The early aughts were cocktail culture’s equivalent to the Gold Rush. Instead of the boomtowns along California’s Sacramento River and miners in search of gold, however, this surge was in a bustling New York City, where bartenders were rushing to invent and name twists on classics that could solidify the creator’s name in drink history forever.
One particular recipe found itself twisted around like a well-worn Rubik’s Cube: the Manhattan. Over the course of a decade, New York bartenders claimed an array of Manhattan-style cocktails, many of which were variations on Harry Johnson’s Brooklyn: the Red Hook, the Cobble Hill, the Greenpoint and the Sunset Park, to name a few. Across the pond at Ruby in Copenhagen, Denmark, however, there was another budding twist on the Manhattan that ditched the borough-specific template in favor of a cocktail that reads like the love child of a Bobby Burns and a Sazerac. Enter the Rapscallion.
The potent, stirred blend of Scotch and Pedro Ximénez sherry—served up in a pastis-coated Nick & Nora glass and garnished with a lemon twist—reached its final form at Ruby in 2007. But the first draft of the subtly sweet and smoky recipe, which would eventually go on to feature in Jim Meehan’s trailblazing 2011 PDT Cocktail Book, was spawned in Scotland a few years prior.
“Adeline [Shepherd] and Craig [Harper], worked together at a bar in Edinburgh called Oloroso, which inspired the team to learn and experiment with the fortified wine,” says Michael Hajiyianni, general manager at Ruby. For a video shoot at the bar, Harper mixed a drink starring whisky and PX sherry in Manhattan proportions, “laying the foundation for what would become known as the Rapscallion,” Hajiyianni says.
Later, in 2003, Shepherd and Harper opened a bar in Edinburgh called The Hallion. There, they adjusted Harper’s original recipe, adding a rinse of pastis to complement the cocktail’s smokiness. They named the drink after the bar, Hallion, which is an old Scottish word for rascal, or rapscallion.
After leaving The Hallion, Harper forgot about the Rapscallion until Shepherd, who co-founded Ruby with her husband, Rasmus Lomborg, made it both “better and famous,” as Harper put it to Hajiyianni. At the Copenhagen bar, they swapped out Johnnie Walker Black, as it previously had been made, for Talisker.
“When Adeline opened Ruby, she’d been bartending in Copenhagen for about two years, and in that short time she noticed a real difference in the palates of the Danes compared to those back in Scotland,” says Hajiyianni, who notes that the Danes were a little more adventurous and enjoyed stronger flavors. Compared with Johnnie Walker, the heavily peated Talisker gave the cocktail an aromatic profile, one dominated by smoke and hints of orchard fruit. The flavor was a perfect match for the sweet, raisiny character of the sherry. This updated recipe—40 milliliters of Talisker 10, 20 milliliters of PX sherry, a rinse of Ricard and a lemon zest garnish—is the one that circulates in many cocktail bars around Europe today.
But how did this relatively obscure Manhattan make its way from Copenhagen into PDT’s cocktail book and become cemented as a European modern classic? “This drink came to us by way of a guest bar shift of leading bartenders from Germany back in 2010,” says Meehan, a former partner at PDT in New York. The lineup included bartenders Holger Groll, Jakob Etzold, Sven Riebel, Torsten Bender and Gonçalo de Sousa Monteiro. “I’d never met or heard of Adeline or Craig Harper at that stage, but we loved [the Rapscallion].”
Meehan was connected—by way of zealous New York City barfly Martin Doudoroff—with Monteiro, a Lisbon-born bartender who was working at the newly opened Admirals Bar in Berlin. Monteiro founded a group called The Traveling Mixologists in 2006, with the sole purpose of celebrating bartending and “building bridges” by doing guest shifts in bars around Europe and beyond—a cultural exchange of sorts. Luckily for the Rapscallion, these nomadic bartenders transplanted the cocktail to New York at what was, at the time, one of the most influential bars in the world.
“I’m not sure if we ever put it on the menu at PDT,” says Meehan, “but our bartenders frequently recommended it and served it off-menu to guests.” The Rapscallion landed in Meehan’s PDT Cocktail Book the following year.
Today, the Rapscallion is alive and well in bars around the world, but particularly in Europe. Moe Aljaff, who picked up the cocktail while living in Copenhagen early in his bartending career, put the Rapscallion on the opening menu of Barcelona’s Lucky Schmuck in 2022, calling it “the king of nightcaps.” He says the cocktail taught him about balance in drinks. The Rapscallion is a dance among three potent ingredients that unexpectedly tame each other when mixed in the right proportions: smoky, peated whisky; sweet and figgy PX sherry; and herbal pastis. The modern classic can be ordered in most OG London cocktail bars, such as Happiness Forgets and Satan’s Whiskers, who’ve both been championing classics—American and global—for over a decade.
“We are very proud of the drink at Ruby,” says Hajiyianni, who knows how rare it is for any bar in the modern day to be known for a specific drink. “Finding it unexpectedly in The PDT Cocktail Book years later is one of the loveliest things that’s ever happened to me in the industry. It’s a drink that’s taken on a life of its own.”
