history
Twelve drinks of the craft-cocktail era — invented or revived from the 1990s onward — that have entered the canon serious bars actually pour.
history
Twelve drinks of the craft-cocktail era — invented or revived from the 1990s onward — that have entered the canon serious bars actually pour.
A "classic" cocktail used to mean something invented before Prohibition. Jerry Thomas's How to Mix Drinks (1862) defined "the cocktail" as a category — spirit, sugar, water, bitters — and a long tail of named drinks (Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Daiquiri, Sidecar, and the rest) hardened into the canon between then and 1920. For most of the 20th century, the list was closed.
Then, starting in the 1990s, a small group of bartenders quietly reopened it.
This guide is the result: twelve drinks of the modern craft era, most invented in the 2000s, a few revived from older sources, one or two from the 1990s, that have stuck. They migrated out of one bar's menu and into the shared bar vocabulary, ordered by name in cities the inventors have never been to. That's enough to call them modern classics. If you only learn 12 post-Prohibition cocktails, learn these.
Three bars do most of the work in this list. Knowing them helps the rest of the story make sense.
Milk & Honey, NYC. Sasha Petraske opened it on the 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. Sam Ross, Michael McIlroy, T.J. Siegal, and Vincenzo Errico all came through it. Half the drinks below were born there.
Death & Co, NYC. Opened 2007 in the East Village. Where Milk & Honey was reverent and quiet, Death & Co was ambitious — long, thoughtful menus, technical riffs on the canon. Phil Ward, Joaquín Simó, and Brian Miller drove its early run. The Naked & Famous and Oaxaca Old Fashioned were created there; the latter basically defined what mezcal would mean to American drinkers.
The Violet Hour, Chicago. Toby Maloney opened it in 2007 in Wicker Park. Sam Ross was there for the opening; the Paper Plane is a souvenir of that night.
There are others — Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco, Mayahuel and PDT in New York — but if you understand Milk & Honey, Death & Co, and the bartenders who orbited them, you understand 90% of what happened.
T.J. Siegal at Milk & Honey, around 2001. A Whiskey Sour with honey syrup instead of simple. That's the entire move. It works because honey carries weight that sugar doesn't — it lengthens the bourbon's finish instead of dropping out of it. The Gold Rush is the ancestor of the Penicillin and, more broadly, of every "swap simple for X-syrup" drink that followed.
Sam Ross at Milk & Honey, 2005. The drink that proved the Gold Rush template could carry weight. It takes blended Scotch, lemon, and a honey-ginger syrup, then floats a quarter-ounce of Islay Scotch on top — so the smoke hits your nose before you taste anything. It was an instant standard. Read a craft-bar menu in 2010 and there'd be a Penicillin riff on it; most bars stocked Islay just for the float.
The outlier. The Last Word dates to the Detroit Athletic Club in the 1910s and was printed in Ted Saucier's Bottoms Up! in 1951, not invented at Milk & Honey. But it stayed buried until Murray Stenson at Zig Zag Cafe in Seattle pulled it off a back shelf around 2004 and started serving it. Equal parts gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime — bracingly herbal and bone-dry. Stenson's revival is what made the equal-parts spec the dominant template of the next decade. Without the Last Word's revival, you don't get the Paper Plane or the Naked & Famous.
Sam Ross again, 2008, made for the opening menu of the Violet Hour. Equal parts bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon. Every part of the spec is in dialogue with what came before — equal-parts (Last Word), bittersweet aperitivo (Negroni lineage), a sour finish — but the result drinks like nothing else. It's the easiest drink on this list to like at first sip and one of the few modern cocktails guests order by name.
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. Smoky on entry, herbal in the middle, citric on the finish. If you understand it, you understand the whole equal-parts movement: a fixed structural 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 the mezcal acting as a smoky modifier. More importantly, it gave American bartenders a clean way to introduce mezcal without burying it in citrus. Before 2007, mezcal in the US was a curiosity; by the early 2010s, serious cocktail bars were making room for it.
Julio Bermejo at Tommy's Mexican Restaurant in San Francisco, around 1990. A Margarita without triple sec — just blanco tequila, lime, and agave syrup. It was one of the first widely cited examples of a "back to ingredients" reinvention: strip out the orange liqueur (which most bars used to mask cheap tequila), use better tequila, sweeten with agave instead. The recipe predates the dates of most drinks on this list, but it took until the mid-2000s to spread, which is why it counts as modern.
Giuseppe González, 2009. The cocktail that broke the rule book. A sour with an ounce and a half of Angostura Bitters as the base spirit — bitters, which most cocktails use a few dashes of, used in spirit quantities. It's offset with orgeat (almond syrup), lemon, and a half-ounce of rye. It looks impossible on paper and tastes balanced in the glass. More than any other drink here, it's the modern cocktail's argument that the canon isn't fixed.
Phil Ward at Mayahuel, NYC, 2009. Mezcal, Aperol, maraschino, lime. Another Last Word descendant, but darker — the maraschino brings cherry weight, the Aperol brings orange, the mezcal brings smoke. Less famous than the Naked & Famous but, to many bartenders, the better drink.
Vincenzo Errico at Milk & Honey, 2003. A Brooklyn variation: rye, Punt e Mes (a sweet-bitter Italian vermouth), maraschino. Punt e Mes is the move — it adds a quinine-like bitterness that a normal sweet vermouth doesn't have, which is why the Red Hook tastes more finished than the Brooklyn it descends from. It's the drink that put Punt e Mes on every craft-bar shelf.
Todd Smith in San Francisco, 2005; he later brought the drink to Bourbon & Branch. The Manhattan, but with Amaro Averna replacing the sweet vermouth. Averna is bitter and herbal, with cola and orange-rind notes — so the result is a Manhattan in shape but a different drink in mouth. It's the gateway to thinking of amari (bitter Italian liqueurs) as full ingredients, not just digestifs.
The oldest drink on this list, and the one most loosely qualifying. 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's been on cocktail menus for ninety years; it counts as modern because it didn't enter the American craft canon until the 2000s — when bartenders started reaching back into pre-Castro Cuba for ideas.
Read the list back and a pattern emerges:
If you're stocking a home bar and want to make as many of these as possible, the additions to a standard bar are: mezcal, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, Amaro Averna, Punt e Mes, Yellow Chartreuse, mole bitters, an Islay Scotch. The Chartreuses (yellow and green) are the most expensive bottles you'll buy; everything else is reasonable.
If you're at a good bar and want to taste the lineage, order in this sequence: Gold Rush → Penicillin → Last Word → Paper Plane → Naked & Famous. That's the actual chronological development of the modern sour and equal-parts template, drink by drink, ten years compressed into one sitting.
And if you only ever make one: the Paper Plane. It's the modern classic that makes the case most cleanly — invented this century, easy to recognize after one sip, and built on a structure you can see the whole movement leaning on.