Warm and citrus-bright, it wraps the baking-spice sweetness of spiced rum in orange curaçao and tart lemon, drinking like a Sidecar with spiced rum where the brandy would be. Served cold and up in a coupe, it meets the lips through a crust of cinnamon-sugar, while a twist of orange peel lifts the aroma over the spice.
Garnish: Sugar Rim, Orange Peel
Shaken · Coupe · Up
rinse
Wet the rim of a chilled coupe and coat with cinnamon-sugar (roughly equal parts cinnamon and sugar).
add
Combine spiced rum, orange curaçao, lemon juice, and simple syrup in a shaker.
shake
Add ice and shake hard until well chilled.
strain
Fine-strain into the prepared cinnamon-sugar-rimmed coupe.
express
Express an orange twist over the surface and drop it in as garnish.
Tony Abou-Ganim devised the Cable Car in 1996 as the house signature of the Starlight Room, the bar perched at the top of San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel. Working from the Sidecar at the request of Captain Morgan, he put spiced rum in place of brandy and dusted the rim with cinnamon-sugar instead of plain sugar. The name nods to the Nob Hill cable cars clattering by beneath the bar's windows. The drink has since settled into the modern-classic canon, with some later versions adding egg white to the original build.