On the inspiration for her drink, Jenna Hemsworth says:
When I heard the name Legacy, I thought about what I want to leave as my legacy. In a career, in a lifetime, what do you want to do as your legacy, what do you want people to think of what you leave? There’s this joke of [me] being a queen and one of the leading females in the industry, so what can I teach to others coming through my footsteps or coming through a path that I’ve led. What can I leave by example and what can I do? I want to first and foremost preach having fun. Why do we do this? It’s because it’s fun, because we enjoy it — why else? What’s the point of living if you’re not having fun? If I was to rule the world for a day, what would I do? I’d tell everyone to have fun, follow what they’re good at and what they enjoy, not because it’s what they’re supposed to do but because it’s what they want to do. If that’s my legacy, to give people a little more fun in their lives and to make people a bit more true to themselves? I’m unashamedly myself, and there’s no cutting corners around that. It’s taken me a long time to be unashamedly myself. There’s a lot of darkness behind not being okay with who I was, not feeling good enough and stuff like that.
When you’re behind the bar you’ve got that three feet of safety buffer. They don’t know how you are. You can be who you want. It took me a long time to [admit] I’m not happy. Over time you realise, you go, ‘I’m okay’, and then one day it just clicked and I thought: I’m going to own this. I stopped apologising for who I was, or how I was, and found that people reacted well to it. It’s a very scary thing putting yourself out there.
That’s what I wanted to put through in this drink. You can find that bit of you and bring it forward and say this is my legacy, or this is the mark I want to leave on the world, or the mark I want I want to leave on today — or even the mark I want to leave on this service.
When you finally let go of everything and you say ‘Hey, I’ve got nothing to lose.’
This is what I’m going to put forward.
The Monarch
- 45 ml BACARDÍ Carta Blanca
- 15 ml Dom Benedictine
- 30 ml mandarin juice
- Peel of one mandarin
- 20 ml lime juice
- 8 basil leaves
- Shake all ingredients hard to properly infuse the peel and release the basil oils.
- Double strain into a coupette glass.
- Garnish with a young basil sprig.