back in the MIX
Once a boozy joke, the Long Island Iced Tea is now getting a cool-kid makeover
a Tthe recently renovated and reopened Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Marks Place, there are craft cocktails on the menu and bottles of small-batch spirits behind the bar. But the watering hole’s drink of the moment is the ultimate déclassé cliché: the Long Island Iced Tea, sprayed straight from the soda gun.
“It tastes good,” says customer Claire Bertin-Lang, 32. But the Upper West Sider, who works in event planning, admits there’s a certain irony to enjoying the drink as an adult.
“I remember using my fake ID to drink Long Islands at bars on Macdougal Street,” she says. “Back then I drank [the cocktail] because it had bang for the buck.”
But what she’s sipping at Holiday is a far cry from the Long Island Iced Teas that hit it big in 1972, when “Rocket Man” topped the charts and bell-bottoms were all the rage. These days, the drink — traditionally, a hangover-in-a-glass made from shots of vodka, rum, tequila, gin and triple sec, plus sour mix and Coca-Cola — is enjoying a resurgence, dressed up with high-end liquor and unique twists while remaining unapologetically boozy.
At vegetarian haunt Dirt Candy, smoky mezcal stands in for tequila; David Chang’s Fuku+ re-creates the drink as the 163 Iced Tea Slushie, and mixology king Dale Degroff replaced the sour mix with simple syrup and fresh lemon juice for retro-themed bar Oleanders in Williamsburg.
“Made right, a Long Island Iced Tea is a fine cocktail,” says John Hen- derson, a local bartender who enjoys the beverage when he’s out and about. “But it tended to be sloppily poured from bottom-shelf bottles. That gave it a bad reputation.”
Danny Neff, bar manager at Holiday, retooled his iteration of the vilified cocktail by replacing Coke with Supreme Breakfast tea from nearby tea shop Physical Graffitea.
“I like the idea of showing that it’s not so bad if you do it correctly,” says Neff, who believes that the booze-blaster has been unfairly maligned. “I spent two or three solid days figuring out how to improve it. Still, though, I sometimes get people complaining that it’s not a real Long Island Iced Tea. I tell them that this is our version.”
No doubt the drink’s late inventor, Bob “Rosebud” Butt, would be flattered by the attention. Though there are various accounts of the cocktail’s origin — a bartender in the 1920s, a Betty Crocker cookbook from the 1960s — it’s widely accepted that Butt concocted the classic in the ’70s while competing in a drink-making contest at the long-gone Oak Beach Inn in Babylon, LI. As he recounted during a segment shot for “PBS Inventors” in 2013, “Five years [after the drink debuted], every place you went, they had Long Island Iced Tea.”
In the episode, Butt, who passed away in 2014, also told of a woman who told him, half-braggingly, that the drink was responsible for wrecking her car and ruining her life.
Driving under the influence aside, the current revival makes sense to those in the business. According to Shawn Wolfgang, bartender at Oleanders, “With craft cocktails having become more approachable, people are trying to find crowd-pleasers that have some nostalgia to them. We’re redoing blue drinks with umbrellas, so why not the Long Island Iced Tea?” Nevertheless, before the recent boom, while working at the Gramercy Park Hotel, Wolfgang “did ask twice for ID whenever someone ordered a Long Island Iced Tea.”
For all the derision that the cocktail gets — Phil Ward, owner of tequila mecca Mayahuel in the East Village and formerly the head bartender at Death & Company, has described it as “the stupidest drink in the world” — John deBary, bar director for the Momofuku empire, which includes Fuku+, has a soft spot for the Long Island Iced Tea.
“Back when I worked at Please Don’t Tell,” he remembers, “there was a debate as to whether the bar served Long Island Iced Teas as a matter of policy. [Owner] Jim Meehan’s final answer was, ‘The drink is good if you serve it right.’”
At Fuku+, deBary improves on the original by using top-shelf liquor, eighty-sixing sour mix and replacing Coca-Cola with Dr. Pepper. Sipped as a slushy, it actually pairs pretty well with the restaurant’s signature fried-chicken sandwiches.
But even with the weight of able mixologists behind it, can the Long Island Iced Tea ever overcome its reputation as being fit only for neo- phyte booze-hounds and sloppy sorority girls?
Back at the Holiday Cocktail Lounge, Bertin-Lang switches to a can of Genesee beer when it comes time to order a second round.
“Even a really great Long Island Iced Tea can only taste so good,” she says.