The Last Word Cocktail

The Last Word is the great resurrection story of modern bartending. It originated at the Detroit Athletic Club during the Prohibition era, generally dated to around 1916, and is associated with the vaudeville performer Frank Fogarty, who is credited with carrying it to New York where it enjoyed a brief vogue. Then it disappeared for the better part of fifty years, surviving only as a printed recipe in Ted Saucier's 1951 cocktail book, Bottoms Up.

Its revival is one of the few cocktail origin stories with a precise, verifiable modern chapter. In the early 2000s the Seattle bartender Murray Stenson found the recipe in Saucier's book and put it on the menu at the Zig Zag Cafe. It spread from there through the bartending community with remarkable speed, first across the American West Coast and then internationally, and within a few years it had gone from a forgotten curiosity to a fixture on cocktail lists worldwide.

The reason is the formula. Equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime juice sounds like it should be a disaster: Chartreuse is a fiercely herbal, high-proof monastic liqueur made from a secret blend of well over a hundred botanicals, and maraschino has a distinctive nutty, almost funky cherry-pit character that overwhelms most drinks. Together with lime, they somehow lock into balance, each one preventing the others from taking over.

That equal-parts structure turned out to be a template as much as a recipe, and it generated a whole family of modern classics. The Final Ward swaps gin for rye and lime for lemon. The Paper Plane replaces the whole cast with bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino and lemon. The Naked and Famous uses mezcal, Chartreuse, Aperol and lime. All of them are children of the drink Murray Stenson pulled off a dusty page.