Buss Stop wins third year
By James Card
The Buss Stop was voted as having the area’s best bloody mary for the third year in a row.
The Fremont Chamber of Commerce organized the Fremont Bloody Mary Trail and throughout the autumn, patrons tried bloody marys at participating local establishments. They received a stamp on a card for each cocktail and they turned in their cards with their vote for the best one.
Hannah Ory has bartended at The Buss Stop for 13 years and she estimates she’s made “thousands and thousands” of bloody marys.
“There are some days where I stop counting at 50,” she said.
The recipe is a secret. Ory filled a pint glass with ice and added vodka, Worcestershire sauce, Frank’s Red Hot sauce, an unidentified seasoning salt or spice mix, a few splashes of a clear liquid in an unmarked bottle and a tomato juice-based mix. The cocktail is not shaken or stirred. Ory pours the contents of the pint glass into a shaker glass and then sloshes the mix back into the pint glass. She does this twice.
The cocktail is topped with a sausage stick, string cheese and a dill pickle. On top of that Ory adds a pickled asparagus shoot, a pickled mushroom, an olive, a pickled Brussels sprout, and a cherry pepper. These condiments are spiked together by three plastic spears. Ory adds a straw and a lemon wedge.
“We tell people don’t judge the cocktail on the garnish. Judge it on the bloody mary itself,” said Ory.
The cocktail is served with a beer chaser with the customer’s choice of what’s on tap.
The pint glass that the bloody mary is served in has the logos of The Buss Stop, the Bridge Bar, the Hotel Fremont and the Fremont River Deck. Over the years, these establishments had a problem with customers wandering off with their pint glasses. The glasses later turned up at the other downtown Fremont bars. Since nobody wanted to serve a drink with another bar’s logo upon it, they joined together and put all their logos onto shared, expected-to-disappear-yet-reappear pint glasses.