When I say that bartender Nicholas Jarrett is a legend, I don’t mean that he simply makes great drinks. He does, but there’s something mythic about the guy. He’s as gracefully comfortable rattling off obscure drink recipes in the snazziest of cocktail haunts as he is handing out life advice in the dankest of dives, and the guy seems capable of superhuman endurance. When I worked with him in 2010 he’d been commuting via the (now defunct) Fung Wah bus back and forth between Brooklyn and Philadelphia for shifts every week. That was when I first heard about the Prizefighter.
The smash is one of those drinks families that were repopularized in the aughts and early teens but have since mostly fallen to the wayside. The 19th-century-style mixed drink is usually executed today as a sour (often with rum or whiskey) with muddled lemon and mint, in this one supplemented with fresh juice. Jarrett’s drink starts with this model but veers off the tracks by splitting the drink’s base between sweet vermouth and the old bartender handshake, Fernet-Branca. The bracing Italian bitter has been used in a lot of drinks since the cocktail revival of the early 2000s but few as pleasantly as the Prizefighter. Rarer still is the use of sweet vermouth in a sour; here Jarrett perfectly pairs the vanilla bomb Carpano Antica with the spicy menthol of Fernet. —Al Sotack
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Recipe information
Total Time
5 minutes
Yield
Makes 1
Ingredients
Preparation
Muddle 6 mint leaves and 3 lemon wedges in a cocktail shaker with ¾ oz. simple syrup (1:1), pushing firmly enough to express juice but not destroy the mint. Add 1 oz. Fernet-Branca, 1 oz. sweet vermouth, ¼ oz. fresh lemon juice, and a pinch kosher salt. Fill with ice and shake until exterior is chilled, 10–15 seconds. Double-strain, using a cocktail strainer and a fine-mesh strainer, into a rocks glass filled with crushed ice. Garnish with a mint sprig.
Recipe notes
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