Allegory's New Menu Wants You To A Have a Think With Your Drink
The award-winning cocktail bar at the Eaton Hotel's new menu is here, along with big ideas.
Ruby Bridges isn’t in Wonderland anymore. The very real young girl — the first African American child in the South to attend an all-white elementary school — has long served as the muse for DC’s Allegory cocktail bar at the Eaton Hotel. In its first award-winning concept, "Down the Rabbit Hole," Allegory paid homage to the whimsy of Wonderland, reimagining Ruby as Alice and following her journey into a wild, new world. As Allegory embarks on its second concept, "Banned in DC," Ruby's journey continues - this time, through a rabbit hole into a dystopian reality that looks strikingly like our own.
Deke Dunne, Allegory’s Creative and Beverage Director, spent a lot of time living with the bar’s initial concept, which ran from 2023 until this year. When it was time to do something new, he let Ruby guide him. “With the response of our last menu, Down the Rabbit Hole, when we were actually telling people Ruby Bridges’ story, we realized Ruby is so ingrained in our identity as a bar and with everything that we do, from who we hired to the type of liquor we carry to our business practices, to our sustainability, everything is done through the lens of Ruby,” he tells me over a Zoom call in early March. “It's almost like a what would Ruby do situation. I realized that if we were going to do another menu, Ruby has to be integral in that.
The new “Banned in DC” concept now sees Bridges, now in her mid-twenties, falling down another rabbit hole to post-apocalyptic DC, where censorship is in full force. She encounters a newly reborn Jabberwocky who has banned all manner of books, including the real-life Ruby’s memoir. It’s heady stuff.
But that’s always been the case at Allegory, where cocktails and storytelling go hand-in-hand. Dunne tells me that for this menu, the drinks needed to be inspired by the story. As an example, when Ruby first emerges into this new, nightmare-ish version of the District, that story beat is juxtaposed by a desire for childlike nostalgia for what once was. The cocktail for this moment is rendered in the form of a cereal milk-style Manhattan called the “Saturday Morning Cartoons.” “It has to be inspired by the story,” he says.
“Cartoons” is also one of the many drinks that show an expansion of technique for Dunne and his team, notably, an exploration into experimentation with enzymes. Dunne mentions that he is fascinated by how you can “manipulate food and sugar” to produce unique flavors; he was so intrigued that he picked up a guest shift at Barcelon’s Paradiso to get a connection with TOUFOOD, the gold standard for enzyme implementation in cocktails. “There’s only a handful of people in the world using [enzymes] in cocktails right now,” he tells me in a way that’s not braggadocious, but rather, like a kid showing off their favorite toy. That connection only got him so far before he went down his own rabbit hole, testing and refinding the components until the process produced something he liked.
In “Cartoons,” Dunne used enzymes to liquify cornflakes. “Everyone’s done a cereal milk [or] milk punch. They’ve used every type of cereal,” he states. “So the challenge was, how do we make cereal milk but not use milk?” The liquefaction of the flakes allowed for a “velvety, silky mouthfeel.”
At the concept’s launch event, every drink I tasted was delicious, but “Cartoons” stood out. Riffing on a Manhattan, the drink is presented in a ramekin-like bowl from Japan. Served alongside a spoon to complete the youthful memory, you’re meant to drink out of it like you’d slurp the sugary milk remains of a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. It’s certainly a cheeky way to have a drink, but the robustness of the flavor and a dash of actual cornflakes make this one more than just style over substance.
The drinks' creativity extends into the story's presentation as well. Much like “Down the Rabbit Hole,” “Banned in DC” uses the menu to tell the newest chapter of Ruby’s tale in storybook fashion. Upon opening the menu and reading through it for the first time, I was struck by a bold declaration at the very beginning that no Artificial Intelligence was used in the creation of the images or narrative of the menu. Artist Katie Miller took seven months (!) across 17 scenes and 15,000 individual pieces to create the images, and the statement on the menu is a tribute to all of her hard work. “We truly believe in artists,” Dunne tells me enthusiastically. “We think this is such a beautiful thing that cannot be replaced... there’s no realm of possibility in which AI could have created the art in this menu.”
Through the concept just launched, the time invested by Miller, Dunne, and the Allegory team is proving well spent. Dunne mentions that over inauguration weekend, Trump supporters came into the bar and left feeling moved by this new chapter of Ruby’s fictionalized story. "We thought they'd be really put off by our concept," Dunne admits. "But people are like, 'Oh yeah, Ruby Bridges. We love Ruby. I remember her from my history books as a kid." Dunne shares that people — even those who might be more politically aligned with groups who are banning books - have been surprised to learn that their kids might not be able to hear about Ruby given the current environment. "[We want others] to realize 'Oh, our kids might not learn these stories if we don't do something about it," Dunne says.
While we may wish to fall down rabbit holes into our own Wonderlands, we’re sadly stuck in reality. Allegory is creating a space for people to come together and have challenging conversations about the real world we live in. Those talks are happening over a deliciously strong cocktail, of course. But that idea of harmony is part of Ruby’s story — both true and fictionalized — and very well might be the thing we all need right now.
After an extended hiatus, Whys and Wherefores is back. Moving forward, the newsletter will take on two forms. Five Things I Liked will stay in a free format, but I’m expanding things to include coverage of the Washington, DC food and beverage scene, aiming for at least one of these kinds of stories a month.
This local content will be paywalled for $5 a month or $60 a year (I’m not counting on anyone to pledge to the founders level, but if you do, I’ll be in touch and we can talk about how to make that worth your while) and will look very similar to what you just read. Anyone can tell you where to eat and drink around DC, but few people can tell you the stories behind those places. That’s what I am to do here. For the cost of one latte a month, I hope you’ll consider joining me to read those stories.
Thanks for reading this one, and chat with you all again soon. Until next time, be well.