Chris Hannah has always been a taciturn “heads-down” bartender, the opposite of a garrulous “heads-up” bartender. Guests at his New Orleans bar aren’t likely to get any silver-tongued banter about the issues of the day. When Hannah talks, it tends to be in his own sideways language, which can resemble a 1940s-inflected sort of Brooklyn argot. He wears vintage clothes. His favorite music dates to the phonograph era. He has three expressions: bemused, amused and annoyed. Often these are on display all at once.
Yet Hannah may be the most fluent bartender I’ve ever encountered when it comes to the language of drinks, especially classic cocktails. When he arrived in New Orleans in 2004, he dropped off his résumé at a handful of bars around the French Quarter, but focused on those that had been around for a half-century or more. Happily, he found a home at Arnaud’s French 75 Bar (opened 1918), with its antique mahogany backbar, quarter-sized white tiles and sepia patina of cigar smoke (smoking was banned in 2015).
Arnaud’s was the perfect perch for Hannah to explore the drinks that made New Orleans famous. He researched and perfected local favorites, such as the Ojen Suissesse, Roffignac and Brandy Crusta. The bar was compact, had a limited palette of liquors and scant room to prep fancy garnishes. So his cocktail style was lean by both choice and circumstance. When he compounded his own drinks, they were built on a sturdy foundation of time-tested classics.
That applies to the Bywater, which Hannah created at Arnaud’s in 2007. The drink is essentially a distant Southern cousin to the Brooklyn Cocktail, which itself dates to 1908. The original drink was a blend of rye, sweet vermouth, Amer Picon and maraschino liqueur, making it a more assertive, elaborate and Continental version of a Manhattan.
The Brooklyn was rediscovered in the aughts, whereupon it spawned a series of whiskey-based spinoffs named after New York neighborhoods. The first was the Red Hook, created by Vincenzo Errico of Milk & Honey in 2004. Over the next five years came the flood: the Bensonhurst from Chad Solomon at Pegu Club, the Cobble Hill from Sam Ross at Milk & Honey, the Bushwick from Phil Ward at Death & Co. and The Slope from Julie Reiner at Clover Club.
“Everybody was doing their own neighborhood,” Hannah says. “All the people who started the New York scene were doing it, and I wanted to do the same down here.”
It made sense to extend this to New Orleans—a city where the native accent sounds more like Brooklyn than Savannah. Hannah looked for inspiration in the Bywater, a neighborhood that was a 20-minute walk downriver from the French Quarter. It’s a former working-class community spread along the riverfront, once populated by stevedores tending to a vast network of nearby wharves and warehouses.
When the shipping industry went to containers and moved elsewhere, cottages in the Bywater were bought and restored by musicians, artists, shopkeepers and others, and painted in bright, garish colors. “New Orleans is often described as the Caribbean’s northernmost city,” Hannah says, and the Bywater’s architecture is heavily influenced by the islands.
To reflect that influence, Hannah swapped out the whiskey for rum. He added falernum, a traditional Caribbean liqueur with top notes of allspice, lime and ginger. Instead of vermouth, he opted for Averna—“amaro has more body than vermouth,” Hannah notes. The amaro offered a distinct tang of orange peel, another staple of the South and a tip of the hat to the orange-heavy Amer Picon in the Brooklyn.
To make it more herbally assertive, he added a scant half-ounce of green Chartreuse, which acts more like a backup singer than a diva. It’s also a nod to yet another Brooklyn neighborhood variation, the Greenpoint, created by Michael McIlroy, another Milk & Honey alum.
The Bywater has emerged as more than a regional curiosity. It appeared in the 2009 edition of Food + Wine Cocktails, compiled by Jim Meehan, and it started cropping up in other bars, some quite distant. “I saw it at the Teardrop Lounge [in Portland] in 2009,” Hannah says. And it’s appeared on cocktail lists in Boston, Chicago, Seattle and San Francisco. Hannah says he’s seen it served in bars in Asia. But it’s the drink’s hometown that may love it the most.
In 2019, Hannah left Arnaud’s to partner with several others and open his own bar, Jewel of the South, just a few blocks away. No surprise: The cocktail menu there is built around enduring classics, notably the Brandy Crusta, a pioneering New Orleans cocktail served at the long-gone Victorian-era saloon from which Jewel took its name.
The Bywater today can be found on menus around New Orleans—at Fives Bar on Jackson Square, and at Manolito, the Cuban-inspired bar in which Hannah is also a partner. Where it doesn’t appear, however, is on the menu at Jewel of the South. (Another of Hannah’s modern classics, the Night Tripper, does.) Maybe it’s modesty, maybe it’s practicality in a time of Chartreuse shortages. Still, once or twice a week a customer comes in and asks for it. A drink made by its inventor, in a bar anchored deeply in the past.
