Episode 113: Best-Of—Toby Cecchini and the Cosmopolitan

Photo: Edwin Munch

December 23, 2024

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Paul Clarke

Hey everybody. Paul Clarke here from Imbibe magazine. We’re taking a few days off for the holidays to spend time with our friends and family. We hope you’re doing the same, and that wherever you are, you’re having a safe and festive holiday season. We’ll be back with new episodes of Radio Imbibe in the new year, starting January 7. But in the meantime, we wanted to share this encore presentation of one of our favorite episodes from 2023, a conversation with Toby Cecchini about the creation and the enduring life of his original cocktail, the Cosmopolitan.

Before we get into that conversation, we have a quick note from an advertising partner. Fa la la la la into the season with our sponsor, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. From festive libations to cozy cocktails, it’s the most wonderful time of the year to toast with your favorite holiday spirit. Distilled & Bottled by Fifth Generation, Inc., Austin, Texas. 40 percent alcohol-by-volume. Distilled from corn. Copyright 2025. Crafted to be savored responsibly.

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Paul Clarke

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Radio Imbibe from Imbibe magazine. I’m Paul Clarke, Imbibe’s editor in chief. And from time to time over the course of the past three years, we’ve reached out to bartenders for a deep dive into a particular cocktail. The background, the fundamentals, the best practices, the variations all drawn from their own years of experience and mixing this drink. In the past, we’ve covered classic cocktails like the Mai Tai, the Negroni, and the Vodka Martini. And we’ve also talked about more modern classics like The Chartreuse Swizzle from Marco Dionysus on a previous episode.

For this episode, we’re stepping back into the latter category with a cocktail that pre-dates the modern cocktail renaissance, but that, in its own way, helped define the trajectory of the way the cocktail world has gone over the past 35 years. Toby Cecchini is a bar owner in Brooklyn with his fantastic spot, The Long Island Bar. Prior to that, he was the owner of Passerby in Manhattan and a regular writer for The New York Times and their spirits and cocktails coverage. And way prior to that, back in the late 1980s, he was a bartender at the Odeon in Manhattan, where one day he came up with the cocktail that soon went supernova in popularity, the Cosmopolitan.

The Cosmo has had its ups and downs and back ups over the years with bars and its media prominence and its reputation. And regardless of what your own considerations of the cocktail are, it’s indisputably a modern classic. So today we’re chatting with Toby Cecchini to get the full back story in the Cosmopolitan, how he’s witnessed its twists and turns over the years and how he goes about making them today.

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Paul Clarke

Toby, welcome to Radio Imbibe.

Toby Cecchini

Happy to be here. Thank you for having me on.

Paul Clarke

Happy we could have you on the podcast. And regular readers of Imbibe of course are familiar with you from your Brooklyn establishment Long Island Bar, which you’ve operated for a decade now. Right.

Toby Cecchini

Now, it’s been ten years, actually, this month or this past month. Yeah.

Paul Clarke

Okay. Fantastic. cocktail people who have been around for any length of time also know that your name will forever be linked with one of the most popular and ubiquitous cocktails of the past 50 years, the Cosmopolitan. I know that you’ve already documented your relationship with Cosmopolitan many times, including in your book Cosmopolitan, appropriately, but that was from 2004, and it’s a great story. So I wanted to have you on so we could kind of revisit it. But also we like to do these deep dives into individual cocktails with our audiences so they can kind of look at this cocktail from every angle, know the back story and know the best practices for moving forward. Billions of Cosmopolitans have been served now, and for a long time you seemed more or less content to just let the drink be out there in circulation, doing its thing. And you weren’t particularly engaged in making sure the people had the accurate origin story for it. What changed that?

Toby Cecchini

Yeah, I think I should have one of those signs now. Right. Billions and billions served. The Cosmopolitan. Yeah, when I invented the Cosmopolitan, it was 1988, and bartending was very different. And people’s attitudes toward bartending, mine included, were also very different. It wasn’t seen as a sort of legitimate occupation. It was seen as something you were doing sort of treading water and wasting time in between, getting on with more serious things in your life like acting and, you know, pre-law and whatever else you might be contemplating doing to actually grow up and become an adult. And so in the sort of course of that, I came upon this really terrible drink that had been introduced to me by a woman I was tending bar with at the Odeon at the time, and she had learned it from friends of hers in San Francisco who said that they had found out about it because it was making the rounds of leather bars in San Francisco at the time and had been for a few years.

