The Old Man Returns

Celebrating Repeal Day on the Sly

December 5, 1933. A day that will live in honor, at least for bon vivants like you and me, dear reader. For that’s the day the 21st Amendment was ratified, bringing an end to the dry horror that was Prohibition. (Let’s pretend there weren’t speakeasies, bootleggers and thousands of homes ordering mail-order grape bricks that were accompanied by clear instructions about how to make sure they didn’t, god forbid, ferment.) The 14 years of an alcohol-free U.S.A. were a parched time I’m glad I didn’t have to suffer.

So that’s why there’s the ritual of Repeal Day. To respect a nation coming to its senses, it’s become a tradition for people to dude up their shirt fronts, make sure the old spats are spick-and-span and head to their favorite watering hole. And the best of those will be waiting, often with a menu honoring the evening, sure to nod to the past, as that’s necessary for anyone caring of cocktails. They are a way to drink our nation’s history.

Alas, we’ve lost one of the best Santa Barbara–area spots for that annual celebration, Sly’s. Annie and James Sly’s impeccable, festive Carpinteria restaurant long had the region’s best bar program, led by Mandy Huffaker Chinn and Chris Chinn, and no team took Repeal Day more seriously. From 2010 to 2015 the “mix mistresses and barmen” would develop an annual menu, and if you had it, you could order anything from it for the rest of the year. This secret handshake of a list offered you a world of ancestrals, fizzes, daisies, a barrel-aged Manhattan, a Queens, a Brooklyn, a Bronx (poor Staten Island only gets the beloved, bumbling vamps of What We Do in the Shadows.) And one year a Bloody Mary variation by Chef Sly himself, made with beet juice, called Vlad the Impaler. (Maybe that could be the Staten Island?)

For this Edible issue, I found myself drawn to the Old Man from 2013’s menu, billed, “The perfect libation for shouting at kids on your lawn.” Figured, “Heck, I’m an old man, and a three-ingredient cocktail is ever a classical delight.” It doesn’t hurt those three ingredients are rye, applejack and Green Chartreuse. The odd thing about the drink is that it didn’t Google, and generally each Sly’s creation had a connection to the past, if obscured in a boozy haze.

But then I found the Diamondback Cocktail. First written up in Ted Saucier’s Bottoms Up (1951), he insisted it was a recipe from the Lord Baltimore Hotel in Maryland. So note, while this drink is mighty potent—with the bonded whiskey and applejack and 110-proof Chartreuse providing the bite of a rattler—the Diamondback in question is the terrapin. Maybe all that confusion, or a mixologist with a serious case of ophidiophobia, led to the less-menacing name Old Man at Sly’s, I don’t know.

There’s no question it’s meant for someone well beyond their Shirley-Temple- or even Cosmopolitan-sipping days. The 100-proof rye (I’ve been enjoying the mighty yet mellow Uncle Nearest of late) gets doubled to be sure the cocktail lives in a neighborhood populated by the Manhattan, Boulevardier and Sazerac. Sipping it, you can practically feel patches grow on your elbows even if you aren’t wearing a tweed coat. But it’s not fusty, not with the 100-proof applejack (go with the classic, Laird’s) offering fruity, cidery notes. The bitters round things out, plus, how can a drink named Old Man not be bitter(ed)?

And then, the Green Chartreuse. Almost all the sins of religion can be pardoned thanks to the magic madness of monks figuring out how to meld 130 plants, barks, roots, spices and flowers to make what they bill as Liqueur de Santé. Sweet, perky, piney, bitter back notes, it brings a complex party to any glass. Note: Some Diamondback versions call for Yellow Chartreuse—Green’s less-potent little cousin—but the Old Man is a cocktail meant to celebrate the end of Prohibition. Nobody lit just a firecracker to say World War II was over.