The Stinger is a local New Yorker. A product of the town’s Gilded Age, it could—if personified—don a high hat and monocle. Although its recognition has ebbed and flowed over the previous 130 years, as we speak, as the town’s latest bars look again to its previous for inspiration, the Stinger is reemerging as a swanky expression of New York-in-a-glass.
The Stinger’s life started on the southwestern nook of Madison Sq. Park in 1890. Initially christened the Bartholdi Cocktail after the lodge the place it was born, the two-part mixture of Cognac and crème de menthe was merely shaken, served up and garnished with a lemon twist. It didn’t take lengthy for the Bartholdi Cocktail to go uptown throughout Madison Sq. Park, the place it landed seven blocks north on the Holland Home Lodge. There, George Kappeler added two dashes of Angostura bitters to the components and, placing his personal spin on it, renamed it the Brant Cocktail.
Up Fifth Avenue the Brant Cocktail went, discovering one more house within the bar on the Waldorf-Astoria, which additionally created its personal riff on the drink: The Prince, a rye-based model, featured orange bitters instead of Angostura. From the Waldorf, the minty cocktail moved additional up Fifth Avenue to West 57th Avenue and the palatial mansion of Reginald Vanderbilt. He’d shake them up for himself and buddies in his barroom, all the time with a touch of absinthe added. However Vanderbilt didn’t name this drink the Brant or the Bartholdi—he known as it the Stinger.
Unusually, the title is the one aspect related to the drink’s historical past that appears to have originated exterior of the New York milieu. Maybe drawn from the world of boxing (referring to a fast jab), the Stinger title was first hooked up to the drink in a handwritten addendum tucked into William T. Boothby’s American Bartender round 1910, attributed to John C. O’Connor’s bar in San Francisco. Then, in 1913, Jacques Straub included it within the common bartender handbook Drinks.
By the Forties, the drink—now strictly touring beneath the Stinger title—was nonetheless having fun with immense recognition. It appeared on the 1944 cocktail listing at Brooklyn’s Gage & Tollner; no shock, because the venerable chophouse was, by that point, already seen as a Homosexual ’90s time warp. Given its lineage, the Stinger is understandably present process one thing of a renaissance in present-day New York’s new—or newly revived—opulent eating places.
In 2021, whereas getting ready to reopen the bar at Gage & Tollner (which had sat dormant for over 15 years), co-owner St. John Frizell methodically labored by means of each drink on the restaurant’s WWII-era cocktail listing and, in collaboration with Jelani Johnson, developed the Stinger that now graces the menu there. The pair labored off of the Kingston Stinger, a rum-based model that Zac Overman had developed at Frizell’s Crimson Hook bar, Fort Defiance. The ensuing recipe combines Cognac, white crème de menthe, Branca Menta, wealthy Demerara syrup and contemporary mint, all shaken and strained right into a snifter over pebble ice then served with a bouquet of mint and a Jamaican rum float. For Frizell, the allure of the Stinger is that it’s a quintessential New York nightcap, what he calls an “out-on-the-town cocktail.”
Simply as the town is experiencing a resurgence of the chophouse, the restaurant scene at Rockefeller Heart—one of the “New York” of New York locations—has additionally been present process a metamorphosis. Nowhere is that this clearer than at Le Rock, a shocking restaurant that channels the New York–French delicacies that loved a spate of recognition throughout the postwar years. Along with a listing of Martinis and unique home cocktails, beverage director Estelle Bossy serves a Stinger frappé over pebble ice as an after-dinner cocktail in a nod to the midcentury interval, when the drink first began getting the crushed ice therapy.
Le Rock’s Stinger employs the identical batch-and-freeze technique used for the home Martini program, which Bossy says makes for a superbly viscous drink. As a substitute of Cognac, she reaches for a extra freezer-friendly five-year-old Armagnac, which “brings an oily, beefy meatiness that flavors cling to,” she explains. Not solely does the drink match proper into Bossy’s Francophile program, it provides a showcase for crème de menthe to redeem its lowbrow repute. “All people’s afraid of crème de menthe, proper? I imply, folks nonetheless trash the Grasshopper, [but] it’s so yummy,” Bossy says. As Frank Caiafa, former bar supervisor on the Waldorf-Astoria, notes, the liqueur was a staple within the Nineteen Seventies, too—one other period that has been the topic of a number of modern-day bar ideas and spinoffs. “Everybody had crème de menthe in the home and also you drank it,” he says. “It landed on the Sunday dinner desk, together with anisette and Galliano.”
Bossy’s is an strategy that mirrors the Stinger that William Elliott used to serve on the bygone Sauvage, a classy Brooklyn brasserie that made for a pure house for a drink constructed on two French elements. Like Bossy’s model, his was batched and frozen, although he doctored the drink with a touch of absinthe à la Reggie Vanderbilt, and served it up in a coupe over a hand-carved hunk of ice.
Between lodge bars, steakhouses and ’70s throwbacks, New Yorkers are nostalgic for the town’s earlier eras. The informal fashion of service that rose to prominence 20 years in the past is giving method to extra formal areas, and cocktails from days passed by—the Martini chief amongst them—have turn into wildly common as soon as once more. On this new (outdated) New York, may the Stinger be the subsequent large factor?
