The Least Manhattan-y Manhattan I’ve Ever Had

Aquavit? Scotch? Orange liqueur? A grapefruit peel and a big piece of ice? Yep. And yet somehow, it's a Manhattan.

For the last several weeks, we’ve looked at Manhattan riffs that tinker with the construction of the drink — adding an element or making an obvious substitution. But all the drinks we’ve looked at so far have been recognizably Manhattan-esque — stirred and boozy combos of whiskey and vermouth and another element or elements to add bitterness and complexity, served “up” in a classy glass. They weren’t precisely Manhattans, but they were all, pretty obviously, close cousins of the more famous drink. 

This week’s drink isn’t obviously a Manhattan. It has none of the ingredients of a traditional Manhattan. It has no dasher-bottle bitters at all. Instead of being served up in a coupe, it’s served over a large rock of ice in a rocks glass, like an Old Fashioned. It’s garnished with a wide strip of grapefruit peel. If someone served it to you without telling you what’s in it, you’d probably think: Well, this is obviously some sort of highly unusual Old Fashioned riff. 

But it’s not. No, this week’s drink is a Manhattan riff down to its bones — and maybe only in its bones.

To be clear, it doesn’t taste like a traditional Manhattan, and it’s not an attempt to replicate the feel or sensibility of a Manhattan. 

But it’s a Manhattan in structure, with two parts base spirit and one part boozy sweetener, and a subtle bitter element cleverly hidden in the mix. It’s an object lesson in the value of understanding how cocktail structures repeat and repeat and repeat, even in drinks that don’t obviously seem to be built on old ideas.

It’s weird and surprising and delicious and relatively easy to make, with just four off-the-shelf-ingredients, plus the garnish. And if you don’t have the ingredients to make this week’s cocktail on hand, we’ll look at some ways you can take the underlying idea and apply them to make your own riff using what you already have at home. 

He Was Too Romantic About Manhattan, As He Was About Everything Else

At this point, you are probably quite familiar with the structure of a classic Manhattan: 

• two parts whiskey as the base

• one part sweet vermouth as the primary modifier

• a couple dashes of aromatic bitters to give bitterness and complexity

• all stirred over ice then strained and served in a coupe, usually with a brandied cherry or three for garnish. 

But for this week’s drink, I want to redescribe and reframe this formula in a manner designed to make it even more flexible and easy to adapt to a wide variety of different ingredients.