It was called the Cosmopolitan, and it was made of real vodka with Rose’s, sort of lime cordial and Rose’s grenadine, those three things with a twist of lemon in it up in a what was then known as a martini glass, or that V-shaped cocktail glass that always represented martinis in that era. So I looked at this and said, Well, that’s kind of cute, isn’t it? And then I tasted it and I said, It’s absolutely repulsive. And later that night I thought, Well, I can do that better. And we were constantly making cocktails for the staff, basically for the waitresses that we worked with and us. We would all sit around and and drink at night, as everybody still always does. And so I just thought, why don’t I take my hand on that drink? That would be kind of interesting.

And so we were at the time making our Margaritas with fresh lime juice, sort of unusually in that era. And Cointreau. And that was at the behest of Keith McNally. He was like, We’re going to make real drinks with real ingredients. We’re going to do this correctly. And this is at a time when most of my great is where things that you sprayed out of a gun, you had a Margarita mix that came out of a gun, and it was this sort of saccharine thing that came out. And that’s what a Margarita was. Our insistence on doing it with fresh lime juice and Cointreau meant that I had those things on hand and I was, you know, very well sort of trained and sort of acclimated to making drinks with those.

So we had had some access for some months to Absolut’s second sort of iteration of flavored vodka. Its first was the pepper that had come out the year before. And sometime earlier in 1988, they released Citron. And, you know, it sounds sort of risible at at this juncture, but, you know, we had never heard of anything like that. The ’90s were all about infused vodkas infusing vodkas with all kinds of gin drinks. But at this point, we were our minds were absolutely blown. We were like, no way, dude, the flavor is inside the vodka. It’s like in it, you know, we were just like, This is madness. And we had been messing around with this this like, strange vodka for months trying to figure out something to do with it. We were making martinis out of it. We were making this and that. We were like, Huh? Like, we were super excited about it. We were like, It’s not really that good, is it? It’s not like, great. We couldn’t figure out what to do with it. We kept kind of bumping up against this wall and being like, That’s not excellent. You know, like, I don’t really enjoy a martini because it’s sort of sweet and it’s kind of weird. It doesn’t really work.

So we kept sort of messing with it, trying to do drinks with it. So I remember thinking, Oh, this might be a good application for that stuff, that stuff that we keep sort of like knock our head against and not really being able to do anything with and then thinking, Well, what, what do I do? So this is kind of a sour so what do I do with it? I’m going to start with Absolut Citron then, and then maybe I just give it sort of the same treatment that we do with our Margarita. So fresh lime juice and Cointreau. That seems like a good start. That’s a pretty basic sour. And we know the specs and we know sort of the the template, you know two, two, one two, one. But now how do I make it? I don’t want to use Rose’s Grenadine because that’s disgusting. Like that’s that’s what makes that you know that’s part of what makes that drink disgusting. So I need something to make it red. And we had ocean spray cranberry juice, cocktail lay around from making Cape Codders, naturally. So I just grabbed that and sort of chugged a bit in there and thought, okay, we’ll try that. It literally was the work of 5 minutes, you know.

And I was 25 years old and a fledgling bartender. I’d been a bartender for I don’t know, less than a year at that point. It really wasn’t rocket science. But I made it and I shook it up and I, you know, handed it out to a couple of the servers I worked with, and they were like, Oh my God, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. Amazing. And I was like, Oh, great, Well, there’s a slam dunk and didn’t think much about it. And they were like, We want that drink after work. And so that became our sort of go to drink after work.

