Tokyo Tea Punch

A vibrant green twist on the Long Island formula, replacing cola with melon liqueur. This Japanese-inspired variation delivers the same five-spirit punch with honeydew sweetness and eye-catching emerald color.

The Tokyo Tea is a variation of the Long Island Iced Tea that substitutes Midori melon liqueur for the cola topper, replacing the original's fake-tea appearance with a vivid green color that references nothing about actual Tokyo but everything about Midori's 1978 American debut. Suntory's launch of the honeydew-flavored liqueur at a Studio 54 party in New York that June — attended by John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Bianca Jagger — established Midori as the spirit most closely associated with novelty and visual impact in the bar culture of the late 1970s and 1980s. The Long Island Iced Tea formula itself was documented by Robert Rosebud Butt at the Oak Beach Inn in Hampton Bays, New York around 1972: five clear spirits stacked with lemon juice and a soda topper, the combination producing a drink whose color suggested iced tea and whose potency suggested otherwise. Replacing the cola with Midori and lemon-lime soda produces the Tokyo Tea — the green color coming from Midori, whose name is the Japanese word for green. Despite the Japanese reference in both the spirit and the name, the drink has no documented connection to Japanese bar culture; it is an entirely American creation that borrowed the vocabulary of Japanese aesthetics for commercial purposes. The punch format scales the same electric green, multi-spirit formula into a communal bowl, where the color is even more visually striking at party scale.