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One college friend ruined me for life with tequila, while another made mezcal one of my favorite liquors. So goes my experience with, and knowledge of, agave-based alcohol. Mezcal and smoked cocktails add to smoke’s sex appeal—you can’t hear or feel it, but smoke fills your nostrils, dances in the air, and now flows across your tongue in a sophisticated profile.
The elevated Belmont neighborhood Mexican restaurant and cocktail lounge La Patroncita is about to unveil its summer menu, but what hopefully will remain (and seems likely to, by its description) is the Rubi ($17), a chile-based cocktail that’s not likely to put out any fires the food menu starts in your mouth. When I read that one of the Rubi’s crowning features is its housemade palo santo-infused mezcal, it made me realize how little I know about the difference between mezcal and tequila. One’s smoked, one’s not, but what’s mezcal usually smoked with?
I’m more familiar with palo santo’s use in perfumery for grounded wood-earth scents that throw the wearer and anyone around them back to the desert’s dusty warmth. Palo santo trees, related to frankincense and myrrh, grow in the Yucatan Peninsula and throughout South America. They’re prized for their spiritual significance and medicinal properties. Palo santo is often burned in purification rituals, or used to treat stomach aches, induce sweating, or make heat rubs.
Beer and whiskey get treated with palo santo, so mezcal smoke makes perfect sense. I can’t say I can taste when mezcal gets smoked with palo santo rather than, say, oak or mesquite wood, but La Patroncita owner Lucy De León and her team’s decision to use palo santo is sublimely romantic. I read that mezcal has been called “the poor man’s tequila” for its connection to Indigenous culture, likely by the kind of people who paid a premium when socially frowned upon foods like lobster suddenly became delicacies. La Patroncita’s dinner and bar menu proudly reflect fresh Mexican ingredients used artfully to make more than pretty plates and cups.
Since La Patroncita has expanded its Friday and Saturday hours to a bar’s traditional 2 am last call time, now felt like a perfect occasion to pop in and try a Rubi (the bartender gently corrected my gringo pronunciation ending in y). A table of broccoli-haired Gen Z-aged boys stared me down as I entered, as if I’d just escaped from the millennial retirement home, but I was still seated at the bar all the same by a kind waitress. Its plant-filled bar, laid with glossy black tiles in an emerald-green section of the restaurant’s rear, was a retreat from a louder compact dining room.
The tomato-hue Rubi is garnished with Hawaiian black lava salt (which the bartender told me some guests mistake for edible glitter) and chile de arbol pepper seeds and red flesh remnants (which I mistook for petals). Its flavor is hard to pinpoint, wafting between a chile base and its aforementioned smokiness, agave and lime, and lillet rouge—a French aperitif wine made with grapes, citrus brandies and botanical infusions—which already tasted complex before it fell into this ring of fire.
I was a spice wimp for most of my life, and have only in recent years become a moth drawn to the piquant flame. La Patroncita’s cocktail menu will probably still have plenty of nonspicy options by the time its summer edition comes out, so don’t push yourself to enjoy this one if you can’t handle the heat. Leave it for the rest of us. Scoville scalers might not think too much of the Rubi’s index, but hopefully will be just as impressed with the cocktail’s flavors as they are with its seasoning.
For myself, I needed to work up a sweat after walking in still full from a lunch with generous servings but stingy on spice. La Patroncita’s bartender trusted that even for my order’s unrefined pronunciation, I would know to try something else if I couldn’t handle the heat. I found both rounds refreshing, even if nearly too gorgeous to drink. Normally I would have ventured further off the menu, but visiting on the edge of the summer solstice led me to believe I might fall in love with a drink that was only ever a spring fling. Future visits, now possible late into the summer weekend night, will tell more.
TRY IT: La Patroncita, 2832 SE Belmont St., 971-254-4317, lapatroncitapdx.com. 5–10 pm Tuesday–Thursday, 4 pm–2 am Friday–Saturday.