Red Snapper

Gin, tomato juice, and Worcestershire — Petiot's 1934 St. Regis version renamed by the Astors from Bloody Mary, gin used in place of scarce post-Prohibition vodka.

The Red Snapper is the gin-based original of what most of the world now knows as the Bloody Mary. The Bloody Mary's documented creator is Fernand Petiot, a French bartender who developed the combination of vodka and tomato juice at Harry's New York Bar in Paris around 1920 to 1921, when vodka was accessible to Paris's Russian émigré community. In 1934 Petiot was hired by the King Cole Bar at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, where he brought his tomato cocktail with him. American vodka supply was still extremely limited in the early 1930s following Prohibition's repeal, and Petiot adapted the recipe to work with gin — a spirit far more available in the United States at the time. The Astor family, who owned the St. Regis, objected to the name Bloody Mary as insufficiently dignified for their clientele and renamed the drink Red Snapper. Petiot also refined the seasoning considerably for the New York version, adding Worcestershire sauce, lemon, salt, black pepper, and cayenne — the spice framework that defines the drink in all its modern forms. The Red Snapper therefore represents the cocktail in its closest-to-original form: tomato juice mixed with gin rather than vodka, seasoned as Petiot developed it, bearing the name the drink first carried in its American incarnation before vodka's rise eventually reclaimed the Bloody Mary identity.