Bronx Cocktail – Classic Waldorf Astoria Recipe

The History of the Bronx Cocktail.

The Bronx cocktail is named after the famous neighborhood in New York. There are three classic versions of this cocktail. The Oldest version is from William Boothby’s 1908 book “The World’s Drinks and how to mix them.” He credits a man named Billy Malloy of Pittsburg, PA, for inventing the Bronx Cocktail. The second is the Waldorf-Astoria’s recipe (this one), like Boothby’s recipe, just minus the orange juice. The Third is from Hugo Ensslin of the Hotel Wallick, and it is like the Boothby recipe but minus the orange bitters.

The original Boothby recipe is 1 oz each of gin, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, 1/2 oz of orange juice, and a couple of dashes of orange bitters, but if you look online today, most recipes are the Hugo Ensslin recipe. The Hugo Ensslin recipe turns the cocktail into a medium martini with orange juice, and the Waldorf-Astoria recipe is just a medium martini with a different name. I like this recipe a lot, though, and while all three recipes are good, this one may be more appealing to people who want more potent drinks and enjoy the taste of alcohol more.

The History Of The Original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

The original Waldorf Hotel was opened in 1893 by William Waldorf Astor of New York. Named after the town of Waldorf, Germany, the Astor Families’ ancestral home, the Waldorf was the apex of luxury New York hotels at its opening. A few years later, in 1897, as a bit of humorous rivalry, William’s cousin, John Jacob Astor IV, would open the Astoria Hotel right across the street. John built the Astoria in the same renaissance revival style and even commissioned the same architect, but made sure to make his hotel a little bit bigger than William’s Waldorf Hotel. Named after the town of Astoria, Oregon, The city founded by John Jacob Astor senior in 1811, the Astoria Hotel was an even more beautiful version of the Waldorf. Fun facts: Astoria, Oregon, is the oldest American settlement west of the Rocky Mountains and the location of the film Kindergartner Cop, starring the great Arnold Schwarzenegger. Also, John Jacob Astor IV helped develop early versions of the turbine engine, wrote sci-fi books, and was one of the most famous Americans to perish with the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

The rivalry was short-lived, though, and the two hotels joined together almost immediately, forming the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1897. Opened on the Waldorf side of the hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria bar was one of the top bars in New York, serving wealthy socialites. From 1897 to 1919, the Waldorf-Astoria bar stood as a testament to the pre-prohibition elite bar scene and helped solidify many of the American classics we know today. With the closing of the bar in 1919 and many of the New York elites moving further north, the hotel’s image became dated, and its current structure and location needed to change too. In 1929 the company sold its hotel on 5th and 34th to Empire State Inc. and began constructing the more modern Waldorf-Astoria on Park Avenue. The original hotel was demolished and replaced by the Empire State Building. Hoping to preserve the legacy of the original hotel’s bar, the company’s publicist, Albert Crockett, managed to collect and publish most of the bar’s classic cocktail recipes in part IV section A of “The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book.” He added popular present-day (1934) cocktails in Section B but maintained that section A of the book had all the original recipes from the hotel’s old days.

Recipe Resources

• 1935 The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book – Crockett