![]() It became our staff drink, and soon the staff started turning the regulars onto it. We were always making drinks for the staff, so I started serving it to the waitresses. So I took the Cointreau, fresh lime juice and the Citron, and to approximate the Rose’s Grenadine I grabbed cranberry juice that was on hand from Cape Codders. Also, Absolut had just come out with Citron, a lemon-flavored vodka. I went about reconstructing it, using what we were using at the time to make Margaritas-fresh lime juice and Cointreau. In 1988, a girl who worked with me had friends from San Francisco visiting New York and they showed her this drink. There was a terrible drink called the Cosmopolitan making the rounds at gay bars in San Francisco in the mid ’80s-it was rail vodka, Rose’s lime juice, Rose’s grenadine, and it went in a Martini glass with a twist. Toby Cecchini (owner of Long Island Bar in New York, widely credited with inventing the modern-day Cosmopolitan): What we think of as the Cosmopolitan is actually my drink that I created at the Odeon in New York. It was the kind of drink where you could always guarantee a second drink sale because it had less booze per ounce than a Martini because of the juice. It was light, clean, fast to make, pretty and cheap. The Cosmopolitan fit perfectly into that scene. ![]() ![]() We got known as the place for the Cosmopolitan. We started making them in 10-ounce Martini glasses. I moved to San Francisco in 1987 and started working at Julie’s Supper Club, a yuppy supper club. The drink had vodka, triple sec, Rose’s lime juice and a splash of Ocean Spray cranberry juice. It was the gay community that brought it from Provincetown, which is where the cranberries were growing. I ran into the drink in Cleveland at the Rusty Scupper, a restaurant. That’s where you start to see the Cosmopolitan.Ĭaine: I started bartending in 1980. Miranda Dickson (global brand director of Absolut Elyx): In the late ’80s and the early ’90s, you see the emergence of these freak flavor martinis, like the Espresso Martini. In the ’80s, they added cranberry juice to that basic Kamikaze to make it this pretty drink and you have a Cosmopolitan. Then after World War II, people discovered Cointreau from France and that drink became a Kamikaze (vodka, triple sec, lime juice). A Gimlet was made because you needed to add something to well vodka or gin, because the well liquors were made so poorly. It was initially called the Vodka Gimlet. John Caine (bartender in San Francisco, widely credited with popularizing the Cosmopolitan): This drink predates World War II. Eventually, it caught the attention of the liquor companies and leapt onto the small screen, reigniting its popularity. But before it hit HBO, it cycled through many iterations and social circles, from the gay community in Provincetown to the celebrity regulars at the Odeon, the buzzy restaurant responsible for its proliferation throughout lower Manhattan. The most obvious source of its cultural dissemination was Sex and the City, where it was Carrie Bradshaw’s signature cocktail-the dainty, stiletto-like glass a perpetual fixture of her social outings. ![]() ![]() There’s a longstanding debate over who actually created the cocktail-but what’s even more interesting is the cast of characters and fairytale circumstances that popularized it. The extent of the Cosmopolitan’s reach was unlike that of any other drink created during the 20 th century, its zeitgeist sweeping and total. Born at the cusp of the Gay Rights movement and before the dawn of the cocktail renaissance, the Cosmo, in its tippy 10-ounce Martini glass, was a show-stealer that went on to become a modern classic. The blush-pink, sweet-tart formula-a blend of vodka, triple sec, cranberry juice and lime-was nothing if not a child of its time. There are few cocktails more immediately recognizable than a Cosmopolitan. ![]()
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