I spent a lot of time trying to find a delicious warm drink in Seattle to tell you guys about. It’s winter and, like you, I cannot resist a theme. I tried at least a dozen different warm cocktails for you, sometimes traveling great distances and dropping a piece of cash on them to boot, but they were all too sweet or too boring. In the end, all I wanted to talk about was the Don Johnson at the Oyster Cellar: a brilliant, hazily remembered glimmer from the summer. I still want it every day.

As it turned out, its creator had a secret warm drink in the works, made from all of my very favorite flavors and elixirs—something that wasn’t even on the menu yet. It was everything I’d searched for all month. So you’re getting both. You’re rich!

Parker Knowles has long been a fixture in Seattle’s chic cocktailscape, and if you drink in this city, you’ve probably sampled his work. He’s an alum of the iconic Roquette, How to Cook a Wolf, and Sushi by Scratch, and since May 2024, he’s been holding the bar down at the Oyster Cellar at 1st and Marion. The newest seafood joint by Brendan McGill (Cafe Hitchcock, Seabird, Bruciato) was restyled from the old Bar Solea space, also owned by McGill, as a good ol’ pandemic pivot. (There should be a dance called this.) 

Oyster Cellar is a two-person operation—-just bar manager Knowles and chef Alex Jackson running the show—and it’s great fun to post up on a leatherette stool with a cocktail and a half-dozen Baywater Sweets and watch them fluidly tangoing behind the bar as Jackson shucks and Knowles shakes. 

Its downtown location and late-ish hours make the Oyster Cellar a perfect time-killing spot, in between trains or dates or jobs or meals, and it’s easy to accidentally end up there. Thanks to Knowles, one can pick any drink from the roster and be rewarded with a masterwork, and this theme extends to Jackson’s quick-changing seafood menu as well. A permanent feature, the crab toast, is an embarrassment of riches—Dungeness, miso tonnato, fonduta, and chives heaped on housemade sourdough—that will make you think about it for the rest of your life. Shit, even the focaccia, made daily at Cafe Hitchcock next door and served with cultured butter, is a serious contender for best bread in the city. Twice, I have brought home a giant slab of this bread to my partner, and we just girldinnered the whole thing in one sitting with the butter and a tin of mackerel. Oyster Cellar also does a choco chip cookie served warm with whipped cream AND crème Anglaise that’s swiftly converted this lifelong dessert agnostic. 

Since August, I’ve been daydreaming (and -drinking) about this juicy, rummy cocktail of Knowles’s: the Don Johnson. First, he takes coconut flakes and toasts them in coconut oil, then imbues a bottle of Transcontinental Rum Line High Seas Caribbean Blend with the fat extracted from the toasty coconut-enriched oil. 

“That was one of my favorite projects you ever did, “ Jackson interjects, “because it smelled so good in here, dude. The whole place smelled like delicious suntan lotion. Delicious hair conditioner.” 

To the coconutty rum blend, Knowles adds house-infused pineapple sherry, using Contrabondisto Valespino as a base. “First, I chop up the pineapple and then freeze it, and then I thaw it, so it will release all of its water, so that the amontillado can get in there, into the fruit. And then it sits for like five days, and after the water falls out of the pineapple, I pour in the amontillado sherry, and then my housemade strawberry syrup and lime. Then it’s clarified, like a milk punch.” 

The syrup, too, is a time-consuming production. “I don’t add any water to this syrup,” Knowles says. “It’s just a combination of equal weights of sugar and thinly sliced strawberries. It’s very prep-heavy. It takes me like an hour just to slice all the strawberries.” He uses demerara sugar to bring out the deeper bass notes in the rum. The jar sits overnight, and the next day, the sugar has sucked everything out of the strawberries. 

Knowles pours me a mini-shot of the syrup by itself, and whew, it’s the undiluted taste of summer that gave me immediate synesthesia, catapulting me right back to August. The flavor of a Pacific sunset, of a red heart on a playing card, of a flashing pixelated fruit in a video game. Of those tiny, fragile wild strawberries from your neighbor’s yard that you can’t buy anywhere because they can’t even be shipped across the street without getting liquefied. You have to transport them in your body.

