Recipe: Sparkling Cocktail
Spreading the Boothby Gospel; or, My Life as the Johnny Appleseed of Manhattan Royales.
Longtime readers of this newsletter know that the very first cocktail recipe published on The Mix was for the Boothby, my wife Mary Kate’s favorite cocktail, and certainly one of my top ten.
A Boothby is simply a Manhattan topped with Champagne—a Manhattan Royale, if you will. It was was created by William “Cocktail Bill” Boothby, the most celebrated bartender in San Francisco in the years on either side of the turn of the 20th century. He purportedly invented it while running the Pied Piper Bar inside the Palace Hotel sometime in the early 1900s. However, it didn’t appear in print until a 1934 edition of his book The World’s Drinks and How to Mix Them, which came out four years after his death.
Bill Boothby has an entry in my new book The Encyclopedia of Cocktails, which was released in October. So, whenever any venue hosting a book event asked me what drinks they should serve, I inevitably suggested the Boothby Cocktail. I half expected them to refuse, because the drink is not cheap to make. But nobody said no.