When Franck Audoux was researching his 2019 book, French Moderne, he came across a drink that appealed to his love of dry, bitter cocktails: the Tunnel. “I’m a huge lover of the Negroni, so when I saw this recipe adding dry vermouth, I said, that’s quite interesting,” he recalls, “especially just 10 years after the creation of the Negroni.”
Falling smack-dab in the middle of the interwar period (on which Audoux’s book is focused), the Tunnel was first published in Cocktails de Paris Présentés par RIP (1929) as a combination of London dry gin, French vermouth, Campari and Vermouth Cora that was invented by “Bob” at Harry’s New York Bar. Its structure is very Negroni-like, with gin and vermouth in equal measure, and slightly smaller amounts of both Campari and Cora, an Italian brand known for its bitter cacao-like finish.
To our modern eyes, the Tunnel does indeed look like a take on the Negroni. But in 1920s Paris, the Negroni wouldn’t have the name recognition it does today. Paris in the 1920s and ’30s had a handful of what we would now call Negroni variations, including the Camparinete, Boulevardier, the Charlie Pie, Old Pal and, of course, the Tunnel—all conceived as their own original drinks. For Audoux, the Tunnel is the best among them, as it’s far drier than most of these contemporaries.
Audoux doesn’t believe in trying to perfectly recreate recipes from cocktail history, in part because of how different most products are from a century ago, but also because our tastes are so different today. “What interests me is to reinterpret these recipes, or to adapt [them] to the palate of today.”
To begin reinterpreting the Tunnel, Audoux wanted to ensure that the gin had the big juniper notes of a classic London dry. “I love when a gin is a gin,” he says. As in the Negroni, juniper is an essential note in this highly botanical drink. He partnered with a distiller in Alsace to create a gin with this piney profile, plus a touch of citrus peel. The latter note is important because Cravan produces a bottled version of the cocktail, served at both of its locations, which is also available to purchase to take home. The citrus peel in the bespoke gin is there in part so those enjoying the bottled Tunnel at home don’t need to have fresh citrus around for a garnish. At the bars, the drink gets the oils from a grapefruit peel expressed onto its surface.
For the dry vermouth, Audoux reaches for the classic French brand Noilly Prat—a brand so old and established that it could well have been the one used in the original Tunnel. For the Campari, he accepts no substitutes and, it can be assumed, neither did the author of Cocktails de Paris; there is a full-page ad for the iconic aperitivo liqueur in the book.
There’s also a full-page ad for Vermouth Cora, which, though the book is in French, features the bold slogan “the soul of a good cocktail” and gives the address of the company’s Paris office. For the vermouth portion, Audoux prefers the Carpano product Punt e Mes for its pronounced bitterness, which bolsters the Campari. Though he keeps the ratios of gin and dry vermouth very close to the original, he increases the Campari slightly and decreases the vermouth component; perhaps this is why he reaches for a distinctive product like Punt e Mes.
Though most Negroni lovers may expect so-called variations on the classic to be served over ice in a rocks glass, Cravan’s program avoids ice in everything except long drinks to more precisely control dilution. Like many of the bars’ cocktails, the Tunnel is served up in beautiful stemmed glassware that splits the difference between a Nick & Nora and a small wine glass.
Audoux loves the Tunnel so much that Cravan has produced T-shirts emblazoned with “drier, bitter, better”—the drink’s official slogan and a very French Gen X reference to the Daft Punk song “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” Beyond mere affection for the cocktail, the Tunnel has become something of an emblem of Cravan’s aesthetic, which Audoux describes as demonstrating complexity in simplicity. “The Tunnel,” he says, “is really the DNA, the savoir faire, of Cravan, in a bottle.”
