While the green chartreuse provides the Bijou-which translates to "jewel" in French-with a boldness that is the drink's defining characteristic, the original specs were "too sweet and a bit overpowering," says DeGroff.
#Bijou cocktail recipe manual
While updating his bar menu at New York City's Rainbow Room in the 1980s, legendary bartender Dale DeGroff stumbled upon a recipe for the Bijou in Harry Johnson's Bartenders' Manual (1900). But while its famous contemporaries, the Manhattan and the martini, continued to thrive post Prohibition, the Bijou-perhaps because it was never updated to reflect evolving tastes-faded into obscurity with only weathered cocktail-recipe books serving as proof it ever existed. The Bijou had a decades-long run of popularity. It even used the layout of the bar as the basis for its design. "These proved to be the keystone that capped the structure of the classic mixologist's craft."įun Fact: Broadway's original Bijou Theater opened in 1880 on the site of what had been a bar run by perhaps the era's most well-known bartender, Jerry Thomas. "Beginning in the early 1880s, American bartenders, seeking to cater to a more sophisticated, cosmopolitan clientele, turned to vermouth and other European aperitifs, digestifs, and cordials to broaden the range of colors on their palettes," says David Wondrich, cocktail author, historian, and longtime Esquire contributor. The original 19 th-Century recipe for the Bijou-which calls for equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and green chartreuse (a sweet, herbal, and pungent liquor with a high alcohol content that has been produced for centuries by French monks), a dash of orange bitters, a twist of a lemon peel over the glass before discarding it, and a cherry-embodied a new direction for cocktails. Which is a shame-the drink has a bright sweetness up front that soon gives way to a velvety mouthfeel and wonderfully complex bold herbal and bitter notes on the back end.
Some have taken hold and are now as common on bar menus across the country as the gin-and-tonic. In the cocktail renaissance of the last decade, many classics have been exhumed, polished, and updated for modern palates.
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