Lantern Fly

A funky, spicy equal-parts cocktail featuring Jamaican rum and Mexican amaro balanced with fresh ginger and citrus.

The Lantern Fly was created by bartender Jojo Colona at Attaboy — the celebrated New York City craft cocktail bar on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, opened by Sasha Petraske and Sam Ross in 2011 following Milk & Honey's transition from its original Eldridge Street location. Attaboy operates without a posted menu, serving drinks based on guests' stated preferences in a format that demands improvisation and broad technical knowledge from its bartenders. The Lantern Fly belongs to a family of equal-parts drinks Attaboy bartenders developed on the structure of spirit, citrus, ginger, and bitter liqueur — a template that produces drinks of reliable balance across different spirit bases. The drink uses Jamaican pot-still rum as its spirit base, pairing the rum's characteristic funky, ester-rich aromatics with Amargo-Vallet, a Mexican botanical bitters liqueur produced in Xalapa, Veracruz by the Almendron company, whose flavor profile — gentian, aromatic herbs, and bitter citrus — provides a different but complementary bitter element to Angostura. The Lantern Fly's name references the spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula), an invasive planthopper native to China that spread across the eastern United States from 2014 onward, becoming a subject of widespread media attention in the Northeast where Attaboy operates.