How One Chicago Bartender Makes the Freakiest, Dopest Cocktails in Town
It’s an overheated and sweaty morning in Chicago, and Annie Beebe-Tron is admiring a particularly soft, floppy plant at the Garfield Park Conservatory. We have a few hours before Annie takes their spot behind the bar at the beloved Macanese restaurant Fat Rice, and the city’s brilliant cocktail sorcerer is visibly enamored.
Freaky plant energy is part of the whole cocktail ethos at Fat Rice and its adjacent bar The Ladies’ Room, where Annie—who is gender fluid and uses the plural pronouns they/them—runs both the beverage program and front of house. The first drink of theirs that I ever tried tasted like acid rainwater and came garnished with a wayward ramp stem leaning out of a double rocks glass. Sort of like a well-tailored suit in a wild color, Annie’s cocktails are surprising and unexpected. They use ingredients like avocado leaf tincture and salted coconut foam; umeboshi vinegar and jerk spices. They play with texture, salt, and umami. They’re silky, creamy, salty, and foamy. They are some of the most boundary-defying drinks in a city celebrated for its bars.
Fat Rice is the first and only restaurant that Annie has ever worked in—if we don’t count their undergrad cafeteria (“you shouldn’t,” they joke). They taught themself how to bartend on the job and revisited basic chemistry to develop their own liqueurs, infusions, and Chartreuses, which coat the tongue in a savory oil slick and blow wide open what was even available for mixing cocktails. Annie is accustomed to learning like this; they were homeschooled as a child (under a Christian evangelical doctrine) and grew up an “indoor kid” with a bent for plants, and later for art.
“I figured out midway through my art career that I wasn’t a visual person, but a kinesthetic person—a texture person,” Annie says of their stint making art with food themes. The art of the cocktail, we’ll say, let them meet in the middle.
Governed by a tactile approach, Annie’s menu prioritizes the active experience of swirling a garnish or adjusting the flavor yourself. The Saigon Street Breakfast, made with ingredients including Thai basil, lime, and a housemade pho vermouth, is an ideal show of their ethos: “I wanted that experience you get when you’re drinking pho—the temperature changes and the dilution changes. It’s all fluctuating as you’re drinking it.”
Their drinks are also a testament to their role as devoted collaborator and steadfast leader at Fat Rice—a job Annie has excelled at as a queer feminist boss seeking to upend the traditional hierarchy. Co-owner Adrienne Lo’s mother is growing ingredients for a house absinthe. A Romanian janitor’s plum liqueur recipe features in the Onu You Didn’t cocktail. The backbar hosts bottles of cardoon amaro, a creation Annie was able to salvage from one of chef Abe Conlon’s infusion experiments gone wrong. It’s just one of many projects Annie tends to with a gardener’s patience—there are currently an estimated 150 bottles (and “lots more to go”) brewing and infusing in their personal “vault.”
As we walk through the conservatory, we pick out which of the freaky plants would make the best garnishes. There’s a furry velvet-looking one and the iridescent rainbow spiky one and the medium-leafed, glossy, proud, type A looking one. I watch Annie’s excitement builds as their attention darts from species to species. Each and every detail noticed; everything eyed for its potential.
