Adonis

An elegant low-proof aperitif combining fino sherry with sweet vermouth and orange bitters, a sophisticated sipper from Broadway's golden age.

The Adonis was created at the bar of the original Waldorf Hotel in New York City in the mid-1880s to honor a Broadway production that had become a cultural sensation. The musical Adonis, written by William Gill, opened at Hooley's Opera House in Chicago in the summer of 1884 and moved to New York's Bijou Theatre in September of that year, where it ran for 603 consecutive performances — making it the longest-running Broadway production of the 19th century. The show starred Henry E. Dixey in the title role and Fanny Ward as Cupid. Albert Stevens Crockett documented the cocktail's theatrical origins in his 1931 Old Waldorf Bar Days, and cocktail historian Difford's Guide places the drink's creation between late 1884 and 1887, most likely 1885 or 1886, after the show reached its milestone performance count. The earliest published recipe appears in Jacques Straub's 1913 Straub's Manual of Mixed Drinks, specifying sherry, sweet vermouth, and orange bitters. The Adonis combines two fortified wines — Spanish sherry and Italian sweet vermouth — with dashes of orange bitters, creating a low-ABV stirred cocktail that functions as both aperitif and digestif. Its revival in the contemporary cocktail era has been driven by the broader rediscovery of sherry as a cocktail ingredient, and it is now widely regarded as one of the foundational templates for the stirred, spirit-adjacent drinks category alongside the Bamboo and Tuxedo.