Vieux Carré

Rye, cognac, vermouth, Bénédictine, and two bitters — Bergeron's c. 1938 Hotel Monteleone creation named for the French Quarter (Vieux Carré = old square, 1718).

The Vieux Carré was created around 1938 by Walter Bergeron, head bartender at the Hotel Monteleone on Royal Street in the French Quarter of New Orleans — one of the oldest and most celebrated hotels in the city, which had been in continuous operation since it was founded by Sicilian immigrant Antonio Monteleone in 1886. Named for the French Quarter itself — Vieux Carré means old square in French, a reference to the original seven-square grid of the French colonial city founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville in 1718 — the cocktail is a specifically New Orleanian synthesis of the French, Italian, and American elements that define the city's cocktail culture. The formula combines rye whiskey, cognac, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, Peychaud's Bitters, and Angostura Bitters in equal parts, a six-ingredient preparation whose complexity is characteristic of New Orleans' tradition of elaborate, multi-component stirred cocktails. Bénédictine, produced at the Benedictine Abbey of Fécamp in Normandy since 1863, contributes its 27-botanical herbal warmth, while Peychaud's — the distinctly New Orleanian bitters whose floral, anise-adjacent character has defined the city's classic cocktails since the 1830s — and Angostura together provide two different bitterness registers. The Hotel Monteleone's Carousel Bar, installed in 1949 as a slowly revolving circular bar seating twenty customers, became one of the most photographed bars in American history and a landmark of New Orleans drinking culture.