Recipes

There are few drinks as freighted with expectation as the martini. Order one and you invoke a century of cultural mythology—Bond’s specifications, Parker’s warnings about three, Churchill bowing toward France while pouring gin. Yet beneath this accumulated lore lies something more elemental: a drink whose enduring appeal stems from radical simplicity and the precision it […]

In the third season of Emily in Paris, the titular marketing executive finds herself newly unemployed and nursing her professional wounds at the Place de la Concorde. Her former colleague Luc orders her a Kir Royale—”the perfect drink to sip and do nothing as the Ferris wheel turns,” he tells her. The moment is quintessentially the […]

The Aperol Spritz achieved global ubiquity not through superior flavor complexity but through perfect timing. When Instagram arrived hungry for photogenic content, and millennial travelers sought accessible markers of European sophistication to show off, this Venetian aperitivo was waiting—sunset orange, effortlessly elegant, requiring neither bartending skill nor challenging flavor commitment. The drink’s origins are modest: […]

There’s something peculiarly modern about ordering a drink named after artillery. When Harry MacElhone created the French 75 at his Paris bar sometime around 1915, he wasn’t being subtle about the reference—the French 75mm field gun had become synonymous with devastating precision, and the cocktail promised similar impact. What’s remarkable is how this drink, born […]

In the taxonomy of forgotten drinks, few have experienced as dramatic a resurrection as the Last Word. This equal-parts cocktail disappeared so thoroughly from American consciousness that its rediscovery felt less like revival than archaeological excavation. The drink emerged during Prohibition at the Detroit Athletic Club, credited to Frank Fogarty, a vaudeville performer, around 1915. […]

Two establishments claim credit for the sidecar’s invention, both in cities where expatriate Americans gathered to drink legally while Prohibition transformed their homeland into a speakeasy nation. Harry’s New York Bar in Paris stakes one claim; the Ritz Hotel in London asserts the other. The most commonly cited origin story involves a military captain arriving […]

The Manhattan is a drink that lies. Not about its contents – those remain admirably straightforward – but about its origins. The most popular legend places its creation at the Manhattan Club in the 1870s, supposedly commissioned by Jennie Jerome (Winston Churchill’s mother) for a banquet honoring presidential candidate Samuel Tilden. It’s a tidy story, […]

Harry McElhone’s genius, if we can call it that, lay not in invention but in substitution. Working behind the mahogany at Harry’s New York Bar in 1920s Paris, the Scottish bartender took the Negroni—barely a decade old—and swapped bourbon for gin. That single modification, made for his friend Erskine Gwynne (whose magazine The Boulevardier chronicled American […]

Count Camillo Negroni could not have known, when he asked his bartender to strengthen his Americano with gin at Florence’s Caffè Casoni in 1919, that he was inaugurating a cocktail that would define Italian sophistication for the next century. The modification was simple—equal parts gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth—but the gesture was radical. Where the […]

When Louisville’s Pendennis Club bartenders began serving whiskey “the old-fashioned way” in the 1880s, they staged a quiet rebellion. As American saloons descended into ornate punches and elaborate concoctions designed to mask cheap spirits, the Old Fashioned emerged as correction rather than innovation: good whiskey needs enhancement, not disguise. The name itself—coined by drinkers requesting […]