La Louisiane

The Origin

Restaurant La Louisiane opened in New Orleans in 1881 and became one of the city's most celebrated dining institutions over the following decades. The cocktail that bore its name appeared in Stanley Clisby Arthur's 1937 guide "Famous New Orleans Drinks and How to Mix 'Em," a document that preserved a number of drinks that might otherwise have been lost in the years following Prohibition. Arthur credited the drink to the restaurant without naming a specific bartender. Whether it was created there or simply adopted as the house pour is not recorded.

New Orleans cocktail culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was defined by a willingness to use Peychaud's bitters, absinthe, and French liqueurs in combinations that bartenders elsewhere were not working with. La Louisiane is a product of that environment. It could not have come from anywhere else.

The Structure

The equal-parts format of rye, sweet vermouth, and Bénédictine gives this drink an unusual honesty. There is no dominant ingredient. Each one contributes something the others cannot. The rye provides spice and grip. The vermouth provides body, sweetness, and wine character. The Bénédictine provides herbal complexity, honey, and warmth. Peychaud's bitters provide anise and floral aromatics. The absinthe, in two dashes, adds a low background note of anise that ties the Bénédictine and Peychaud's together without announcing itself.

Remove any single element and the drink becomes noticeably less interesting. That is the mark of a well-constructed recipe.

The Vermouth Question

More cocktails are ruined by poor or stale vermouth than by any other single variable. In a drink where vermouth represents one third of the total volume, the quality and freshness of what you use is not negotiable. Sweet vermouth is a wine-based product. It oxidises after opening. A bottle left at room temperature for several months will produce a flat, slightly bitter result that no amount of quality rye or Bénédictine can rescue. Buy a fresh bottle, refrigerate it immediately after opening, and replace it within four weeks. That discipline alone will produce a better La Louisiane than most bars serve.

How to Serve It

Stirred, strained, and served cold in a coupe with a single Luxardo cherry. This is a late evening drink, best consumed slowly. It has enough complexity to reward attention across every sip and enough weight to close a meal with genuine satisfaction. It is not a session drink and it is not designed to be. Pour one, pour it properly, and give it the attention it asks for.

The Bénédictine

Bénédictine is doing the job a sweetener would do in a Manhattan, and it is the reason this is not simply a Manhattan variation with extras bolted on.

It is a French herbal liqueur on a brandy base, made at Fécamp in Normandy to a recipe of honey, saffron, angelica and a long list of other botanicals. What it brings here is honey and warmth alongside genuine herbal complexity, so the sweetness arrives with structure attached rather than as plain sugar.

At thirty millilitres it is a full third of the drink, which is a great deal more than the ten or fifteen it usually gets elsewhere. There is no direct substitute: a different herbal liqueur changes the character completely, and simple syrup makes something much flatter.

Frequently Asked Questions