Called "old fashioned" because customers in the 1880s were tired of bartenders getting creative and just wanted it made the normal way. The complaint became the cocktail name. 140+ years later, nothing about it has changed. That is either genius or stubbornness. Probably both.
Legend credits this to a party thrown by Winston Churchill's mother. Historians later proved she wasn't even in New York that week. The drink didn't care and stuck around anyway. Rye whiskey, sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters, stirred cold. A proper drink for a city that doesn't apologise.
First published in print in 1862. The egg white version came later. The debate about whether egg whites belong in it has been running almost as long as the recipe itself. We add the egg white. We think the debate is over.
An American engineer named Jennings Cox ran out of gin while entertaining guests and improvised with local rum, lime and sugar. Hemingway later claimed to have invented a version of it. He did not. He did drink 16 of them in one sitting at La Floridita in Havana, which he called research. The bar framed it on the wall.
New Orleans bartender Henry Ramos made the gin fizz so popular during Mardi Gras that he hired 35 bartenders to shake them simultaneously. Each one took 12 minutes to shake properly. Nobody complained. Ours is the classic version: gin, lemon, sugar, soda, bright and effortlessly refreshing.
At least five different people have officially claimed to have invented the Margarita. A socialite in Acapulco. A Dallas socialite. A Tijuana bartender. A showgirl. None of them can prove it. The Margarita has no comment and continues to be ordered everywhere, constantly.
Created at the Waldorf Hotel for the opening of a Broadway show about a Scottish folk hero named Rob Roy. The show is completely forgotten. The drink named after it is not. Art is temporary. Cocktails are forever.
Count Negroni asked his regular bartender to make his Americano stronger by swapping soda for gin. The bartender did it. The whole cafe wanted one. Then Italy. Then the world. There is now an entire international charity week named after this one drink. The Count has been dead for over 100 years and is still indirectly doing good in the world.
A Negroni where gin is replaced with bourbon. Erskine Gwynne, an American writer in 1920s Paris, published a magazine called "Boulevardier" and gave the drink his brand. The magazine folded. The drink was then forgotten for about 80 years. Bartenders rediscovered it in the 2000s. Everyone now acts like it was always their favourite.
Gin and dry vermouth. The ratio has shifted across a century, from equal parts to Churchill's method of glancing at a bottle of vermouth from across the room. James Bond insists on shaken. Every bartender knows shaking is wrong and over-dilutes. Bond doesn't care. We'll make it however you like.
A half-frozen American allegedly pulled up to a Paris bar on a motorcycle sidecar and demanded something warming. The bartender reached for Cognac. It is the priciest classic on our menu for one honest reason: Cognac ages in barrels for years. That is what you are paying for. Worth it.
Named after a 1911 Broadway musical, the Pink Lady was the cocktail of choice for women during Prohibition precisely because it didn't look like a drink. Pink, frothy, completely non-threatening in a teacup. Underneath: gin, grenadine, lemon, and egg white, which is not nothing. It was considered feminine and therefore dismissed by serious drinkers for decades. Those drinkers were wrong, and also probably boring.
The Cosmopolitan exists largely because of a TV show that ended in 2004. Before Sex and the City, it was already circulating among bartenders in Miami and San Francisco. After it, every bar in the world was making them constantly for a solid decade. The recipe is vodka, triple sec, cranberry juice, lime. Carrie Bradshaw didn't invent it, but she did make it extremely famous, which is a more interesting legacy than most cocktails manage.
The Mojito's ancestor was called El Draque, made with rough aguardiente and used as medicine in the 1500s. By the time rum became Cuba's dominant spirit, it had evolved into something worth drinking for pleasure rather than survival. Hemingway claimed the Daiquiri, not the Mojito, but he drank both and had opinions about everything. The combination of fresh mint, rum, lime, sugar, and soda sounds simple. It is. That is why it still works.
Robert Butt, a bartender at the Oak Beach Inn on Long Island, invented this in 1972 as part of a cocktail competition. The rule was that the drink had to include triple sec. He added four more base spirits, a splash of cola to make it look like iced tea, and won. It has vodka, rum, tequila, gin, triple sec, and lemon. It tastes like nothing and then suddenly it doesn't. The name is the most accurate thing about it.
