Black Manhattan

Rye whiskey and Averna — Todd Smith at Bourbon & Branch (2006), Averna produced in Sicily since 1868 from a Benedictine monks' recipe given to Salvatore Averna.

The Black Manhattan was created by Todd Smith at Bourbon & Branch, the San Francisco craft cocktail bar that opened in 2006 at 501 Jones Street in the Tenderloin neighborhood, as the bar was establishing its meticulous approach to pre-Prohibition cocktail revival. The drink replaces the standard sweet vermouth of the Manhattan entirely with Averna, the Sicilian amaro produced in Caltanissetta, Sicily since 1868, when Salvatore Averna — a Sicilian cloth manufacturer given a recipe by the Benedictine monks of the Abbey of Santo Spirito — began commercial production. Averna's flavor profile is distinctly different from vermouth: where sweet vermouth provides herbal sweetness and wine-derived complexity, Averna contributes a richer, darker combination of caramel, cola, citrus peel, and warm herbs with a notably more bitter finish. In the Black Manhattan framework, this bitterness completely transforms the drink's character — it is darker, more complex, and significantly more bitter than a standard Manhattan, the rye whiskey's spice engaging with the amaro's herbal intensity rather than the vermouth's gentler wine-and-herb combination. The drink exemplifies the amaro boom's impact on American craft cocktail culture, where the growing availability of Italian and American amari gave bartenders a new palette of bitter, herbal modifiers to use in spirit-forward stirred cocktails.