Last Word

Gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, and lime in equal parts — the Detroit Athletic Club (c. 1916), revived by Stenson at Seattle's Zig Zag Café around 2004.

The Last Word was created at the Detroit Athletic Club around 1916 and attributed to Frank Fogarty, a vaudeville performer who was a regular at the club. Detroit's Athletic Club, founded in 1887 as a private men's athletic and social organization on Madison Avenue in downtown Detroit, was one of the most prestigious private clubs in the Midwest during the city's industrial boom years, and its bar served the automotive industry executives, professionals, and performers who constituted Detroit's Gilded Age and early 20th-century elite. The drink's equal-parts formula — gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and fresh lime juice — is a masterwork of balance: four strong-flavored, assertive ingredients in identical proportions that find complete harmony because each component occupies a different flavor register. Green Chartreuse's 130-botanical herbal complexity, maraschino's cherry-almond floral character, lime's citric acid, and gin's juniper-botanical structure each contribute without any single element dominating. The Last Word faded after Prohibition disrupted the continuity of American cocktail culture and was largely forgotten through the mid-20th century. Its dramatic revival was catalyzed by Murray Stenson, a revered Seattle bartender who encountered the recipe in Ted Saucier's 1951 book Bottoms Up and added it to the menu of the Zig Zag Café in Seattle around 2004. From Seattle the drink spread globally, becoming one of the defining cocktails of the early 21st-century craft era.