The Bronx Cocktail , essentially a Perfect Martini with added orange juice (or other orange flavor), was the cocktail sensation of the 1900s and 1910s and was the drink that, in the United States, took the cocktail from the barroom to the sideboard, helping to sell untold numbers of cocktail shakers in the process. See cocktail shaker. Indeed, such was the Bronx’s popularity that, as one journalist noted in 1914, one could “order one with confidence and get it with prompt familiarity in any part of the civilized world.”
As is so often the case with such a highly popular drinks, the question of the Bronx’s invention is a vexed one, with many claimants—at least eleven of them, each with a scrap or two of documentation. The earliest of them, however, is John E. “Curly” O’Connor (1870–1941), head bartender at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, who in 1901—a full five years before the cocktail achieved national popularity—participated in a sort of summit of the city’s top mixologists, brought together to come up with a “Carrie Nation Cocktail.” O’Connor’s ticket to entry was his fame as “inventor of the Bronx Cocktail.” Since two other Waldorf-Astoria bartenders, John J. Solan (1875–1951) and Philip M. Kennedy (1875–1922), also turn up among the drink’s putative fathers, it is at least very likely that the Bronx came out of that famous bar.
The Bronx’s popularity remained high during Prohibition but declined precipitously after Repeal—indeed, Esquire magazine placed it first on its list of the ten worst cocktails of 1934. Nor has it prospered during the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance, whether because it is a difficult drink to balance properly (too much orange juice and it is insipid, too little and it is merely a neither-flesh-nor-fowl Perfect Martini) or because even if properly balanced it is a light and pleasant drink, not a spectacular one. See cocktail renaissance and Cosmopolitan.
Recipe: Cut an orange wheel in 8 pieces and muddle in cocktail shaker. Add 60 ml London dry gin, 15 ml each sweet and dry vermouth and 2 dashes Angostura bitters. Shake with ice and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.
See also Martini; Perfect; and Waldorf-Astoria
“A ‘Carrie Nation Cocktail.’” Kansas City Star, February 7, 1901, p7.
Shay, Frank. “Ten Best Cocktails of 1934.” Esquire, December, 1934, 40.
By: David Wondrich