PARCHED | NAME GAME

BY ROSIE SCHAAP

The names of the most venerable and beloved mixed drinks — the Old-Fashioned, the Manhattan, the martini — are so deeply familiar to bartenders and our patrons, and spoken so often, that we seldom give much thought to their origins. We puzzle more over certain drinks of more recent vintage, the ones that many of us associate with the 1970s and ’80s and are embarrassed to utter, and others find so hilarious they just can’t say them often enough. I’ve never had an intense yearning for a drink made up of vodka, peach schnapps, orange juice and cranberry juice, but — out of professional interest, of course — I’ve had to make, and try, a Sex on the Beach more than once. If that’s what a customer wants, that’s what he or she will get.

My mother was so amused by drinks with risqué names that she’d make a great production of ordering them — especially, I’m pretty sure, in my presence. And although the memory of the first time she visited me at a bar where I worked one summer and loudly called for a Slippery Nipple — in front of my boss, my co-workers, my regulars — still stings a little, I’ve long since lightened up about such things.

What I haven’t lightened up about is the difficult art of inventing names for cocktails. Nearly every time I think I’ve come up with something new and memorable, I peek in the indexes of my cocktail books or head to Google and discover that it’s already taken. I try to strike a balance: something dignified, but not too serious. Something distinctive, but not too off-puttingly weird. The Bitter Darling (a rye-based cocktail with clementine juice and a good lashing of bitters) and La Puesta del Sol (a Spanish-inflected aperitif) are two of my favorite coinages. Straightforward stuff.

But some braver creators of drink names seem instead to say: dignified, shmignified. Jill Dobias, of the restaurant Joe and Misses Doe in Manhattan’s East Village, is a madcap master of mixed drinks and their names. She has one named after a guy who made a reservation at the restaurant for a Saturday night and never showed up. She has a tribute to our commander in chief called the Hot Obama. She has a variation on a screwdriver whose name I really can’t go into here.

And then she has a drink called the Clam in a Can. It’s a delicious take on an oyster shooter that, to my palate, anyway, is also suggestive of a michelada — if the Maryland seashore was part of Mexico. I can’t explain exactly why the name cracks me up, but it does.

Maybe I’ve just got a thing for drinks named for animals. Recently, one of my best friends handed me a drink he’d created and dubbed Ojo del Komodo. I Anglicized it as Eye of the Komodo. In any case, name a drink after a lizard, and I may be instantly won over — but especially when it’s the answer to the riddle: What’s green and spicy and garnished with an eyeball?

Read it at NYT Mag

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