Mimosa Pitcher

Champagne and orange juice in a pitcher — Frank Meier's 1925 Ritz Paris creation and the bottomless brunch format that made it a major restaurant revenue stream.

The Mimosa Pitcher is the standard brunch-service format for the Mimosa — the champagne and orange juice cocktail created at the Ritz Hotel in Paris in 1925 — presenting the drink in a communal vessel from which guests serve themselves throughout the meal. Frank Meier, head bartender at the Ritz Paris, created the original equal-parts combination of champagne and freshly squeezed orange juice, naming it for the mimosa plant whose yellow-orange flowers the drink's color recalled. The pitcher format emerged naturally from the American restaurant brunch tradition, where the Mimosa became so standard through the 1980s and 1990s that restaurants developed the bottomless Mimosa format — a fixed price allowing unlimited Mimosas throughout a brunch service — as one of the most commercially successful hospitality innovations of the period. The pitcher preparation sacrifices the individual carbonation of a glass-by-glass champagne pour for the convenience of advance preparation: a large volume of sparkling wine mixed with orange juice loses some effervescence through the pitcher's surface area, but the trade-off in service convenience for large groups is commercially acceptable. Brunch bottomless Mimosa programs became a significant revenue stream for American restaurants from the 2000s onward.