The “honey deuce” is an odd cocktail to be the default drink of the U.S. Open. Odd, because it is missing any ingredient distinctively American.
Consider the quaffs of other national racket tournaments: At Wimbledon, the drink of choice is Pimm’s, a summer refresher as British as bubble and squeak. For the major played on the red clay of Roland-Garros, the beverage partner is Perrier, a product as French as Lacoste, the Citroën deux chevaux, and the shrug.
But what of the honey deuce? What is a drink made of French vodka, Grey Goose, and a French blackberry liqueur, Chambord, doing as the drink of an American tournament? It isn’t a frivolous question. A couple of years ago, the Australian Open became the object of derision and ridicule for agreeing to a scandalous deal that made a Chinese bottled water the signature H2O of the event.
What would make for a drink more fitting for Flushing Meadows? Hmm, that doesn’t really sound right, does it? Let’s try again. There is a vintage cocktail called the “tennis girl.” If you had ordered one in the 1940s, you may well have gotten a drink of scotch, dry vermouth, and lime juice. Awful. A 1937 version of the tennis girl called for equal parts gin, rum, and apricot liqueur with a couple of dashes of pineapple juice. Not great, not disgusting, but not distinctively American either.
Go back some 50 years and you will find various “racket club” cocktails, which at least put us in the right idiom and draw on American tradition, whatever the ingredients. Most of the drinks labeled racket club were martinis with orange bitters. But there was also a Racket Club No. 2 (1/4 orange juice, 1/4 sweet vermouth, and 1/2 gin) and the Racket Club Fizz (2 ounces rum, 1 ounces fresh lemon juice, 2 tsp fine sugar, 1 fresh whole egg, and half a slice of pineapple. Toss it all into a blender with crushed ice, and make a slushy out of it. Pour into a tall glass, and give it a shot of seltzer water. Not bad, but frankly, not worth the effort).
Perhaps we could find something appropriate with a New York theme. Many are the cocktails with Big Apple overtones, and some of those are among the essentials. There’s the Manhattan, of course, and the Brooklyn and the Bronx (not to mention the silver Bronx, the golden Bronx, the pineapple Bronx, the Bronx River, and the Bronx terrace). There’s a Knickerbocker, a New Yorker, and a New York cocktail.
An abundance of cocktail riches, one might think, but it’s a mixed bag. The Manhattan is sublime. The New York cocktail, by contrast, combines rye whiskey, grenadine, and lime juice. Less vile is a New Yorker cocktail that joins gin, dry vermouth, dry sherry, and a splash of Cointreau.
So maybe it’s not such a bad idea to head to Flushing Meadows and have a honey deuce. Or better yet, just watch the matches from one’s own living room and mix up one’s own honey deuces. Start with a tall glass full of large ice cubes. Add 2 ounces of vodka, 4 ounces of fresh-squeezed lemonade, and 1/2 ounce Chambord blackberry liqueur. Stir and enjoy.
If you want to indulge in the whole shtick, prepare the garnish ahead of time: Scoop melon balls and put them in the freezer. Later, when the drinks are mixed, skewer three frozen melon balls on a long cocktail pick and plunge them in. The melon balls are meant to look like tennis balls. If you think the decoration is too cute by half, feel free to forgo it.
Also, feel free to use any competently made vodka. The best palate in the world couldn’t tell the difference between Grey Goose and Stoli, Ketel One, Svedka, or even Smirnoff in a glass of lemonade and Chambord.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
