Sidecar

Cognac, Cointreau, and fresh lemon — Paris, 1922, the structural template for the Margarita and White Lady that Wondrich called a model for a dozen great drinks.

The Sidecar was created in Paris around 1922 and appears simultaneously in two authoritative cocktail publications from that year — Robert Vermeire's Cocktails: How to Mix Them and Harry MacElhone's Harry's ABC of Mixing Cocktails — with competing claims placing its invention at Harry's New York Bar on Rue Daunou and at the Ritz Hotel Paris under head bartender Frank Meier. A third origin story attributes it to Buck's Club in London, though the Paris accounts are better documented. The formula — cognac, Cointreau, and fresh lemon juice in a sugar-rimmed coupe — is the Brandy Crusta reduced to its essential three-ingredient form, stripping away Joseph Santini's elaborate 1850s New Orleans presentation while preserving the structural relationship between brandy, orange liqueur, and citrus that made the Crusta historically significant. The Sidecar's influence on subsequent cocktail development is outsized relative to its simplicity: the White Lady substituted gin for cognac and became a 1920s standard; the Margarita substituted tequila and lime for cognac and lemon and became the most ordered cocktail in American bars. Both are structurally Sidecars. The IBA recognizes the Sidecar as a Contemporary Classic, and it appears on virtually every serious cocktail menu worldwide. David Wondrich, in his 2007 James Beard Award-winning book Imbibe!, called the Sidecar the model for a dozen other excellent drinks.