The Naked and Famous is one of the great modern cocktails – a perfectly balanced mezcal sour born in a New York bar
Naked and Famous Bar holds a 4.5 from eighty-five people – a strong score on a fair sample – and its name comes from one of the great modern cocktails: the Naked and Famous, a perfectly balanced mezcal sour that has become a genuine contemporary classic in the short time since its creation.
The modern classic
The Naked and Famous is a cocktail created in 2011 by a bartender named Joaquin Simo at the celebrated New York cocktail bar Death and Co – one of the temples of the craft cocktail renaissance. It is made of equal parts mezcal, yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, and fresh lime juice – a beautifully balanced combination of the smoky, the herbal, the bitter and the sour.
It belongs to a family of “equal parts” cocktails descended from the Last Word (gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino, lime) and the Paper Plane (bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, lemon) – modern classics built on the elegant principle of equal measures of contrasting ingredients, balancing perfectly against one another. The Naked and Famous takes this template and gives it a smoky, mezcal-driven twist, and the result is one of the most admired cocktails of the modern era.
The craft cocktail renaissance
The Naked and Famous is a product of one of the most important developments in modern drinking: the craft cocktail renaissance of the twenty-first century. After decades in which cocktails had declined into sweet, artificial, poorly-made drinks, a movement arose – beginning in bars like New York’s Death and Co and Milk and Honey – to rediscover and reinvent the art of the cocktail.
This renaissance brought back forgotten classics, revived proper technique, insisted on fresh ingredients and quality spirits, and created a wave of brilliant new cocktails that now stand alongside the old classics. The Naked and Famous is one of the great successes of this movement – a genuinely new cocktail, created in the modern era, that has earned a permanent place in the canon. It proves that the age of the classic cocktail is not over: new classics are still being created, and the Naked and Famous is one of them.
The evocative name
The name itself is wonderful – “Naked and Famous” is bold, memorable, slightly provocative, and completely distinctive. It reportedly derives from a combination of influences including a band of that name and the general spirit of the drink. As a name for both a cocktail and a bar, it is striking and confident – it promises something bold, exposed, celebrated. For a cocktail bar to take its name from a modern classic cocktail is a neat piece of self-definition: it announces, immediately, an allegiance to the craft cocktail movement and its finest creations.
The bar
A well-regarded cocktail bar doing a strong 4.5 across a fair sample, named after one of the great modern classic cocktails – the smoky, balanced, mezcal-driven Naked and Famous, a triumph of the craft cocktail renaissance.
Verdict
Strongly rated and cleverly named after a genuine modern classic – the Naked and Famous, proof that great new cocktails are still being created.
Order a Naked and Famous, of course – equal parts mezcal, Chartreuse, Aperol and lime – and taste one of the finest cocktails the modern age has produced.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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