Disputed origins of the Manhattan cocktail, and the Hong Kong bar that gives it a new twist

In David Embury’s influential 1948 cocktail manual, The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks, the Manhattan is listed as one of the six “basic cocktails”, along with the daiquiri, Jack Rose, martini, old fashioned and the sidecar.

It is certainly one of the longest established cocktails, although exactly when it was first mixed remains a mystery.

For years, popular lore had it that it was created in 1874 for a party at the Manhattan Club, arranged for the new governor of New York, Samuel Tilden, who was the Democratic candidate for the US presidency in 1876.

The result of that election, as in the recent case of Trump vs Clinton, was determined by the electoral college, which gave the presidency to Rutherford Hayes, although Tilden won the popular vote.

Cocktail historian William Grimes has looked into that theory of the drink’s origin, however, and concluded that the story is untrue. The club’s records show that the drink was invented there but give no date, and in his book Straight Up or On rhe Rocks: The Story of the American Cocktail, Grimes quotes one contemporary source as crediting the recipe to a Broadway saloon keeper surnamed Black.