What Is the “New York Sazerac” and Why Is Australia Obsessed With It?

The primary Sazerac I ever ordered was in 2008 at a bar in Brisbane, Australia, known as The Bowery, one of many solely locations making critical cocktails on the time. Like lots of my bartending compatriots, throughout the early days of the cocktail revival I pored over David Wondrich’s Imbibe and did numerous hours of my very own analysis. I’d heard of the Sazerac. I didn’t, nevertheless, count on my order to be met with an automated response within the type of a query: “New York or New Orleans fashion?”

“New Orleans fashion,” within the Australian vernacular, means 100% whiskey. The so-called “New York–fashion Sazerac” or “New York Sazerac,” which is typified by a break up base of rye whiskey and brandy in equal proportion, was, and stays, the usual model in Australia. At present, it’s so ingrained within the Australian bartending psyche that if you’d like a Sazerac as it could be served wherever else—i.e., “New Orleans fashion”—it’s a must to ask for it particularly. Earlier than I set foot in The Bowery, I’d by no means heard of it. 

The written document of the New York Sazerac is, unsurprisingly, muddled. In New York, the drink’s logical birthplace, there are scattered references to the split-base method and its attendant identify. For instance, Milk & Honey, probably the most influential cocktail bars in America, had the “New York” model on the menu in 2013 when it moved to the Flatiron District. (The bar’s unique location on Eldridge Road famously had no menus.) The New York Sazerac additionally seems as a variant in Milk & Honey alumnus Sam Ross’ Bartender recipe app—however then once more, he’s Aussie. Extra lately, beloved Harlem bar 67 Orange Road’s cocktail checklist additionally featured a New York Sazerac with a break up base. 

However other than these few examples, influential as they could be, virtually all different references to the drink come from Australia. A 2015 article in Australian Bartender magazine, the nation’s main trade shiny, is the highest consequence on Google when looking out “New York Sazerac” (quotes included). Difford’s Information, the world’s largest on-line repository of cocktail recipes, makes no point out of a “New York Sazerac” wherever in its hundreds of entries, regardless of a split-base variation showing as a personal preference of British founder Simon Difford. 

On a go to to New York in 2012 I inquired round city in regards to the metropolis’s variation. Nobody I spoke to had ever heard of it. (Clearly, I didn’t go to Milk & Honey.) There, it appeared, as in different American cities I visited, the usual model was 100% whiskey-based. Steve Schneider, former bartender at New York’s Workers Solely, who has in all probability pumped out extra Sazeracs within the Large Apple than another residing bartender, instructed me the usual at EO was all the time made with rye. “I’ve made lots of split-based Sazeracs,” he says, “however that’s principally since leaving New York, and I’ve by no means heard somebody name it a ‘New York Sazerac.’”

To raised perceive why Australians would possibly affiliate the split-base Sazerac with New York, it’s necessary to notice that cocktail tradition right here is comparatively new. Within the early 2000s, when Australia’s first devoted cocktail bars had been opening, younger bartenders, eager to hone their craft however missing mentorship from an older technology, turned as a substitute to books. Chief amongst them was Dale DeGroff’s The Craft of the Cocktail, probably the most influential works of the early cocktail revival.

Inside its pages, DeGroff’s solely recipe for the Sazerac incorporates a break up base of rye and Cognac. He doesn’t discuss with it as a “New York” model; he merely states that he has modified the normal rye drink to his personal liking with a measure of brandy. Nevertheless it’s not exhausting to think about younger Australian bartenders, trying to New York for inspiration, dubbing a recipe from one of many metropolis’s best residing bartenders “New York fashion.” 

The story within the U.Ok. seems to be related, and will be the conduit by which we discovered of the “New York Sazerac” right here within the Antipodes. Russ McFadden, a bartender at London’s Match—a venue that was, within the mid-2000s, an influential bridge between the ’tini tradition of the ’90s and the ultraserious classics of the 2010s—additionally factors again to DeGroff. “I’m not 100% certain, however I believe Dale DeGroff began it off,” he says. “We had the ‘New York Sazerac’ on the checklist as a result of he described it as the most effective of each worlds.” Bartenders like McFadden additionally performed a job in popularizing the drink by this identify in Australia. Like many from the U.Ok. on the time, he emigrated to Melbourne in 2008, the place he opened an outpost of Match, passing alongside the “New York Sazerac” as the usual recipe to dozens of younger Aussie bartenders. 

I’m unsure if our model of the Sazerac, now itself a bona fide modern classic, will ever correctly catch on in New York. However to numerous bartenders in Australia and the U.Ok., DeGroff’s split-base model will all the time be the usual. Looking back, the truth that New York was so distinguished within the title ought to’ve been a lifeless giveaway that the drink was not really “New York fashion.” As a New Yorker pal of mine’s mom as soon as sagely suggested, “If it says ‘New York fashion,’ it ain’t New York fashion.”