Cable Car

A San Francisco modern classic riffing on the Sidecar, featuring spiced rum with orange curaçao and fresh citrus, served with a cinnamon-sugar rim.

The Cable Car was created by Tony Abou-Ganim in 1996 while he was working at the Starlight Room, the rooftop cocktail lounge atop the Sir Francis Drake Hotel in San Francisco's Union Square. Abou-Ganim named it after the city's iconic cable cars — the manually operated funicular transit system that has run on San Francisco's steep hills since Andrew Smith Hallidie launched the first line on Clay Street in 1873 and that became a National Historic Landmark in 1964. The cocktail is structurally a Sidecar: the Sidecar's classic formula of base spirit, orange liqueur, and lemon juice in a sugared-rim glass was documented in cocktail books from the early 1920s onward. Abou-Ganim substituted Captain Morgan spiced rum for the Sidecar's cognac base and added an orange-spice cinnamon-sugar rim that amplified the rum's own baking spice character. The result was simultaneously familiar and distinct — the Sidecar's clean sour architecture given a warmer, more tropical character by the spirit swap. Abou-Ganim is widely credited as one of the key figures of the American craft cocktail renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s, and the Cable Car helped establish his reputation as both an original thinker and a technically skilled bartender. It remains one of the better-known modern riffs on the Sidecar and one of the small number of cocktails born in San Francisco that achieved national recognition.