23 Sep Where You Should be Drinking: Hotel Indigo in El Paso

Where You Should be Drinking: Hotel Indigo in El Paso

I mentioned earlier this week that I found myself in El Paso, again. The days were long, the work was grueling, but I’ll stop my sob story because I really can’t complain. My absolute best friend in the entire world lives there. She fed me home-cooked meals, and we verbally-processed both our lives and our days like we have since the age of 10. On my very last night on very few hours of sleep, we had a celebratory outing to Hotel Indigo in Downtown El Paso.

Was it the perfect summer night air? Or running on four hours of sleep? Whatever it was Hotel Indigo was magical. I wanted to stay there forever. And I also wanted to sleep. The decor was electric modern chic, the modern that welcomes you and makes you feel cool by association with deep woods and tile, and pops of bright Aztec blues, yellows, and reds. The indoor bar spills open to a small patio with tables on one side and a giant pool patio with rope chairs, and chaise lounges, and canopy beds on the other. The two man band, Diego and John, serenaded us with acoustic top 40 covers. The pizza I ordered tasted like heaven.

It was all magic, and this was all before I even got my cocktail.

What I Ordered

• Rising Star: El Paso inspired Absolut Texas vodka, fresh rosemary infused simple syrup, pineapple juice, chili rim.

What I Thought

While it’s still beyond me what “El Paso inspired Absolut Texas vodka” is I was delighted to see a spicy-summer-fruit drink that wasn’t based on tequila. I know vodka ranks low in the world of sophisticated spirits, but vodka is somehow the spirit I want after a long work day (this was my dilemma during my trip to Miami). We’ve learned from experimenting that rosemary is a force to be reckoned with and it held it’s own in this drink, adding a nice depth to an otherwise straightforward beverage mix. I don’t normally think of rosemary and chili together, but it created a lovely complexity, kind of like a one-two punch, in the best of ways. This drink is the girlfriends-drink-out and order round after round, making you feel equal parts celebratory and comforted. If I were to remake it, we’d play with rosemary infused pineapple juice to cut the sweetness just a tad.