Bensonhurst

A Brooklyn neighborhood cocktail riffing on the Manhattan, featuring rye whiskey with dry vermouth, Cynar, and maraschino for a bittersweet Italian accent.

The Bensonhurst was created by Chad Solomon in 2006 while working at Milk & Honey, the influential speakeasy-style cocktail bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that helped anchor the American craft cocktail renaissance of the mid-2000s. Solomon devised the drink as an alternative to the classic Brooklyn cocktail, substituting Cynar — the Italian artichoke amaro first marketed in 1952 — for the increasingly hard-to-find original-formula Amer Picon. The Bensonhurst joins a series of Brooklyn-neighborhood cocktails from this era, including the Red Hook and the Greenpoint, all built on the Manhattan's structural bones of rye whiskey, vermouth, and a bitter or aromatic modifier. Bensonhurst is a neighborhood in southwest Brooklyn whose population has been predominantly Italian-American since large waves of Italian immigrants settled there from the early 20th century onward, informing Solomon's choice of the Italian amaro as the cocktail's defining modifier. The Cynar's herbal bitterness and the maraschino's cherry depth give the Bensonhurst a more complex, amaro-adjacent character than the standard Manhattan, while remaining within the stirred whiskey cocktail family.