The syrup bottle itself is luminous as well, like a fire opal. You can’t take your eyes off of it. Knowles holds it up to the light to make it flare even more. 

“I was inspired by Miami Vice with this one—it’s so tropical and Floridian, with the rum and all the fruit in there,” he says, per the name. “Maybe I should call it the Winter Vacation now, like Santa is on the beach in Miami with a cocktail,” he laughs. “Or since it’s red, it’s a Rudolph’s Nose. Which is red because he’s drunk.”

This is a drink you can first taste with your nose, speaking of, because it’s like breathing strawberry oxygen. It’s like the strawberry octane level of Nesquik, but the flavor is real strawbs. 

Chef Alex leans in again, his hands full of knives and oysters, to say, “Parker once made me a lemonade out of that stuff and it was just… whoa.” He pantomimes staggering around. “It was intense. Like drinking two hundred strawberries at once.”

It was a pure fluke that I asked if Knowles had a warm drink on the menu, while bitching about how I couldn’t find a unique one locally that I was psyched about. “I’m actually working on a toddy,” he says, and holds up a finger. “Stay there.”

He returns with a simple white mug, garnished with an orange moon. “We’re calling this one the Hot Date,” he says, then explains what was in it, and the cast made me swoon before I’d even tasted it. It’s a base of Medjool date-infused AND brown butter-washed Bank Note blended scotch, to which is added Amoro De Vino Picon Vasco, vanilla-palm sugar syrup, orange zest, and a a tincture Knowles has made from ancho chile and aji amarillo (aka Peruvian yellow chile). It’s garnished with a little disc of lime peel and, depending on Knowles’s mood, sometimes a pinch of nutmeg.  

It’s that thing I wanted that whole time!!!!, except I still love the other one from the summer! I love them both. I’m like Janet Jackson running around in the desert in the “Love Will Never Do Without You” video, where she can’t choose between Dijmon Hounsou in his underwear and Antonio Sabato, Jr., in his underwear. She wants them both, for opposite reasons. Love will never do without both of these cocktails.

Hot toddies are super boring, famously, so it’s a dubious start for the Hot Date, and Knowles agrees. “Yep! The chili is what makes this version interesting right away,” he says. In addition to jazzing up the flavor, he adds, “The aji amarillo brings out the fruitiness of the date, since the chile and the date are both fruits, and the ancho gives it more depth.” 

There’s definitely some heat here, but it does not overwhelm. The molasses-ity from the dates, which is punched up by the chiles, reminds me of cola, and the mild, unpeaty Bank Note contributes more vanilla and marshmallow. From Rioja, Spain, Amoro de Vino makes the Picon Vasco, a Basque natural wine with about 700 billion botanicals macerated into it, among them gentian root, cinchona bark, quinine, bitter orange peel, cocoa, and Basque lemon verbena—all of this strengthens the overall cola/root beer tones while adding some crucial citric and herbal bitterness to chill out the brown sugar. Spicy herbal cola plus hot buttered scotch, man. Sign me the fuck up.

Each of these drinks packs a punch that belies its appearance, too. Don’t flinch when you order a Don Johnson and it shows up looking like a sugar bomb all full of juice. Knowles correctly commented that “It tastes like a high-school dropout at first, and then finishes like a doctoral candidate.” The bromeliad sharpness of the pineapple and the acid in the strawberries slices through all the sweetness, and yeah, he said it—it’s just perfect. As well, the Hot Date arrives in a plain mug, as all hot toddies must, disguised as an innocent cup of tea, and that’s just fine. There’s no need to exoticize it. The first sip will do all the work. 

So. Despite my goal to spotlight an on-brand holiday cocktail straight out of Central Casting—like the elaborate Kevin! at the Sitting Room, from my December column last year, which is on offer again now, so go get it—it turns out that the weather itself is the actual seasonal theme we’re recognizing with a drink here. Either or both of these cocktails are the perfect prescription for when you’ve just come in out of the shitty, biting cold with the face of a slapped ass and you’re peeling off all your sodden outer layers and you need the misery channel changed inside your brain. These drinks will instantly warm you up with serotonin, hot or cold, and make you forget all about the frightful weather outside. As your doctor and your attorney, I recommend them.