t-miss experience, especially since it will only operate until August 31.
“This thing is fleeting, just like a memory,” Piotrowski says. “The bar is only here for a short amount of time. How do we make the best of the time we have? How do we create an experience that people will talk about even once its gone?”
Courtesy of The Post Oak Hotel
The Red Cloud is made with mezcal, grilled pineapple, and more.
