Bourbon Street drinks are a loose, louche, and deceptively strong family of mixtures typically sold on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Aptly named (though for the French royal lineage, not the whisky), Bourbon Street is one of the world’s legendary drinking thoroughfares. The ten-block stem that stretches from Canal Street to St. Philip Street (the location of Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar, said to be the oldest structure housing a tavern in America) has been the site of countless first drinks, no doubt a few last ones, and an incalculable number of tipples in between. The street is almost as awash in alcoholic folklore as it is actual in booze—a reputation that had its start in the 1917 destruction of New Orleans’s notorious Storyville red-light district, which pushed the business of vice into the French Quarter. For better and worse, the indulgences of Bourbon Street defined and sold the identity and allure of the Crescent City to the world for generations.
Old Absinthe House. Likewise, over Sazeracs and flaming Café Brûlot at Galatoire’s Restaurant, opened in 1905, or highballs at the burlesques and nightclubs that lined Bourbon Street through the 1950s and 1960s, or the inventions of bartender Chris Hannah, who oversaw the city’s twenty-first-century cocktail revival from Arnaud’s French 75 Bar, a hundred yards off Bourbon, on Bienville Street. See Sazerac Cocktail.None of these, however, can strictly be said to be “Bourbon Street Drinks.” That designation is reserved for an altogether more lurid, potent genre of cocktail that gained popularity as the public life of Bourbon Street shifted from the inward-facing cloisters of restaurants and nightclubs to the public pageant of a twenty-four-hour street promenade. The first and most famous of these was the Hurricane, perhaps invented but certainly popularized by Pat O’Brien’s. An accommodation to the whisky shortages (and rum surpluses) of World War II, the Hurricane was a bright red, proto-tiki combination of rum, citrus, and passionfruit. It set the Bourbon Street standard for high proof, high sugar and high theatricality, with its instantly recognizable hurricane-lamp glass which became a self-sustaining sidewalk advertisement. See Hurricane.
The Hurricane was inspiration for Earl Bernhardt and Pam Fortner, who opened Tropical Isle on the corner of Toulouse Street in 1984. The pair introduced the technicolor Hand Grenade, served in a bright green plastic version of that weapon, which soon became the most visible accessory on Bourbon Street—helped by Bernhardt and Fortner’s irrepressibly amateur TV commercials and their very professional commitment to bringing litigation against imitators. (A sign at Tropical Isle offered rewards to customers willing to act the snitch.) Lesser known, but with a local cult following, was Tropical Isle’s Shark Attack, a simple concoction of sour mix and vodka transformed into an operatic high-seas drama with the addition of literal bells and whistles rung and blown whenever one was ordered, plus a plastic alligator and shark and copious amounts of “blood” in the form of grenadine syrup.
By the late 2010s, the pantheon of gimmicky drinks included the Fish Bowl, the Jester, the Mango Mango Lady, the Yard Dog, the Willie’s Cocktail, the self-explanatory Huge Ass Beer, and more—each in a distinctive container hoping to achieve the lucrative iconicity of the Hurricane or Hand Grenade. Vulgar, trashy, and mass produced, these drinks are the very antithesis of the craft cocktail. Yet in a city that insists on participation—the ethos that every consumer is also a part of the show—they may be the most authentic New Orleans drinks of all.
Curtis, Wayne. “Remembering Earl Bernhardt, the Cocktail King of Bourbon Street.” Daily Beast, January 28, 2020. https://www.thedailybeast.com/remembering-earl-bernhardt-the-cocktail-king-of-bourbon-street (accessed March 17, 2021).
By: Brett Martin