When I say our, I still emphasize that I don’t think I’ve ever in my life had an entire Cosmopolitan. It was a thing that I made for the waitresses and they loved it and loved it and loved it and drank oceans of them for months. That was like our private house drink. And then there was this very strange sort of exodus where then sort of regulars of ours started, started asking for that drink. And I was like, Wait a minute, how do you know about the Cosmopolitan? They would say, Oh, we’ll taste told me about it. It Oh, that makes sense. Okay. And then even, you know, one step stranger, when actual strangers came up and started asking for it, I’m like, Wait, who are you? How do you know about our drink? And they’re like, Oh, well, Donald Sultan, you know, told me that he gets them from me. Oh, I see. Huh?

And so exponentially weirder and weirder when I actually saw the first one made outside the Odeon, just up the street at El Teddy’s. When I saw the bartender there making a Cosmopolitan for somebody that looked completely wrong. Looks exactly like the Cosmo that you frequently see that are sort of like dark red and completely transparent and like, this is obviously not a Cosmo, but, you know, they heard it and I was like, wait, how do you know that drink? And and the bartender said, Oh, they’re doing them down at the was like, Yes, yes, you’re right. You know, explosion throughout downtown New York where suddenly this drink was like the thing.

Paul Clarke

So what kind of time frame are we looking at here from the time that you were making it for the servers at the Odeon until you saw this kind of cross-pollination and it escaped, if you will, out into the cocktail gene pool.

Toby Cecchini

Like very, very, very, very fast and then very slowly and then very fast again. I mean, what happened was it became a huge thing in downtown, you know, like the Odeon was this complete mecca for stars and just everybody but everything. I mean, over the course of four and a half years or whatever I work there, I saw every famous person on the planet. I mean, it was just everybody but everybody. And I made Cosmos, three times a week for Madonna and Sandra Bernhard because they were super regulars at lunch. And they would, you know, I’d sort of turn them on to this drink and they were they would just demand that I make them this this pink drink of mine. And, you know, so that kind of things begat this huge sort of craze for a year or two years where, you know, then every bartender in downtown New York City was just chained to a boot blacking machine that was turning out, you know, 250 Cosmopolitans per night. And it just became like this monster that ate us alive and I became very much persona non grata, as you know, as the like sort of slyly.

Now, an inventor of said cocktail, like when I met other bartenders, people would be saying, you know, things like, Oh, you asshole, you’re the guy, you’re that guy. And I would be like, on and on. Not even, you know, it just wasn’t the thing that I wanted to be known for. We were like, Yes, I have a friend who works at the Odeon who told me you invented that cocktail, so for a long time I was like, I don’t really want to be that guy. And then as things happened in New York, you know, after a year or two years, it died down. It died its natural death because it was a trend and it was a fad. And New Yorkers move on to other things.

And so by three years on, if you got, you know, an order for a Cosmo, you’d be like, oh, of other. And that was so 1990. Wow, it’s 1993 and we should know better. But sure, I’ll make you that drink. You know, it just was a thing that, like, it was huge and then it just died.

And then fast forward to 1998 when suddenly there was this just blitz of Cosmopolitans coming across the bar. And I was like, What in the hell is going on? Like, I didn’t know what was going on. And somebody was like, Oh, you don’t know. There’s this show where like, these chicks are constantly drinking Cosmopolitans now and like, everybody’s into it. And that was Sex and the City, which I’ve still never seen a single episode of. But I certainly understood what what then happened. So and that took something that had literally been dead for five years and thrust it into the mainstream and made it literally known internationally. I mean, I think if it weren’t for Sex and the City, nobody would know what the Cosmopolitan is except outside of, you know, people who lived in downtown New York City in from 88 to 92, say.

Paul Clarke

Right. And when that resurgence started again in the late ’90s, you know, like you said, it, it kind of spread. It had kind of become everywhere. Everybody, everything at the time. But also, I mean, you know, you mentioned Madonna that you were serving really you mentioned Sex and the City. But another name that comes along is Dale DeGroff. You know, they always at the Rainbow Room. And this was this was something that was being served there as well.

Toby Cecchini

Yeah, I mean, there is this sort of weird I mean, this just pulls up a lot of different things, like Dale his name got mentioned in conjunction with the Cosmopolitan. You know, I don’t really know how all of this came about. I remember Cointreau once putting out an ad that said Dale DeGroff invented the Cosmopolitan for Madonna at the Rainbow Room. And I was like, wait, what? They’re putting this in print, you know? But Dale has said to me, you know, like, I don’t know, people credit me with making the Cosmopolitan. I don’t know where that came from. I, you know, I tried to dissuade them, but, you know, have immense respect for Dale and we’re friends. And, you know, that is what it is there.

