N°04 · The Island in a Glass
Manhattan
Rye sharpened by vermouth, rounded by bitters, crowned with a cherry. The first great cocktail of the vermouth age.
- Spirit
- Rye whiskey
- Glass
- Nick & Nora or coupe
- Method
- Stirred
- Est.
- c. 1870s · New York City
Where it comes from — as far as anyone can prove
The best story is false, which is how you know the drink matters. Legend holds that the Manhattan was invented at the Manhattan Club in 1874, at a banquet hosted by Lady Randolph Churchill — Winston’s American mother — for governor-elect Samuel Tilden. It is a perfect anecdote, spoiled only by the fact that on the night in question she was at Blenheim Palace, days from giving birth to Winston.
The likelier truth is humbler. William F. Mulhall, a bartender at the Hoffman House through the 1880s, wrote that the Manhattan was invented by “a man named Black” who kept a saloon on Broadway just below Houston Street in the 1860s. Whoever poured first, the innovation was the same: Italian vermouth — newly flooding into New York — married to American rye, with bitters officiating.
“Invented by a man named Black, who kept a place ten doors below Houston Street.”
— William F. Mulhall, Hoffman House bartender, recalling the 1860s
That marriage changed everything. The Manhattan is the drink that taught America to mix spirit with fortified wine, the template from which the martini, the Rob Roy and a hundred others descend. It survived Prohibition in teacups, crossed into Hollywood — mixed in a hot-water bottle on a sleeper train in Some Like It Hot — and settled into Wisconsin, where the brandy Manhattan remains a regional religion.
Things worth knowing by the second round
- 01
A “Perfect Manhattan” isn’t praise — it means the vermouth is split half sweet, half dry. Order one on purpose sometime.
- 02
Swap the rye for Scotch and it’s a Rob Roy; for brandy, a Harvard; keep the formula and rename the borough — Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens all have their own.
- 03
The cherry revival is recent. For decades the drink wore fluorescent maraschinos; the dark Luxardo marasca returned with the craft renaissance.
- 04
Vermouth was the exotic new import of the 1870s — the Manhattan was, in its day, cutting-edge fusion cuisine.
Famous company
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Marilyn Monroe’s Sugar mixes Manhattans in a hot-water bottle in a Pullman berth — cinema’s greatest cocktail scene.
The Manhattan Club
Happily claimed the invention for a century, Churchill myth and all.
Wisconsin supper clubs
The brandy Manhattan is ordered there by the tray, ideally before a Friday fish fry.
Sinatra-era New York
The after-office drink of mid-century Manhattan, from the Oak Room to P.J. Clarke’s.