Welcome to The Last Word, a monthly column about craft cocktails. Meg van Huygen talks about her cocktail faves—both alcoholic and not—their histories and their components, to lure you to Seattle’s dive bars and cocktail lounges that deserve your attention.
Despite having lived in Seattle my whole life, I know mortifyingly little about Shoreline. There’s great food in Shoreline, of course, but I don’t drive, and taking the bus out there is usually too much of a chore. Especially when it’s shitting rain and there are no sidewalks. Forget it.
Unless the legendary Chef Zephyr Paquette lands a new gig there, that is. And oh yeah, unless there are not one but two new light rail stations in Shoreline that opened last summer! Hmm, okay. Right. I guess I totally do go to Shoreline now.
Along the southern border of Shoreline, across the street from the discount Crest Cinema and sprawling easterward, is the darling Ridgecrest neighborhood, where the Ridgecrest Public House has been the neighborhood’s go-to night spot for the last 20 years.
When owners Megan Kogut and Jarred Swalwell opened Drumlin next door in 2020, it was essentially a family-friendly pub version of the bar: They served beer, wine, and cider with subdued snacks like tuna melts and pretzel knots with beer cheese, and the space with popular with parents and kids. Then the pandemic lockdown struck soon after Drumlin’s debut, and when it reopened, the food was being supplied by trucks outside. Then the pub abruptly closed again in September 2024, a sign on the door promising that the hiatus was temporary. The grand re-opening finally arrived in February 2025. The food trucks, however, have been scrapped to make room for Paquette, who’s helped restyle Drumlin as a chef-driven, farmer-focused bar-bistro.
“I told them, ‘Whatever you want,’” Paquette says she responded when she was asked to join the team. “Want me to be the chef? The GM? The bar manager? It’s up to you guys.” Officially, she’s Drumlin’s chef/GM, but while the shop’s still in reopen mode, she’s doing a bit of everything.
Drumlin’s name refers to a small hill in the Irish language—because Ridgecrest, get it?—and the newest release has more of a dinner-date vibe than its pubby previous incarnation. The shop’s running on table service now, and the menu’s leveled up as well—the pretzel knots (from Lake City bakery Kaffeeklatsch) and beer cheese have stuck around, but new additions include cacio e pepe risotto with burrata and tomato dust, lamb albondigas, beluga lentils with kale and Italian sausage and bacon, and a spectacular roasted carrot dish that we’re gonna talk about in a minute. Most importantly for this column’s purposes, Drumlin is now equipped with a full bar.
Zephyr Paquette’s been cooking in Seattle for well over two decades now. Today, as ever, she’s known for employing a strong field-to-plate, farmers-market culinary philosophy to cheffery, using local producers, organic foods, and a punk-rock DIY ethos. Closely affiliated with the late, great Chef Tamara Murphy and her restaurants (Terra Plata, Brasa, Elliott Bay Café) over the years, Paquette’s also an alum of Dandelion, Lecosho, Marjorie, and Cafe Flora, among manifold others, and she ran two of her own joints as well, Le Petit Paquet and Skelly and the Bean. She was a longtime participant in Murphy’s brainchild festival Burning Beast, “the world’s best feast in a field,” and a grad of the prestigious Quillisascut Farm School in rural Stevens County, where students learn to raise farm animals, make cheese, harvest from the gardens, and essentially create food from the ground up. This is just a fraction of Paquette’s resume, because you don’t have an hour and a half to read the whole thing. Suffice it to say that when Chef Zeph is at the wheel, I’m showin’ up.
This farm-to-plate credo shows up in Drumlin’s bar program, of course. Concentrating on rejiggered classic cocktails, the drink list comprises spirits sourced from small-batch distilleries, and mostly local ones. There are only a couple original crafties on there, and the one I’m besotted with is the Women’s Work. This babe comes with a special twist: Alongside being delicious and innovative and beautiful, it’s also specifically made from products that’re owned and produced by women.
In Women’s Work, Paquette combines Libélula blended tequila, Flor de Azar, ginger liqueur, honey, and her own housemade lemon soda. On the rim is honey powder and bee pollen—both sourced from Rainy Day Bees, just around the corner from Drumlin. The drink is served in a rounded-but-triangular Collins glass and then strewn with yellow marigold petals. She’s a shimmering vision, all in gold.
I tend to shy away when I see tequila on a cocktail list—it makes me braindead in an embarrassing, not-fun way. You can also safely assume the drink it’s in is gonna be thick and syrupy ’cause that’s everyone’s favorite way to style the stuff. Either you see a variation on a marg, a fruity sugar bomb loaded up with grenadine, or some kind of smoky masculine highball with fuckin’ cedar sawdust and barbecue powder. Tequila makes people act corny, man. Maybe just Americans.
