By Valentina Dirindin
The leaning tower could not be missing, in a tribute to the wonders of the Pisan area: in fact, in the signature drink list of the Jeffer, young local on the banks of the Arno, in the heart of Pisa, the tower is the absolute protagonist.
To the point of being the container of the menu itself: you rotate the top and little by little, one after the other, the names and ingredients of the dishes come out. eight cocktails invented by Fausto, Richard And James, the three partners and barmen of this place opened in the midst of the Covid period and now launched as one of the best in the area.
A colourful, modern, designer bar. A smiling counter, which overlooks large round mirrors in which slightly retro furnishing accessories are reflected. It is a proposal that has grown over time, becoming increasingly sophisticated.
Jeffer and their “easy to drink” cocktails
“Our concept, from the beginning, is purely “easy to make easy to drink”, we want to create cocktails that can be easily understood by the public", explains Fausto. “After all, Pisa is a student city, and for us it was not easy to enter such a market with a new proposal, different from the usual“.
In the end however, step by step, the three managed to build a small compendium of drinking well, with original, sensible, fun creations, which will certainly remain as their signature for a long time.
The cocktails on the new drink list, unusually presented on Easter Sunday, are an invitation to discover Pisan excellence: it is no coincidence that the menu hidden inside the small tower of Pisa available to customers is called "uncover": “We want to help Pisa to grow, to tell its story, to reveal itself, and our customers to get to know it“. So, al Jeffer the three barmen worked hard to take inspiration from the history of the area, sometimes in a playful and sometimes more serious and committed way. The result is, indeed, very convincing.
Uncover: Jeffer's drink list
Eight new drinks are born, starting with "Better Day“, dedicated to San Rossore Park, with its lush vegetation, among which the pink hibiscus stands out. “We created a hibiscus soda, which was the basis of a refreshing, fresh and drinkable drink, where one sip leads to another“, they say from Jeffer.
Then there is thetribute to Galileo Galilei, which is a game played with a magnifying glass (to recall his telescope): the drink – a twist onOld Fashioned with Mescal with red pepper – rests on a coaster, whose message – which changes from time to time – can be read with the help of a magnifying glass. The game is also the basis of Bruce Banner (Hulk's real name), which pays homage to the CNR, the National Research Center, and its studies on microalgae for food use, for a greener and more sustainable future: from this inspiration comes a gin-based drink, with basil with a hint of fava water and a spirulino sherry on top.
That the inspiration is that of three boys in their mid-thirties can be understood from some pop cultural references from the Eighties and Nineties: as in Fra Tuc, the drink named after Robin Hood's friar and which recalls the Carthusian bitters recalling that Pisa is home to the Certosa di Calci, a former Carthusian monastery now transformed into a Natural History Museum.
Or the drink without a name, identified with the emoji that makes the typically Italian gesture that stands for "What do you want“: the homage here is to “Tuttomondo”, murals by Keith Haring in Pisa, and the idea is to combine New York with Italy by taking a Martini cocktail, a classic New Yorker, and adding a dry wine to it, a very Italian element. Still, Kung Fu Pandan celebrates the Luminara, the event that indicates the arrival of summer in Pisa, in which the city and the Arno rivers are illuminated by hundreds of lights. A summer drink, with pineapple and ginger and a coaster that lights up, so that it looks like there are fireworks in the glass.
Then, a more serious drink, the “More than half”, dedicated to when Pisa was a flourishing Maritime Republic, with the idea of taking the best of the Mediterranean: a twist on the Daiquiri with lemons from the Amalfi Coast, French cognac and a spice mix from North Africa. And finally a very technical drink, the Midnight Cheesecake, which recalls the classic colors of the "bridge game", an annual Pisan tradition in which some teams compete by pushing a cart: the red is given by a raspberry cordial, the blue by the Philadelphia foam on top, to which a vodka infused with Digestives, the biscuits used to make the base of the cheesecake.
“We were tired of hearing that in Pisa there was only the tower", say the three bartenders at Jeffer. “In reality there is much more and we want to invest in our territory, we believe in it a lotor". And it shows, in fact.
