Thirsty Madonna helped revive Cosmopolitan
The bartender who retooled the drink and served it to the Material Girl will be in Toronto this week
ERIC VEILLETTE While the jury is still out on who invented the Cosmopolitan cocktail, any bartender will tell you the vodka and cranberry drink was popularized by Dale DeGroff, who revitalized the moribund cocktail scene in the 1980s.
According to DeGroff, the drink was created in test marketing by vodka-maker Absolut Citron. “Cheryl Cooke came up with the name and a not-so-great recipe,” he says over the phone from Long Island, N.Y. “I thought it had potential. I retooled it with Cointreau and fresh lime juice.”
But DeGroff won’t take all the credit. He owes some of it to Madonna.
In 1988, years before Carrie Bradshaw ordered her first Cosmo on Sex and The City, DeGroff was head bartender at Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room, where the Material Girl put the cocktail on the map at a Grammy Awards party.
“Sony threw a big party and took up both floors. We installed three private bars for Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan and Madonna,” he says. “Madonna’s crew were drinking our Cosmopolitan to the point where we were actually making gallons. We were mixing the vodka, cranberry juice, Cointreau, the fresh lime juice and couldn’t keep up.”
The next day, newspapers featured photos of the pop star holding the pink drink. “All the Associated Press photographers were my customers, so they very kindly mentioned the drink.”
Within 24 hours, DeGroff was giving interviews all over the world and sharing the recipe.
The drink’s silver jubilee — or at least DeGroff’s version of it — will be celebrated all week during the inaugural Toronto Cocktail Week, which begins Tuesday. DeGroff will attend, presenting seminars on his famous innovation, as well as a history of speakeasies and a bitters-making workshop.
Cocktail historian and columnist for The Grid Christine Sismondo is a judge in the Hogtown Shakedown bartenders’ competition during cocktail week. The Cosmo was the first cocktail to make its mark during the wine-heavy 1980s, she says.
“Sophisticated drinking was mostly wine-related when the Cosmo came out. I remember cocktails being kind of tacky before that.” Although not a fan of vodka or pink drinks, she says it was “at least urbane when it first came out.”
John Bunner, bar manager at Yours Truly on Ossington Ave., doesn’t feature the drink on his menu but often gets requests for it. With a preference for the Prohibition-era cocktails found in The Savoy Cocktail Book, Bunner, a semifinalist in competition, offers the Cosmo a classic twist. “If you use gin instead of vodka, and just a splash of cranberry juice, it’s basically an old-school drink.”
Despite rehabilitating the famous cocktail, Bunner has nothing but praise for DeGroff and his books The Essential Cocktail and The Craft of the Cocktail: “I’ve lost count of the times I’ve studied his videos.”
DeGroff learned his trade from the late Joe Baum, the New York restaurateur who developed the Four Seasons Restaurant for the Bronfman family in1959, when a classic cocktail
“Sophisticated drinking was mostly wine-related when the Cosmo came out.” CHRISTINE SISMONDO COCKTAIL HISTORIAN AND WRITER
like a Sazerac was a rare sight.
“Prohibition had really put the kibosh on the cocktail,” says DeGroff. “They were inventing lots of sour mixes and easy things that guaranteed consistency. The Four Seasons changed everything.” In 1984, Baum hired DeGroff to design the bar menu at the Rainbow Room. “He asked for a return to pre-Prohibition cocktails, using real recipes, real ingredients. He didn’t want any short cuts.”
Bunner sees no short cuts in Toronto’s mixology scene, where many new bars offer their own bitters, house-made syrups and products not available at the LCBO, all used to make the classics, but also their own creations.
But will any new creations become as famous as DeGroff’s Cosmo?
The Penicillin and the Paper Plane are modern classics, notes Bunner, but Sismondo jokes that an Old Fashioned — which dates to the 1800s — is the new Cosmopolitan, which, because of Sex and The City, “evokes this image of freedom of a woman going out in a bar and playing make believe . . . The Old Fashioned gets ordered the same way as the Cosmo because you can make believe you’re an old tough ad guy from the ’60s.”