THE MANHATTAN

Tracking down the origin story of one particular cocktail or another is rarely a simple endeavour. There are but a handful of drinks whose history is well documented and beyond question, even in the pantheon of so-called modern classics. Yes Ben Reed invented the Pineapple Martini at The Met Bar in 1997, and Sammy Ross invented The Penicillin at Milk & Honey in New York City sometime in 2005, and both of those drinks have had or do have a shot at immortality.

More so even than the Martini or the cocktail itself, there has been debate about the origins of the Bloody Mary. Countless theories abound regarding who, where, when, and what made up the original Bloody Mary, and quite how it got its name. Furthermore, there are at least two drinks which very much resemble the Bloody Mary, but seem to pre-date it. In short, the Bloody Mary’s history, not to put too fine a point on it, is a bloody mess.

My first bartending job was at a small bistro in the Northern English city of Leeds. Happy Hour was actually Happy Three Hours, and it ran Monday to Friday. Drinks cost £1.75, and this being shortly before the dawn of the modern cocktail renaissance, the Long Island Iced Tea and the San Francisco (don’t ask) were our biggest sellers. When I was presented with the task of re-writing that menu, I grasped the opportunity to perhaps bring a little old school sophistication to the place, and over the twelve months that followed the launch of the new menu I think we sold two Negronis, both of which came back relatively untouched.

When we run our eyes across the cast of characters involved in the history of the cocktail, it is regrettable how few female names we encounter, at least on the business side of the bar, however, history’s failure to record female characters does not mean they were not there.

On a trip to Washington DC a little while ago, I found myself with time to kill before my flight home, and I knew exactly what it was in that city of treasures that I wanted to see: The Space Shuttle Discovery. But that being near the airport, I figured I also had time to check out something else, something even rarer and more noteworthy, something that was rumoured to be among the three million artefacts preserved in The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

First of all the Clover Club is an incredible drink and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise - looking at you Esquire Magazine, which in 1934 branded it one of the “ten worst cocktails of the decade”, not only misjudging the drink but also its birth date.

“How should a Daiquiri taste? Well personally one believes that it shouldn’t taste of rum, it shouldn’t taste of lime, and it shouldn’t taste of sugar. It should just taste of Daiquiri.” It is unclear quite who first said that, but if it wasn’t Ernest Hemingway then I’ll eat my Quaker Marine Supply hat.

The Sour is perhaps moderately out of place among these pages, for it is not just one drink but many. In the same way that the original Cocktail leads us to the Old Fashioned, the Martini, the Manhattan, the Sazerac, the Hanky Panky, the Negroni, and countless others not listed herein. The Sour gave us the Daiquiri, the Clover Club, and the Margarita, not to mention the Bramble, the Sidecar, the White Lady and the multitude of different drinks that merely stick the suffix Sour after the name of their principal ingredient.

There is little doubt in my mind that the Manhattan is the greatest cocktail ever created. Nothing else has even come close, and doubtless nothing ever will. Having already elucidated on the Martini and the Sazerac I need not spend too much time expounding on from whence the Manhattan sprang: it’s the Whiskey Cocktail with vermouth in it, it’s the Martini’s cooler, older brother. If Martinis are the afternoon, Manhattans are the evening. If Martinis are for business, Manhattans are for pleasure. Any bartender worth their salt smiles inside when a guest orders a Manhattan.

And now to the Martini, a creation so perfect that for many, in the drinks world at least, it will likely never be surpassed. “The only American invention as perfect as the sonnet”, as the great American newspaperman H.L. Mencken almost certainly didn’t say.