Red Hook

Brooklyn

The Brooklyn is a dry Manhattan with two seasonings: a barspoon of maraschino and a barspoon of Amer Picon. Jacob Grohusko printed it in Jack's Manual in 1908, and it is the drink that gave the borough its cocktail identity, eventually producing the Red Hook, the Greenpoint, the Bensonhurst and a dozen more. The problem is the Picon. It was a French bitter orange aperitif at high proof, reduced and reformulated through the twentieth century, so the bottle the recipe assumed no longer exists in any obtainable form. Every modern Brooklyn is therefore a reconstruction, and it is more honest to say so than to pretend a substitution is the original. This version uses Averna with two dashes of orange bitters, which is the accessible route: the amaro supplies the bitterness and the body, the bitters supply the orange. Bigallet China-China is closer to the original voice if you can find a bottle of it.

Manhattan

The Manhattan is the oldest documented whiskey cocktail in the American canon and the template for every stirred, spirit-forward classic that followed. It appeared in bar guides of the 1880s already described as an established drink, suggesting an origin in the 1870s. The most commonly cited account places its creation at the Manhattan Club in New York, at a banquet hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill in honour of presidential candidate Samuel Tilden; the account is disputed, Lady Churchill being documented elsewhere on the date in question, but the Manhattan Club association remains the most plausible origin available. What it established is the shape rather than the recipe: a base spirit, a fortified wine and a bitter, stirred cold and served up. That structure is the foundation of the Vieux Carré, the Boulevardier, the Rob Roy, and every other stirred whiskey drink that followed, and understanding it is the most direct route into that entire family. The sweet vermouth is the variable that most determines the finished drink. A stale or poorly chosen vermouth does not simply diminish the Manhattan; it defines it. The drink’s simplicity leaves the vermouth nowhere to hide.

Black Manhattan

The Black Manhattan asks a simple heretical question: what if the vermouth were replaced entirely by amaro? Todd Smith posed it at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco in 2005, chose Averna, and produced one of the defining drinks of the modern era. Rye and Sicilian amaro at the classic ratio, both bitters, one cherry, and a drink the colour of its name. The swap works because Averna is built like a vermouth that kept going: wine-adjacent sweetness, herbs and citrus peel, but darker, denser and bittersweet where vermouth is fresh. The Manhattan’s architecture survives intact while every surface of it changes, and the two dashes of bitters now read as accents in an already bitter landscape. It sits with the Hanky Panky and the Toronto in the small family of drinks that taught amari to speak cocktail, and it has moved more bottles of Averna than any of them.