New Orleans may or may not have invented the cocktail. It definitely invented the drinking it still practices.
Every American city has a cocktail story. Only two or three have a cocktail century. New Orleans's story runs continuously from the 1830s to today, through two world wars, Prohibition, three waves of migration, half a dozen storms, and a global craft revival that owes it a lot.
Here is the short version.
1830s — Peychaud's apothecary
Antoine Amédée Peychaud, a Creole apothecary of French-Caribbean descent, kept a shop on Royal Street. He mixed his family's bitters recipe with cognac and sugar in an egg-cup (coquetier, in French — one proposed etymology for the word cocktail, though linguists are not convinced). This drink became the Sazerac. It is still the official cocktail of the City of New Orleans, by municipal ordinance adopted in 2008.
Peychaud's bitters are still produced today, now by Sazerac Company, which also owns Buffalo Trace. If you've had a Sazerac in the last twenty years, you've probably had Peychaud's. It is the one Southern bitters you can find behind most American bars.
1888 — The Ramos Gin Fizz
Henry Ramos, a Louisiana-born saloonkeeper of German descent, opened the Imperial Cabinet Saloon in 1888 on Gravier Street. His signature was a shaken drink of gin, cream, egg white, lemon, lime, sugar, orange-flower water, and soda — the Ramos Gin Fizz. The drink's trick is a ten-to-fifteen-minute shake, which Ramos famously hired "shaker boys" to perform, up to thirty-five at a time at Carnival.
The Ramos is the drink that most clearly makes the case for New Orleans as a city of serious cocktail labour. No other 19th-century American saloon tolerated a cocktail that took quarter of an hour per order. Only in a town where a cocktail was treated as a performance did this exist.
1934 — The Vieux Carré, at the Hotel Monteleone
Walter Bergeron, head bartender at the Hotel Monteleone's Carousel Bar (which actually rotates, slowly, through the night), invented the Vieux Carré in 1934. Rye, cognac, sweet vermouth, Bénédictine, Peychaud's and Angostura. It is the definitional New Orleans drink: French and American, bitter and sweet, elegant and heavy, built for a long conversation.
The Carousel Bar is still open. You can order the Vieux Carré. The bar still turns.
"The Vieux Carré is the drink that doesn't apologise for itself. It's not refreshing. It's not a stepping-stone. It is where you arrive." — Dale DeGroff
Prohibition and after
Prohibition hit New Orleans hard but did not destroy its bar culture, in part because the city's political structure around alcohol enforcement was… imaginative. A larger damage came after Repeal, when fine-cocktail bars lost the status they had held in the Gilded Age. By the 1950s New Orleans was better known for Hurricane cocktails and tourist drinks than for Sazeracs.
This is the version of New Orleans drinking the rest of the country learned about through Pat O'Brien's and Bourbon Street. It is true, and it is not the whole picture. Through the whole mid-twentieth-century slump, kitchens at the Monteleone, Antoine's, Arnaud's, and Galatoire's kept the long canon alive.
1980s–90s — The slow revival
Chris McMillian, now a legend of American bartending, moved to New Orleans in 1983. He spent two decades at the Napoleon House and the Ritz-Carlton quietly restoring the mid-century drinks menu he'd read about in old bar books. Harry Craddock's Savoy Cocktail Book, Jerry Thomas's Bar-Tender's Guide. By the late 1990s he was the city's unofficial curator of pre-Prohibition cocktails.
In 2003 Ann Tuennerman founded Tales of the Cocktail, now the largest cocktail conference in the world, hosted in New Orleans every July. It became the single most important industry gathering in the global craft revival. New Orleans had quietly become the city where the industry went to learn its own history.
2005–present — The modern era
Post-Katrina, a new generation of bars opened — Cure (2009), Bellocq (2011), Compère Lapin's bar program (2015), Jewel of the South (2018). Each one was built explicitly as a bar-first room with cocktail-first intent. Chris Hannah, Nick Detrich, Abigail Gullo, Kirk Estopinal — a generation of bartenders made New Orleans the second city in the US where craft cocktails were simply the default, after San Francisco.
That is the room ShaSha is being built into. Not as a reaction to anything missing — the city is well-served — but as an addition. A membership-first room, mission-first, with a specifically Caribbean-and-Creole angle that returns, in some ways, to Peychaud's and Compère Lapin's own Caribbean roots.
What to drink, where
If you have a week in New Orleans, this is a Sazerac-to-Sazerac itinerary. We don't make a dollar if you take it; we just like a good week.
- Sazerac Bar at the Roosevelt — the drink's namesake, the room's gilt mirrors are worth the trip alone.
- Carousel Bar at the Monteleone — order the Vieux Carré, sit on the carousel for one full rotation.
- Napoleon House — Pimm's Cup, the city's forgotten fourth classic.
- Cure — the modern canon, impeccably mixed.
- Jewel of the South — Chris Hannah's room, Caribbean-leaning menu.
- Compère Lapin's bar — Nina's own cocktails, soft entry to the Caribbean-Creole dialect ShaSha will deepen.
- ShaSha — if we have your membership on file, you know where to find us.