There have subsequently been, you know, like a dozen people have been like, oh, thank you for like sort of popularizing the drink that I in fact, invented in Augusta, Georgia, in whatever year or that I invented it. Like, there’s people from I L.A., people from all over the country who maintain that they invented the Cosmopolitan. So this particularly became a pointed thing after, say, the turn of the century after 2000, when the cocktail renaissance came into being, and suddenly there was this laser focus on drinks and their origins and bartenders as sort of rock stars. And like, we need to find out who really invented the Cosmopolitan.

And I remember Gary Regan jumping to that and saying, Well, there was this drink before you took your hand to it. So there was somebody who really invented the Cosmopolitan me for you. And I’m like, Yeah, no, not really. Gary because there was some horrible drink that would have just died really on the vine. And I completely remade it and yet kept the name. And so, you know, when I did the Cosmopolitan, I did.

Paul Clarke

Right. And natural evolutions always happened. You know, the Manhattans that you’re serving today are not the original Manhattans. The martinis. We served that they are not their original martinis.

Toby Cecchini

Right.

Paul Clarke

Things. Things happen. Things change. Things are improved. And become that identity for that cocktail.

Toby Cecchini

Yeah, certainly. Yeah. you know, I didn’t want to get into like propriety things over like there was a name. There was that. There was also a drink called the Cosmopolitan in the ’30s that used gin and what is it, raspberry syrup or something? And I’m just like, you know, sort of like a Clover Club and like and people were like, See, you didn’t invent anything. That’s not really my drink, though, isn’t it? Does share a name, but I’m sure there’s lots of drinks that share a name. The Metropolitan, for example. There are several different examples of drinks that are called the Metropolitan, and that means nothing. Like if you invent a drink and it has a certain spec, then that’s your drink.

Yeah. I mean, there was a point at which it went from me denying being the inventor of the Cosmopolitan to all these sort of like charlatans coming out of the woodwork and saying, Oh, this is my drink, where finally I had to be like, Listen, this may have been the albatross around my neck for much of my adult life, but it is it leaves my albatross like, you didn’t invent the drink, I did. So I had to sort of own up to it and and have ever thus, you know, put out my story on it.

Paul Clarke

And as you mentioned, you know, we got into the cocktail renaissance 21st century, but at that time, vodka, you know, that was a that was persona non grata.

Toby Cecchini

Yeah.

Paul Clarke

You know, in the Cosmo, it became kind of almost like a symbol to cocktail nerds of the kinds of things to get away from. What was that like from your perspective?

Toby Cecchini

Funny. I mean, it was funny because after I closed my bar Passerby, I’ve always made sure that I have the things on hand to make a Cosmopolitan, even when it was like sort of deeply out of vogue. I’m like, Well, I’m just going to keep some citron on hand and some Cointreau because, you know, like people, every once in a while people know who I am and they’re like, Hey, you’re the dude. Can I have a Cosmo? Made by your hand? I’m like, Yeah, there are those savvy people who still know, and you know, I don’t want to I don’t want to say to them, Oh, I can’t make you that because vodka is naff or because, like, I don’t carry cranberry juice because we’re like a high end cocktail bar now. Like that just seems churlish and stupid. Like it’s a drink that I invented that had, like, a huge history, so I should always be able to make it.

And that was never a problem until I close Passerby and was sort of like, I’m just doing freelance writing and this and that. But I decided to like clock under the staff at Death & Company at their request. They’re like, Hey, we’d love to have you as like sort of an emeritus, like, I mean, craze crazy with our young staff and you know, we can learn from you, blah, blah, blah. And of me, more learning from them than anything. But it was early on when Death and Company was really a murderer’s row of now sort of celebrity bartenders. It was Brian Miller and Joaquin Simo and Thomas Waugh and Alex Day and Phil Ward and like all of these people who have gone on to found their own bars and it was just a spectacular place to be. And when I walked in, they were like, We have neither vodka nor cranberry juice. So you can’t you can’t make a Cosmopolitan if people ask you. And I was like, Well, look, here’s my stipulation. I will learn all 96 of your proprietary cocktails on your cockamamie list and in return, you’re going to have the things on hand that I can make a Cosmopolitan with because people are still going to ask me for that.

