The Fitzgerald owes its existence to a regular guest at the Rainbow Room, though that customer’s name has never been recorded. The bartender who created the drink for him, however, is well known: Dale DeGroff, one of the key figures behind the modern cocktail renaissance.
The Story of the Fitzgerald
To talk about Dale DeGroff and the Rainbow Room means turning the clock back to 1987. In New York City, inside Rockefeller Center, the restaurateur and impresario Joe Baum was overseeing the renovation of the Rainbow Room nightclub.
When the venue reopened that same year, it quickly became one of the central stages of the cocktail renaissance—the movement that restored seriousness to the profession of bartending and revived attention to ingredients, proportions and preparation. Those principles had largely faded during the decades following Prohibition.
The Customer Who Made the Difference
The exact moment when Dale DeGroff created the Fitzgerald remains unclear. The story likely unfolds sometime during the 1990s, perhaps early in the decade.
In The New Craft of the Cocktail (2020), DeGroff recounts that one evening a guest arrived at the Rainbow Room. The man usually ordered a Gin & Tonic, but that night he wanted something different: a summer drink built around gin.
DeGroff began with the structure of a Gin Sour. He removed the egg white, increased the amount of sugar syrup, added a few dashes of Angostura bitters and served the drink in an Old Fashioned glass.
When the time came to name it, he improvised. The cocktail was introduced as Gin Thing—a name that, by DeGroff’s own admission, left room for improvement.
From Gin Thing to Fitzgerald
According to the story, it was the customer who proposed the new name. At the time, the Hemingway Daiquiri was widely popular, and it was well known that the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald favored the Gin Rickey, another gin-based drink.
Putting those elements together, the guest suggested replacing Gin Thing with the more refined Fitzgerald. The elegance and simplicity of the cocktail seemed to match the name, and the new identity stuck.
Thanks, Internet!
In The New Craft of the Cocktail (2020), DeGroff adds a final anecdote: “The drink showed up on menus around the world thanks to the Internet. We all have a love-hate relationship with the Internet—this one belongs on the positive side of the ledger.”
The Fitzgerald Cocktail Recipe
The recipe below appears in The Craft of the Cocktail (2002), the original edition of DeGroff’s book that he republished in 2020 as The New Craft of the Cocktail, adding the brief anecdote about the drink’s origin.
Ingredients
• 45 ml gin
• 30 ml sugar syrup
• 22.5 ml fresh lemon juice
• 2 dashes Angostura bitters
Method
Add all ingredients to a shaker filled with cubed ice. Shake well, then strain into an Old Fashioned glass.
Garnish
A slice of lemon.
Photo by Emanuel Florentin, location Bob The Other Side – all rights reserved
