No surprise there. If there’s one thing booze hounds like more than drinking a drink, it’s talking about it. And while a bar dispenses many things, reliable information isn’t often among them.<\/p>\n
I’ve tried throughout the Sunday Specials series<\/a> to provide only verified, multi-source histories of the cocktails I present\u2014or, at the very least, to lay out the various, competing versions of the drink’s lineage, accompanied by as many qualifiers as necessary.<\/p>\n I’ll need a lot of them for this week’s concoction: the Bronx Cocktail.<\/p>\n The most oft-repeated narrative involves a bartender, Johnnie Solon, who worked at the old Waldorf hotel in New York around 1906. By one account, he invented the drink after hearing a customer’s description of the recently opened Bronx Zoo; by another, Johnnie visited the zoo himself. Some say the drink was inspired by the wild descriptions of zoo animals from his liquored-up clients; others suggest the barkeep was actually drawing a scathing parallel between the creatures who inhabited the menagerie beyond the East River and those perched on the stools of his own Manhattan establishment.<\/p>\n As Gary Regan maintains in The Joy of Mixology<\/em><\/a>, odds are that none of those stories is true. For one thing, the Bronx Zoo opened in 1899, and the Bronx Cocktail existed as early 1900, listed on a menu\u2014from someplace other than the Waldorf. For another thing, as David Wondrich writes in Imbibe!,<\/em><\/a> there were at least two other claimants to the invention around the same time, both of which were bars actually located in the Bronx borough.<\/p>\n Based on its components alone, this cocktail was most likely the product of multiple, independent parentages. The older, slightly higher-alcohol version is just a Medium Martini<\/a> (made, per Simonson, with equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and dry vermouth) with a tiny bit of orange juice added. The more modern Bronx Cocktail is really a Perfect Martini<\/a> (double the gin, a fraction of the vermouths) with orange juice making up the difference.<\/p>\n Neither recipe represents anything like a giant leap forward in cocktail artistry. All it took was for someone to ask for a splash of OJ in their Martini, and the Bronx cocktail was born\u2014even if it wasn’t called that.<\/p>\n I wanted to like what I call the Boozy Bronx, which Wondrich attributes to one Billy Malloy of Pittsburgh, Pa.; the recipe appears in “Cocktail Bill” Boothby’s World Drinks and How to Mix Them<\/em><\/a>, first published in 1908 (thereby casting further doubt on the Waldorf origin story). But because I love gin, I prefer the modern Bronx Cocktail, even though it goes heavy on the orange juice.<\/p>\n Take your pick. The story of the creation of the Bronx Cocktail might indeed be too good to be true, but the drink definitely isn’t.<\/p>\n Adapted from The Joy of Mixology<\/em><\/a> by Gary Regan<\/p>\n 2 ounces gin Shake and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Twist the orange peel over the glass and add as garnish.<\/p>\n
\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cuisinestupide.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/P9090011-1-246x300.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h3>\nBronx Cocktail<\/h3>\n
\n1\/4 ounce sweet vermouth
\n1\/4 ounce dry vermouth
\n1 ounce fresh orange juice
\n1 dash orange bitters
\nOrange twist for garnish<\/p>\nBoozy Bronx<\/h3>\n