A few weeks ago, Daniel Zausner, the chief operating officer of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, received an important call from T.J. Murphy, the chief executive of Baldor Specialty Foods. “He says, kind of half joking around, ‘I’m out here in California, making sure the melon ball production is on schedule.’ ”
In the dog days of late summer, the National Tennis Center in Queens, N.Y., home of the U.S. Open, one of professional tennis’s four Grand Slam tournaments, becomes the city’s single greatest consumer of honeydew melons. Or rather grape-size honeydew melon balls, which garnish every one of the hundreds of thousands of Honey Deuce cocktails sold at the Open each year.
During the 2024 tournament, tennis fans guzzled 556,782 Honey Deuces — a sugary-tart mixture of lemonade, Grey Goose vodka and raspberry liqueur served in a plastic commemorative cup — to the tune of $12.8 million in sales, making it by many measures the most profitable cocktail in sports.
“It’s sold in carts, it’s sold on both levels of Armstrong, it’s at Grandstand, it’s sold on all levels of Arthur Ashe Stadium, it’s sold everywhere on the grounds,” said Mr. Zausner, who joined the National Tennis Center in 2001 and five years later led the push for the Open to introduce a signature cocktail. In 2018, the Open began offering a frozen version, and this year the drink will even be sold for three days at a pop-up bar in Grand Central Terminal.
Though the cocktail was preceded in both stature and fame by the Pimm’s Cup, the subtly floral concoction served since the 1970s at Wimbledon, Mr. Zausner drew inspiration for the Honey Deuce from a decidedly more American event: the Kentucky Derby, and its mint juleps.
“I saw women with these gorgeous wide-brim hats, four-inch stiletto heels, and they were walking around with a stack of, like, eight glasses,” he said. “Nothing was more important to them than those glasses, because it had the name of the winners of the horse races for the last 50 years.” Mr. Zausner figured he could replicate that success in New York.
Sure enough, many New Yorkers (and tennis fans) have at least a few Honey Deuce cups in their kitchen cabinets.
“I think at one point I had two dozen,” said Jordan Valinsky, a reporter at CNN Business who first attended the U.S. Open in 2013. “I think it’s the most affordable souvenir, even as the price goes up.”
And drinking a Honey Deuce, or at least being photographed drinking one, has become its own status symbol. “It’s definitely become a thing in New York,” said Ally Golden, a digital marketing manager who lives in Manhattan. “People want to post that they’re there, post their Honey Deuce on Instagram.”
The simplicity of the Honey Deuce belies the many months of work that go into producing the cocktail. For starters, the commemorative cups, printed with the names of every winner since 1968, must be ordered six months before a single player takes the court at Arthur Ashe Stadium. (In 2020, the tournament was played without fans because of Covid, and the United States Tennis Association found itself with hundreds of thousands of cups to give away.)
Then there are the melon balls: three nearly perfect spheres of honeydew melon on a skewer. For the last 16 years, the Open has worked with Baldor to buy the thousands of melons required from Turlock Fruit Company, a family-owned grower in California’s Central Valley.
“They leave the fruit on the vine the longest, so it gets pretty sweet while it’s out there,” said Jared Walton, the director of national accounts and sales operations at Baldor.
Each year, Mr. Walton also orders 800 melon ballers, which are sharpened on-site, for the small group of employees who will scoop melons each day starting at 6 a.m. at Baldor’s headquarters in the Bronx. (So far, no one has invented an industrial melon baller.) For the 2025 tournament, the team will scoop 2.3 million melon balls from 7,700 cases of King of the West honeydew melons, up from 1.9 million balls in 2024.
“All I know is that someone came up with the idea that honeydew balls look like a can of tennis balls,” Mr. Walton said. “And it sells like crazy out there.”
“Someone” is Nick Mautone, a hospitality veteran and former brand ambassador for Grey Goose, who was tasked with creating a signature cocktail for the Open that would outsell an unsuccessful earlier attempt. Mr. Mautone initially envisioned a complex drink featuring rosemary-citrus syrup, fresh lemon and blackberry brandy.
But he quickly realized that “if you slow down the bartenders, you slow down sales.”
The three-ingredient Honey Deuce, which could be mixed in under two minutes and originally sold for $12, was the result. The first year, 18,000 were sold at the Open, said Mr. Zausner of the National Tennis Center. “So, from 3,000 of our signature cocktail that no one would remember to 18,000 of the signature cocktail that everyone talks about all the time.”
Each year, Baldor prepares for a roughly 13 percent increase in Honey Deuce sales, much of that growth now driven by a 2022 decision to pre-mix the vodka and lemonade and push both through a tap. Today, it takes less than a minute to pour and serve a Honey Deuce, which now sells for $23.
“Do I think it’s a little bit expensive? Absolutely,” said Elsa Chin of Manhattan, who works in finance and began attending the U.S. Open as a teenager. “But I think the simplicity of the drink is delicious.”
A fervent tennis fan, Ms. Chin has been to all four of the Grand Slam tournaments, sipping Champagne-based Ace Royals at the French Open, Pimm’s Cups at Wimbledon and the Australian Open’s brand-new Lemon Ace, a cousin of the Honey Deuce that’s flavored with passion-fruit syrup and mint, and served in a can.
“From an experience standpoint, yeah, it was refreshing. It was a fine cocktail,” said Mr. Zausner, who attended the tournament in Melbourne this year. “But it’s not doing the same thing.”
Ms. Chin agreed: “I feel like no one has a beverage nearly as iconic as the Honey Deuce — but I think people are trying, which is fun.”
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Nikita Richardson is an editor in the Food section of The Times.
The post The U.S. Open Already Has a Winner: the Honey Deuce Cocktail appeared first on New York Times.
