Bronx

Gin, dual vermouth, and fresh OJ — Solon's Waldorf-Astoria (c. 1906) named for the Bronx Zoo, one of America's three most ordered cocktails before Prohibition.

The Bronx Cocktail was created around 1906 by Johnnie Solon, a bartender at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, in response to a customer challenge to invent something new. Solon's combination of gin, dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, and fresh orange juice produced a drink of immediate commercial success: during its peak popularity in the years before Prohibition, the Bronx was reportedly among the three most ordered cocktails in the United States. The Waldorf-Astoria, which occupied a site on Fifth Avenue at 34th Street until it was demolished in 1929 to make way for the Empire State Building and then relocated to Park Avenue, was one of the most prestigious hotels in America and its bar a showcase for professional bartending at its finest. Solon named the cocktail for the Bronx Zoo — formally the New York Zoological Park, which opened to the public on November 8, 1899, in the Bronx borough — explaining that he named it after visiting the zoo and seeing exotic animals he had never encountered before, an experience of novelty that he associated with the new drink. The Bronx's use of fresh orange juice distinguished it from the spirit-and-vermouth cocktails that dominated the era, making it a transitional drink between the stirred cocktails of the 1890s and the citrus-forward shaken cocktails that would define the pre-Prohibition decade.