Casino

Old Tom gin, maraschino, and lemon — from the 1930 Savoy Cocktail Book, the Victorian sweetened gin base producing a rounder, more delicate cocktail.

The Casino Cocktail is built on Old Tom gin — the sweetened, mellow gin style that dominated the British and American gin market before London Dry's rise to global dominance — and represents one of the clearest examples of how a spirit style shapes a cocktail's entire character. Old Tom gin, which takes its name from a carved wooden cat (a Tom cat) mounted outside gin shops in 18th-century London through which customers could insert coins and receive a measure of gin through a pipe, was the standard gin of the Victorian era and the base for the original Tom Collins and the early Martinez formulas. Its slight sweetness — produced either by adding sugar to the distillate or by distilling to a sweeter botanical profile — produces a gin whose relationship with maraschino liqueur, orange bitters, and lemon juice in the Casino is fundamentally different from a London Dry base: rounder, less assertive, more fruit-forward. The Casino appears in Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) with a name evoking the casino culture of Monte Carlo and the French Riviera — the playground of European and American wealth through the Belle Époque and Jazz Age. Old Tom gin nearly disappeared from commercial production through the mid-20th century, surviving primarily in a few British examples, before the craft spirits revival of the 2000s and 2010s brought multiple new Old Tom expressions to market and made the Casino reproducible in its intended form.