It drinks like a Martini softened with fresh orange juice, the gin still out front but its edges rounded by a split of sweet and dry vermouth. Shaken hard and served up with an orange twist, it pours a hazy amber, bright and lightly bittersweet, more approachable than its gin-forward backbone suggests, with a faint citrus perfume rising from the peel.
Garnish: Orange Peel
Shaken · Cocktail glass · Up
add
Add the gin, sweet vermouth, dry vermouth, fresh orange juice, and orange bitters (if using) to a shaker.
shake
Fill with ice and shake well until thoroughly chilled.
strain
Double-strain into a chilled cocktail glass, served straight up.
garnish
Express an orange twist over the surface and drop it in.
Who mixed the first one is disputed. Historian Albert Stevens Crockett gave the credit to Johnnie Solan, a Waldorf-Astoria bartender said to have devised it around the turn of the century and named it after a trip to the Bronx Zoo, while an obituary for Joseph Sormani, a restaurateur from the Bronx, held that he had come upon the drink in Philadelphia in 1905. Both stories are complicated by an 1895 New York hotel menu that already offered a "Bronx Cocktail." The recipe went on to appear in Hugo Ensslin's Recipes for Mixed Drinks and Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book, and by 1934 it ranked third among the best-known cocktails in the world.