The Perfect Cosmopolitan

It's funny how memory works, where some big details slide into the abyss while small details stick so well.

New York City, Summer 1997. I was at a dinner party at this incredibly wealthy fellow's townhouse in (of all places) Spanish Harlem... all the way at the end of East 118th Street. I was invited as a friend of a friend at the party: I don't even remember the friend, the friend's friend, or the host. (The friend was this Swedish girl who lived in my building; her friend (the friend of a friend) lived in an apartment down the street from the wealthy guy / host. I remember that part.)

After dinner, the entire party went down to this bar in the Village... West of 7th Avenue and North of Christopher Street — one of those places you normally don't get into without wearing $600 shoes — that was supposed to have the World's Best Cosmopolitans.

Well, they were. That's pretty much all I remember about that night.

I sat up tonight trying to get the right combination of ingredients to recreate that Cosmopolitan they served and on the 5th try, finally got it right. Here is a reasonable reproduction of the World's Best Cosmopolitan:

8 parts Citron vodka
4 parts triple sec
1 part Rose's lime juice
8 parts cranberry juice

Add cracked ice (the most important part) and shake. Pour in a cocktail glass. No garnish.

(I measure in "parts". A part can be whatever you want it to be... it's a relative system of measuring: twice as much Citron as triple sec; a quarter as much lime juice as triple sec; same amount of vodka as cranberry.)

The cracked ice is the important part because the broken ice should chip off and add just a bit of frozen water to the mixture and perhaps some small bits of ice in the final product.

There you have it. Or, you can go buy a plane ticket to New York, some Berlutis, and spend $12 a glass at this bar I visited, assuming you can find it and assuming it is still there after 14 years in the fickle Village. Your choice.