Modern Classics: 12 Cocktails the Craft Scene Actually Orders
A "classic" cocktail used to mean something invented before Prohibition. An 1806 newspaper defined the cocktail as spirit, sugar, water, and bitters, Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks (1862) put the recipes in a book, and named drinks like the Manhattan and Sidecar hardened into the canon by the early 1920s. For most of the 20th century, the list was closed. Starting in the 1990s, a small group of bartenders reopened it.
These twelve stuck. A modern classic, by one working definition, is one that gets ordered by name in cities its inventor has never been to.
The bars that mattered
Sasha Petraske opened Milk & Honey on New York's Lower East Side at the end of 1999. No menu, no signage, house rules ("don't talk to women you don't know"), perfect ice. It taught a generation of American bartenders that the bar itself was a craft discipline, and Sam Ross, Michael McIlroy, T.J. Siegal, and Vincenzo Errico all came through it.
Death & Co opened in the East Village in 2007. Where Milk & Honey was hushed and reverent, Death & Co ran long, technical menus; Phil Ward, Joaquín Simó, and Brian Miller drove its early run. The same year, Toby Maloney opened The Violet Hour in Chicago's Wicker Park.
Others carried it too. Bourbon & Branch (2006) put a password-only bar in a Prohibition-era speakeasy space in San Francisco's Tenderloin. PDT (2007) put its entrance in a phone booth inside Crif Dogs, an East Village hot-dog shop. And in 2009 Phil Ward opened Mayahuel, a tequila-and-mezcal bar that kept margaritas off the menu.
The list
T.J. Siegal at Milk & Honey, around 2001. A Whiskey Sour with honey syrup instead of simple. That's the entire move. Honey carries weight sugar doesn't, so it lengthens the bourbon's finish instead of dropping out of it. The Penicillin, and every "swap simple for X-syrup" drink since, descends from this one.
Sam Ross at Milk & Honey, 2005. Blended Scotch, lemon, and honey-ginger syrup, with a quarter-ounce of Islay Scotch floated on top so the smoke hits your nose before you taste anything. It was an instant standard; plenty of bars bought an Islay just for the float.
The outlier. It dates to the Detroit Athletic Club in the 1910s and was printed in Ted Saucier's Bottoms Up! in 1951, then stayed buried until Murray Stenson started serving it at Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle around 2004. Equal parts gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime. Stenson's revival made equal parts the dominant template of the next decade. Without it you don't get the Paper Plane (Sam Ross calls his drink a Last Word riff) or the Naked & Famous.
Sam Ross again, 2008, made for the Violet Hour's summer menu a year after it opened. He named it after M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes," which he had on repeat while working it out. Equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon. It's the easiest drink here to like at first sip, and people order it in airport lounges without knowing who Sam Ross is.
Joaquín Simó at Death & Co, 2011. He called it "the bastard love child of a Last Word and a Paper Plane": equal parts mezcal, yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, and lime. Hold the template, swap one variable, get a new drink.
Phil Ward at Death & Co, 2007. Reposado tequila, a half-ounce of mezcal, agave syrup, mole bitters. It's a Tequila Old Fashioned with mezcal as a smoky modifier, and it gave American bartenders a way to introduce mezcal without burying it in citrus. Mezcal was barely used behind American bars in 2007, and this is the drink usually credited with introducing a generation of drinkers to it.
Julio Bermejo at Tommy's Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, around 1990. Blanco tequila, lime, and agave syrup, with no triple sec (which most bars used to mask cheap tequila). It was a back-to-ingredients move: in the 1980s Bermejo had already swapped Tommy's well from mixto to 100% agave tequila, when, by his count, 98% of American tequila drinkers were on mixto. It predates most of this list but took until the mid-2000s to spread, which is why it counts as modern.
Giuseppe González, 2009. A sour with an ounce and a half of Angostura Bitters as the base, when most cocktails use a few dashes. Orgeat (almond syrup), lemon, and a half-ounce of rye round it out. It looks impossible on paper and tastes balanced in the glass.
Phil Ward at Mayahuel, NYC, 2009. Mezcal, Aperol, maraschino, lime. A darker Last Word descendant, with the maraschino adding cherry weight under the smoke. It's less famous than the Naked & Famous and, to many bartenders, the better drink.
Vincenzo Errico at Milk & Honey, 2003. A Brooklyn variation: rye, Punt e Mes, maraschino. Punt e Mes is a sweet-bitter Italian vermouth with a quinine-like bitterness a normal sweet vermouth doesn't have, so the Red Hook tastes more finished than the Brooklyn. It helped put Punt e Mes on craft-bar shelves.
Todd Smith in San Francisco, 2005; he later brought the drink to Bourbon & Branch. A Manhattan with Amaro Averna (bitter and herbal, with cola and orange-rind notes) in place of the sweet vermouth. It's the gateway to treating amari (bitter Italian liqueurs) as full ingredients, not just digestifs.
The loosest fit. Constante Ribalaigua adapted the Daiquiri at El Floridita in Havana in the 1930s around Hemingway's taste for sugarless rum drinks. White rum, grapefruit juice, maraschino, lime. It counts as modern because it didn't enter the American craft canon until the 2000s, when bartenders went digging in pre-Castro Havana for ideas.
What ties them together
- Equal parts is the dominant spec. Last Word, Paper Plane, and Naked & Famous are all built on 0.75 oz × 4. The math is easy.
- Modifiers took the lead. The Trinidad Sour, Black Manhattan, and Red Hook treat bitters, amaro, and Punt e Mes as headliners, not seasoning.
- Mezcal arrived. Two of the twelve center it, and a third uses it as a smoky modifier. In 1999 it wasn't even on most bar shelves; two decades later it's a category. Agave Spirits covers the bottles.
How to use this list
Beyond a standard bar, these need mezcal, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, Amaro Averna, Punt e Mes, Green and Yellow Chartreuse, maraschino, mole bitters, and an Islay Scotch. The Chartreuses are the most expensive bottles you'll buy; everything else is reasonable. See Bitters and Modifiers for amari.
At a good bar, order the lineage in sequence: Gold Rush, Penicillin, Last Word, Paper Plane, Naked & Famous. That's the modern sour and the equal-parts template, ten years in one sitting. Pace yourself.
If you only ever make one, make the Paper Plane. The whole movement leans on its structure.