Bronx
Dry gin, with hints of lemon and orange, crisp aperitif style.
There are two people who claim ownership of the Bronx cocktail. One, cited in his obituary in the New York Times, among other places, was Joseph S Sormani. Sormani was a Bronx restaurateur who discovered the cocktail in 1905 in the city of Philadelphia. There is no known reference to who made it or where in Philadelphia it was mixed. The other, and possibly more accurate claim, is that Johnnie Solon of the Waldorf Astoria created this drink as an alternative to the then popular Duplex cocktail. He never tasted the drink, preferring to trust the palate of the head waiter who had issued the challenge for a new cocktail on behalf of a customer. The drink was an instant success. Its creation would have been between 1899, when Solon began at the Waldorf, and 1905 when the drink first appeared in print. The name comes from the Bronx zoo, in honour of the various beasts and strange animals that the bartender saw there, and the even stranger beasts that customers claimed to have seen when under the influence. Johnnie Solon did not drink. The drink is a mixture of Gin, Orange juice, sweet and dry vermouth, all shaken and served straight up; or drunk frappe style over crushed ice in the summer.