And, you know, I remember Dave Kaplan being like, okay, that seems reasonable. And so, you know, they got in what I needed and sort of put it aside. Yeah, vodka is like it’s it’s really inane to have an entire category of spirit and you’re like, No, we’re too cool for that. Like, we pray at the altar of rum and rye and this and that. But vodka is disgusting. Like gin is amazing. Vodka’s disgusting. I mean, that just doesn’t make any sense on top of everything else. So fortunately, some of those more dogmatic, rigorous rules have been relaxed, I think, throughout the in the whole canon. You know.

Paul Clarke

Right. Right. And, you know, more recently, we’ve seen people kind of come back and re-embrace the Cosmo as, you know, everything that goes where it comes back again. And I think, you know, looking at it through the lens of do it right, you know, if you do it right, it’s fine. And stop making too much of a thing about what it is and what it isn’t. So has has it been worthwhile? Is what has been pleasing to you in some way to see it re-embrace to some degree by the cocktail cognoscenti?

Toby Cecchini

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s very cute and it’s and it’s gratifying. I think that that like, I’m now so old. I’m 60, by the way, and the Cosmo is now so old that there are actual generations of people for whom this is a nostalgic thing. It’s like, oh, it reminds of being really young in the ’90s and like in the ’90s aren’t that far away. 080 yeah, like 30 years ago. Oops. And so there, you know, it’s like, it’s like this wave of nostalgia for this thing that people remember. And for better or worse, it, it so happens that the Cosmopolitan is really like maybe the only cocktail to come out of the ’80s that really has been entrenched in the entire lexicon of classic cocktails.

Now, as something bartenders know worldwide, the way you’re going to know a bramble and you’re going to know a Naked and Famous and you’re going to know Penicillin. And you’re going to have these drinks that are not only historic things, but that are new classics and, you know, the Cosmo is seriously seeded there worldwide, whether you like it or not. You can be like, oh, that drinks horrible. It’s this like pink abomination. It’s too sweet as to that.

But I think that in typically that means A, you’re churlish and B, you’ve never had one made properly because the Cosmo in the spec that I created it is actually many people think way too dry and way too sour. And I’m perfectly amenable to people making it sweeter if that’s their palate. But the way I made it in the spec I made it in, it’s a pretty reasonable adult, you know, sour. It’s very silly. It’s very pink, it’s very flirty. It’s all those things, but it’s not is cloying.

Paul Clarke

Right. And so for those who feel inspired to break out a Cosmo today, what what is your approach to making them these days? And are there any best practices you’ve developed or you’ve learned over time?

Toby Cecchini

Yeah, I mean, different people make them different ways, but I mean the spec is I’ve always made it and always prepared it and so few people get this right is I mean the ratio has always been 2:1:1:1 and it’s super simple. I mean, back in the day when those V-shaped martini glasses actually held something like 60 ounces of booze, it was literally all in ounces. I mean, this was a five-ounce drink and shaken with, whatever, 26% dilution, it’s probably a six-ounce cocktail. You can wedge that into a coupe still. But I think in sort of modern-day version terms, it’s a little easier to take on as one and a half, three quarters, three quarters, three quarters. So but again, it’s just the ratio is two, one, one one. So that was two parts of citrus vodka to one part each of Cointreau, fresh lime juice strained and ocean spray cranberry juice cocktail and then shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail coupe of some type and garnished with a twist of lemon. So it was lime juice and lemon twist. As I first encountered the cocktail and I sort of kept it that way.

