Best Bloody Mary: Arizona BBQ

Photo by Viktor Suvorov AZ's Bloody Marys are authentic as it gets in Kyiv.

It's late Sunday morning or perhaps early afternoon and you want clarity. You want to sweep away the cobwebs that are the direct result of having said, "Waiter, one more round for me and my friends!" a mere six hours earlier. You want the spicy bite of properly seasoned tomato juice with the medicinal magic of just a hint of vodka. You want that classic hangover killer: a Bloody Mary.

Sacrifice is the name of the game at Best Of headquarters, and in order to render an accurate judgment, we decided to conduct our testing under "real life" conditions. So we stayed out all night. And the following morning we gathered with our real-life hangovers, and schlepped off to sample Kyiv's best Bloody Marys.

Let's start with the basics. The ideal Bloody Mary should have the following ingredients: tomato juice, vodka, Worcestershire sauce, celery salt, horseradish, pepper and crushed ice. It should be garnished with a stalk of fresh celery and lemon or preferably lime.

However, the Bloody Mary is an import and imports suffer a bit for the journey - just like most Bloody Mary consumers.

We began at the John Bull Pub, which served tall glasses of warm tomato juice and vodka. Not only were the necessary ingredients lacking, but there was no deftness of preparation demonstrated. A fine Bloody Mary requires a certain touch with proportion and wrist action, and there was no evidence of either here.

Uncle Sam's served up a marked improvement. This variant was clearly a combination of prepackaged spicy-tomato juice with the mild addition of Worcestershire and Tabasco. However, the net result was a tangy mixture, garnished with lemon and ice.

Deja vu proved to be a lot of flash and not much filigree. The heavily pierced bartender had all the right moves: the glass flip, the rhythmic pour, the one-handed shake. But the net result was disappointing. The final concoction arrived with no ice and was a tad heavy on Tabasco and Worcestershire.

The Wall's Bloody Mary was abysmal, as was the one at Eric's Bierstube. The Wall's drink, served with a limp parsley garnish, illustrated one of the intolerable pitfalls of Bloody Mary preparation: the inverted strata. The vodka floated visibly on top of the tomato juice, indicating that it was not shaken properly.

Eric's Bloody Mary was just plain sweet, proving the scientific theory that sugar is no substitute for horseradish.

O'Brien's served up what would be more appropriately called a Bloody Mary frappe. The drink had a nice bite to it, but it had been shaken with ice to a frothy consistency and was served with a tinsel-topped swizzle stick. A novel effort, but on a heady Sunday morning, a more traditional approach would have been better.

For consistency and quality, the unanimous favorite was Arizona BBQ's version. This variant used an ample amount of Worcestershire and Tabasco without over-spicing. The drink was served with fresh celery and a lemon slice and it was shaken with ice. There was minimal variation from one round to the next and the staff was friendly and amenable to criticism. Was it the perfect Bloody Mary? No. Would we have liked to see some lime, white horseradish, some fresh peppercorns? Sure. But this is Kyiv after all, and the availability of certain ingredients necessitates a tolerance for minor flaws.

A word to the wise: a Bloody Mary isn't the type of beverage you'd want to drink all day long. Several members of the Best Of team can no longer look at a glass of tomato juice without crying.