Algonquin

Rye, dry vermouth, and pineapple juice — named for the hotel where Dorothy Parker's Round Table met 1919–1929, the Algonquin itself having banned alcohol in 1917.

The Algonquin cocktail takes its name from the Algonquin Hotel, a landmark of New York City literary and intellectual life located at 59 West 44th Street in Midtown Manhattan. The hotel, which opened in 1902 under the management of Frank Case, became famous in the 1920s as the gathering place of the Algonquin Round Table — an informal daily lunch group that included Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and more than a dozen other writers, critics, actors, and editors whose witticisms were syndicated in newspapers nationwide. The Round Table met from approximately 1919 to 1929. There is a historically important caveat: Frank Case was a firm prohibitionist who voluntarily stopped serving alcohol at the Algonquin in 1917, three years before national Prohibition began. The Round Table members were thus meeting in a dry hotel throughout their entire decade of lunches, and cocktail historians including David Wondrich and Ted Haigh have noted that the group likely never consumed cocktails at those gatherings. The cocktail bearing the hotel's name first appeared in print in 1935 in G. Selmer Fougner's Along the Wine Trail, where it was called the New Algonquin and specified as rye, dry French vermouth, and pineapple juice in a 2:1:1 ratio — a combination that is unusual enough to stand apart from the Manhattan and Rob Roy traditions, the pineapple juice adding a tropical brightness to rye's grain spice.