Some people—Jim Meehan does this, for example, Dale DeGroff does it—prefer an orange twist. And I don’t have any big problem with that. There is Cointreau, which is an orange based liquor, so there’s certainly orange in there. And you can accentuate that sort of orange citrus oil from that. I’ve always made it with a with a lemon twist because I sort of just like the play of that bright lemon and particularly in terms of coloration off the pink of the drink, I will always make it with a lemon twist. But some people use it in orange twist and that’s fine. Dale, of course, famously flames his orange twists and does did that for the Cosmopolitan as well. I also see some people like Joaquin Simo says that he always knocks it with a little dash of simple syrup because he finds my spec too dry. And I think I think that Jim Meehan does that also, if I recall correctly; I could be wrong, but I get it.

When people do that, like my palate veers towards the very austere and dry. I actually don’t eat sugar. So when I develop cocktails, my palate may be way too searing and shrill and dry for most people. And and I appreciate that That’s funny. Like I frequently have made this drink for I made it for one older woman who once said, you know, she queried me. She’s like, Can you make a Cosmopolitan? And I said, I believe I can, you know? And she’s like, I mean, can you make it? Well, I don’t want it made poorly. I was like, well, you know, all these things going through my mind, like, well, if I make it for you, it is de facto the correct drink. But, you know, instead I just said, yes, I believe I can, you know. And I made her the drink and she was like, Oh, this is all wrong. This is way too tart. And I was like, you know, it is by definition not all wrong. However, if you like it sweeter, I’m perfectly happy to do that for you.

You know, like it’s like everyone has their own palate and their own everyone’s taste is subjective. So if you find that spec to be too tart, you’re not alone. It is too dry and too tired. And some people like a little more heft in their drinks. I understand that fully. And so, like all cocktails, like all cocktails, a recipe is always just a suggestion. And I think that there should be a very even balancing of fresh lime juice to whatever sweetener that you’re using in here. And that’s my absolute thing.

When I see Cosmopolitans coming out looking like Negronis, I’m, you know, that’s why I’m like, you did something that really wrong there. That should not be a clear see through drink. And whatever you’ve made is not a Cosmopolitan. But if you want a little more sweetener in there because you just can’t stand that it’s this tart and this shrill and you think it needs a little more heft in the middle. I’m not going to argue that with you. You may be absolutely right for your palate, and you should do that. Like every recipe, I always say this, every spec is but a suggestion. You have to find your sort of mean there.

Paul Clarke

As we move toward the exit here, are there any final thoughts on the Cosmopolitan that you’d like to share?

Toby Cecchini

It’s living like this. It just keeps getting legs. I keep, you know, after Sex and the City die down, I’m like, well, we’re finally done with that. And now over the last like two years, post-Covid, I mean, Ina Garten doing her huge Cosmo on her podcast or website or whatever it was, you know, like, there are things that just keep goosing it.

Now, I just sort of like people keep sending you like Taylor Swift is endorsing Cosmo. I’m like, Yeah, well, it just it’s the drink that refuses to die. I mean, it’s a cute pink drink. It’s a sour. It’s in the sour family. It’s not as terrible a drink as some people would purvey. And it’s also it it is this drink with like, this innate sense of fun and like, you don’t have to take it so terribly seriously. I’m very tickled by all of this. I think it’s all very kind of sweet and and I wish I had a penny for every Cosmopolitan that’s ever been sold. But alas, you you can’t patent a cocktail. As it turns out.

Paul Clarke

Right, right. Well, Toby, thanks so much for taking the time. It is always good chatting with you. And I look forward to seeing you again very soon. Hopefully.

Toby Cecchini

Yeah. More than more than happy to do so. And thanks for having me on, Paul.

Paul Clarke

You can find Toby on Instagram at Toby Cecchini and Long Island Bar on Instagram at Long Island Bar. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes to get you there. And that’s it for this episode. Thanks again to our sponsor for this episode, Tito’s Handmade Vodka. Subscribe to Radio Imbibe on your favorite podcast app to keep up with all our future episodes. You can find plenty more articles, recipes and our full back catalogue of podcast episodes on our website at Imbibemagazine.com. We’ve got your social media needs covered on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and threads. And if you’re not already a subscriber to the print and or digital issues of Imbibe, then here’s your opportunity to change that. Just follow the link in this episode’s notes and we’ll be happy to help you out. I’m Paul Clarke. This is Radio Imbibe. Catch you next time.