Shoomaker’s, the home of the Rickey, in 1917. Image via shorpy.com.
Find a highball glass. Take a lime, cut it in half. Squeeze a half into the glass, then drop in the shell. Add a dose of dry gin or rye whiskey, then top with soda water and stir.
You’ve just made a “Rickey”—circa-1880-style—the drink that last year became by ordinance of the city government D.C.’s native cocktail.
“We’re one of two cities that has named an official cocktail,” says Garrett Peck, a local historian who was instrumental in the process. “New Orleans is the other. Do you know what drink is theirs?”
The Hurricane, obviously.
“No, it was actually the Sazerac,” says Peck, “since the Hurricane was actually created in Wisconsin.”
It was behind the bar of a saloon called Shoomaker’s on what is now Pennsylvania Avenue that the Rickey was created some 130 years ago. Called “Rum Row,” the stretch of the city that was home to Shoomaker’s is believed to be the highest concentration of bars that this country has ever seen.
“It was called ‘the walk of magnificent distances,’ because you could walk all the way home going from drink to drink to drink,” says Derek Brown, co-owner of a D.C. duo of craft cocktail bars, the Passenger and Columbia Room. “Shoomaker’s, though, was the star.”
