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 while working at the Pegu Club, the craft cocktail bar at 77 West Houston Street in New York City that Audrey Saunders opened in 2005 and that became one of the most influential bars of the American cocktail renaissance. Saunders, who had trained under Dale DeGroff at the Rainbow Room, built the Pegu Club into a laboratory for original drinks and rigorous technique, and the bar produced a roster of original cocktails — many named for New York City neighborhoods — that entered the wider cocktail canon. The Bensonhurst joins the Red Hook, created by Vincenzo Marianella in Los Angeles, the Greenpoint by Michael McIlroy, and others in a series of Brooklyn-neighborhood cocktails 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; the neighborhood's character appropriately informed Solomon's choice to include Cynar — the Italian artichoke amaro produced by the Campari Group and first marketed in Italy in 1952 — as the cocktail's defining modifier alongside rye, dry vermouth, and maraschino liqueur. 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.