the boothby

1 oz Bulleit Bourbon
1 oz Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth
2 dash Angostura Bitters
1 oz Moet Imperial Champagne

Stir all ingredients with ice save for the Champagne. Strain into a flute glass, top with Champagne, and garnish with a Luxardo Maraschino Cherry.

After the Amaro session on Thursday at Tales of the Cocktail, we headed over to the Cabildo Museum for the Diageo Happy Hour. What took a little getting used to was that the event was held in the sister museum to last year's event. The previous year was at the Presbytere Museum which has practically the same layout as the Cabildo. People were asking where all of the rooms filled with fun old Mardi Gras memorabilia were. Instead, we were two doors down and downing drinks while viewing displays about leprosy and other dark moments of Louisiana history.

The theme this year was "Cocktails through the Decades," and spread out across the three floors were eleven areas representing the decades from 1900 to 2010. Each section had celebrity bartenders making both traditional and modern interpretations of that decade's drinks. Even the decades during Prohibition were well represented, and the more modern decades on the third floor toyed with today's trends such as molecular mixology and the like. Out of the forty drinks being served, I picked my top four from the ones I tasted to showcase here.

The first one was the Boothby presented by San Francisco bartenders Neyah White and Erik Castro. The caption read, "This cocktail was created in 1908 in honor of William Boothby, one of San Francisco's most famous bartenders." Neyah explained that Boothby was quite good at assessing his clientele to determine if they had extra coins that they should be parted from. One of the Boothby's add-ons was to prepare the drink requested and to top it off with Champagne. The imbiber rarely complained until they saw the extra surcharge on the bill for something they never requested in the first place.

The Boothby was essentially a Manhattan; however, the Champagne lightened up the darker flavors in the drink considerably. The brut sparkling wine cut into the sweetness of the vermouth and generated a much drier and crisper result. Overall, it reminded me of a less orange and easier to drink Seelbach Cocktail.