New York City is a cocktail kind of town, but dating back to steamboat days, New Orleans has always been its rival. Around 2007, when New York bartenders were endlessly riffing on the Manhattan and Brooklyn cocktails—producing variations like the Red Hook, the Greenpoint, and the Slope—New Orleans bartender Chris Hannah watched the phenomenon from afar and decided to bring NOLA into the game. Then working at Arnaud’s French 75 bar in the French Quarter, Hannah initially got novel, taking two homemade ingredient recipes from the July/August 2007 issue of Imbibe—for Falernum No. 9, and Seattle bartender Jamie Boudreau’s Amer Picon replica—and incorporating them into the mix. (Commercial brands like Velvet Falernum and Averna are now more commonly tapped for the cocktail.) To distinguish his drink from the New York variants typically based on rye whiskey, Hannah looked for something closer to his NOLA neighborhood—and kept that neighborhood in mind when it came to the name. “I used rum instead of rye because we’re the northernmost Caribbean city, and this has more of a New Orleans than a New York vibe,” he says. “And while I work in the French Quarter, most service industry people can’t afford to live in the Quarter—but the Bywater is about 90 percent service industry people. That’s the hip and cool place, and I named it the Bywater because of that. I was just bringing everything close to home.”