This cocktail, though, is the obverse of that. Women’s Work is lovely and light, citrusy and herbal, with the tequila starring as the floral centerpiece. Honey-sweet but alpha femme. An accessible, chilled-out tequila cocktail, at last. “Yeah, everybody’s got a tequila story,” Paquette laughs when I confess my prejudices. “You’re definitely not the first person to say this.”
“I'm secretly proud of Woman's Work,” Paquette adds, “especially since it was a beautiful accident. Libélula brought me in for a tasting, and while I was there, my friend Amy Beth (Nolte), who co-owns Rainy Day Bees with her husband Peter, got back to me about buying honey powder. And then Peter was like “Does she know about the bee pollen?” So she told me about that, and I was like “WAIT, let’s just take them all and make an all-female cocktail!” And so we built it with other woman-produced liquors we had, and I was like ‘Oh my god,’ at the coincidental beauty of how it all tasted together.”
Based in Jalisco, Mexico, Libélula Tequila is owned and produced by the Lopez family, led by their matriarch Carmen Villareal Treviño. One of a small handful of living maestras tequileras, Treviño took the wheel at Casa San Matias Tequila back in 1986, whereupon she became the first woman to both own and operate a tequila distillery. Today, she guides her adult children on the same path via Libélula, whose craft distillery, Destiladora Bonanza, is located on the same estate as Casa San Matias. A joven (blended) tequila, it’s grassy, citrusy, and peppery, with just a little richness from the oak-aged reposado.
“This is actually our well,” Paquette explains. “It’s 80% blanco, with 20% reposado in it, so it’s got real gumption to it.”
Flor de Azar is a premium triple sec, and the name’s a Spanish slang term for the orange blossom (literally the “flower of luck,” hence the four-leaf clover on the bottle). Although triple sec is usually just orangey, this liqueur throws in limes, pomelos, and mandarins, alongside both sweet and bitter oranges. Agave syrup is used in place of cane sugar, and the citrus fruit is grown on a family farm in Veracruz, Mexico. It’s made by Mexico City-based distillery Flor de Luna, owned by Hillhamn Salome, who founded the distillery when she was only 18 years old and now produces the liqueur on a team with five other women. It tastes like triple sec except more so. Brighter and fruitier. Triple sec times two.
Paquette makes the lemon soda herself, and the honey-pollen rim is manufactured by neighborhood bees, per above, by way of the Ridgecrest neighborhood’s own flowers. (Don’t worry, most primary pollinator bees within a hive are female.)
I did discover a possible outlier hiding in the recipe: The ginger liqueur is made by Portland’s New Deal Distillery, which is owned by Tom Burkleaux, a person who COULD be a non-femme and is described by he/him pronouns on the company’s website. (Who am I to assume, though?) That said, the staff at New Deal seems to be overwhelmingly composed of women, and there's just a hint of the ginger liqueur in the drink anyhow. Made from spicy organic ginger, the liqueur’s a spot of potential masculinity to even out the superfemme sound, but which lays low in the cocktail’s multitrack overall.
And about those carrots. So I had some disappointing carrots at a press event at [redacted] a couple months ago, wherein the menu description called them “roasted carrots,” and the carrots delivered to me were pure orange with zero caramelization. They were still crunchy in the middle. These were in fact parboiled carrots that had never seen the inside of an oven, and I was angry about it. I felt tricked. Rarely does free food ever make me mad.
“You want these carrots,” Paquette promised when I told her my sad story and then asked about her carrot side. “I stand confidently by these roasted carrots. These are the ones.”
She was right to do this. Hers are slathered in olive oil and roasted for reals, so they’re all wrinkly and knurled like a witch’s fingers, and she serves them on a lake of maple goat-milk yogurt, accented by pomegranate molasses, salty feta, and toasted pepitas. Carrots themselves? Perfect and roasty and great, but I wanted to stick my whole hand in the plate and just scoop up every drop of the sweet-and-salty yogurt sauce. I wanted to pour it into my coat pockets. This dish instantly wiped the bad, free carrots from my memory—a real Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind moment. Therapy carrots.
As excited as I am to know that Drumlin even exists, and about Women’s Work in particular, I’m even more stoked to know that Drumlin’s newest season has an innovator like Paquette to help owners Kogut and Swalwell realize their long-held, COVID-delayed plans for the space. I’m stoked for sweet little Ridgecrest too—the weather’s just starting to get nice, and they’re opening up the front and back patios at Drumlin. Live music acts are being scheduled next, for their big indoor stage. You can see how it’s all gonna come together. Damn, y’all got me light-railing out to Shoreline now.
