Few cities do spooky like New Orleans. Mix Anne Rice’s vampires, aboveground burials and a tradition of jazz funerals and you get a city undaunted by death. Mix gin, vermouth and absinthe and you get a martini-like cocktail that is equally bold — the Obituary.
Dating back at least 85 years, the Obituary has slipped in and out of fashion without ever staying dead. But with martinis experiencing a renaissance of their own, its time seems to have come — again.
Recipe: Obituary
“Martinis are so popular across the country right now,” said Neal Bodenheimer, the owner of the James Beard award-winning cocktail bar Cure. “But, at the same time, our locals and tourists gravitate to things that feel uniquely New Orleanian.”
And that dash of anise-forward absinthe “is definitely New Orleanian.”
“The absinthe creates a flavor profile cocktail lovers expect from many of our city’s drinks,” Mr. Bodenheimer added, “just like the absinthe in a Sazerac or the Peychaud’s bitters in a Vieux Carré.”
But the Obituary’s greatest appeal may be its name.
That’s what drew Sue Strachan, the author of “The Obituary Cocktail,” (LSU Press, 2025) to the drink as a potential subject. “My first question was what could possibly be in a drink named after a death notice?” Ms. Strachan said. “It must be strong!”
Her book covers the story of the cocktail, likely invented in the French Quarter at the bar Café Lafitte, named for an infamous 19th-century pirate and opened by a trio of bons vivants in 1933, the same year Prohibition was repealed.
In the 1942 travel guide “The Bachelor in New Orleans” by Robert Kinney, the Obituary is mentioned as one of two signature drinks at Café Lafitte. Later that decade, in 1948, a columnist for the now-defunct New Orleans Item-Tribune noted that Tom Caplinger, the bar’s owner, had invented the Obituary and offered up these instructions: “add a drop of absinthe to a Manhattan or a Martini and it becomes an Obituary.”
The bar attracted a bohemian crowd, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, the sculptor Enrique Alférez and the restaurateur Ella Brennan. “It was a gathering place for the late-night artsy crowd,” Ms. Brennan told the Times-Picayune in 2007. “The most attractive people in the world talking about the most interesting things.”
The bar is widely believed to be America’s oldest continuously open gay bar, though it moved one block in 1953 to its current home, Café Lafitte’s in Exile, where the Obituary is still on the menu. Such a worldly and connected clientele, Ms. Strachan believes, could explain how the owners were able to procure absinthe for its Obituary, even though the wormwood spirit remained illegal in the United States until 2007.
By the 1970s and ’80s, the Obituary, like many classic cocktails, had lost popularity among a generation who rebelled against the drinks of their parents, preferring sweeter concoctions like the Long Island Iced Tea and Slippery Nipple. Ultimately, it was the Obituary’s name that, once again, saved it from obscurity.
In 1999, the author Kerri Nicole McCaffrey published a collection of photographic essays about the city’s bars entitled “Obituary Cocktail: The Great Saloons of New Orleans.” Dorian Bennett, a local real estate agent, received the book as a gift that same year and suggested to his friends that they visit each of the featured bars.
“On Fridays they would check off another bar in the book, and even have people at the bar sign it like a yearbook,” said Arlene Karcher, a retired art consultant. She is now the unofficial leader of the group, which has taken the name the Grande and Secret Order of Obituary Cocktail.
Once members of the original group finished visiting each of the bars in Ms. McCaffrey’s book, they shifted their attention to other drinking establishments in the city: Twenty-six years later between 30 and 100 members still gather at a new drinking hole in New Orleans every Friday.
“It’s funny, I think most members don’t even realize our club’s name has anything to do with an actual cocktail,” Ms. Karcher said. “They just know it’s the name of a book, and that our club name sounds mysterious and dangerous — fun because I think our average age is 60-something.”
Although participants in the Grande and Secret Order might not be totally committed to the Obituary, it is regaining its foothold. James O’Donnell, the bar manager at Fives Bar in the French Quarter, said an increasing number of cocktail lovers and bar professionals are rediscovering the drink, which he calls a “gateway absinthe drink.”
Mr. O’Donnell balances his own recipe with a weighty gin and a full-bodied vermouth to produce a cocktail that’s both boozy and complex. Though, all that still comes secondary to the name.
The name is “why many of our customers first order it, and why the drink has staying power,” Mr. O’Donnell said. Well, that “and the idea that if you have two or three of these cocktails, someone will be writing your obituary before the night is over.”
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
The post The New Orleans Drink That’s Back From the Dead appeared first on New York Times.
