Why Is Everyone Just Discovering the Gimlet?

When the writer and cookbook author Colu Henry was in college in the late 1990s, she worked weekend evenings as a barista behind the milelong wood bar at Sonsie, then Boston’s hottest dinner reservation. Toward the end of every shift, one of the three bartenders would make her a Vodka Gimlet in a pint glass.

“We all drank them because it looked like soda water, and no one wanted to be seen drinking on the job,” Henry admits. Henry found Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial too sweet, so they’d cut hers with fresh lime juice. To this day, she loves ordering Gimlets in the summertime, always made by someone else, always with vodka, not gin.

“I know they’d be delicious with gin,” she says, “but it’s nostalgic for me, like limeade with booze.”

For years, the Gimlet has been written off, even forgotten, by drinkers and barkeeps alike — save for stubborn loyalists raised on that candy-sweet flavor of bottled lime cordial spiked liberally with spirit. The historic British drink’s facelift amid the craft cocktail renaissance of the 2010s quietly swapped lime cordial for fresh juice — morphing it into more of a shaken gin Daiquiri — which won it a new cohort of fans in the early 2010s (to the probable dismay of Rose’s purists).

Though its exact specs might be somewhat debated, the Gimlet, in its many forms, has recently been popping up on more menus and tables across the country. Maybe it’s finally found its niche in the cocktail world as a slightly more refreshing alternative to a Martini. Or perhaps the recent wave of British bar and restaurant concepts has spurred new interest. Either way, the drink’s evolution into a part fresh, part candy, forever zesty-sweet cocktail might see this gateway gin cocktail finally get its due. But does it have the stuff of It Girl status?

Rose’s on the Pop Culture Rise

The Gimlet was unofficially born sometime in the 1800s, when scurvy-prone British sailors were given lime rations mixed with neutral spirit to preserve the juice on long journeys. When a Scottish ship provisioner named Lachlan Rose started fortifying lime juice with sugar instead, he thought his shelf-stable product might appeal to a wider market and eventually branded it Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial. It’s hard to pinpoint who was first to mix Rose’s cordial with navy gin rations, but by the 1940s and ’50s, the Gimlet was codified in popular culture and cocktail books as a 50/50 blend of the two. Most famously, in Raymond Chandler’s 1953 detective novel, “The Long Goodbye,” the character Terry Lennox declares: “A real Gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats Martinis hollow.”

Much of its trajectory since has been unremarkable, as an artificially sweet, boozy relic platforming the ever-diminishing quality of Rose’s. Eventually, the Gimlet became derogatorily associated with stuff old ladies drink.

Still, it had a stubborn kind of staying power. Fifty years after “The Long Goodbye’s” debut, Dale DeGroff issued a gentle semantic scolding in his seminal 2002 book, “The Craft of the Cocktail.” “Be careful about switching fresh lime juice for Rose’s,” he wrote. “Real Gimlet drinks want the taste of preserved lime juice. When made with fresh lime juice and sugar, it is a sweet Gin Rickey, not a Gimlet.” Perhaps no one in the bar world insists on this creed more than acclaimed bartender Toby Cecchini, who put a considerable amount of R&D into making his own lime cordial for the Gimlet at the Long Island Bar.

A Tale of Two Neo-Gimlets

Traditionalist nitpicking couldn’t stop craft cocktail revivalists from taking liberties as they upgraded their way through the classics. That’s how the modern American Gimlet came to be shaken with fresh lime juice. It was this version that blew the mind of a young Katie Renshaw who came of age in Chicago’s early-wave craft cocktail bars like Sable.

“The Gimlet was probably what got me into cocktails,” says Renshaw, a longtime bartender who now owns the whimsically experimental Bar Bambi in Chicago’s West Town. “It taught me the power of a few fresh ingredients. I started asking if bars had fresh lime juice and if they did, I’d order a Vodka Gimlet.”

This bracing version also turned my citrus-loving sister, Madeline Shea, assistant commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, into a Gimlet loyalist over a decade ago. As someone who reverts toward lemon or lime in times of menu incertitude, she says it remains her go-to in an era of increasingly convoluted cocktails.

“Maybe this will be helpful for the ‘industry,’ so to speak,” she says acidly. “But the bars go really overboard with cocktail ingredients. And you order it, and you go, ‘What is this, fruit punch? Where’s the booze? Ugh, just give me a Gimlet.’”

Meanwhile, in the U.K., bartenders weren’t really talking about, much less making, Gimlets in the early 2010s, according to London-based bartender Liam Davy. Modern Rose’s Cordial was more likely to season a seltzer or beer than be used in cocktails. The gin sour-esque version of the Gimlet did crop up in British bars, albeit contentedly disguised as the summery, mint-infused Southside cocktail.

“A Gimlet is like Chanel No. 5. It’s never going to be trendy, but it’s always going to hit.”

“In the 20 years I’ve been bartending, for the first 10 or 15 Gimlets were not something that ever got ordered,” says Davy, now beverage director for the London steakhouse mini chain Hawksmoor. “The big change came in the last five or 10 years, when bartenders started making their own cordials and using things like powdered acid citric and malic with fruit to make clearer cordials that resemble Rose’s, but are more like acidic syrup.”

Suddenly, the Gimlet was morphing back into a clear, silky stirred drink in some bars, albeit noticeably upgraded. Davy, who prefers the bolder acidity of the American version, marries the two in the Ultimate Gimlet, which is poured at Hawksmoor’s Chicago location. Tanqueray 10 joins candy-sweet Rose’s lime marmalade and a zingy lime zest and leaf cordial punched up with citric and malic acids.

“We pour [the cordial] through Greek yogurt, which gives a little softness, but also gives this lovely, smooth viscous mouthfeel of a stirred Gimlet,” Davy says.

With outposts in Boston and New York, Davy’s employer counts among those architecting a mini British invasion around the U.S., as are English pub-inspired hotspots like Dingles Public House in San Francisco, Wilde’s in Los Angeles, and the Bell in New Orleans. Dean’s, the hot Manhattan restaurant dressed in brawny pub clothing, proudly slings cheffy takes on British deep cuts like boiled ham and stargazy pie. There, one can sip an aromatic, cucumber-spiked Fords gin Gimlet.

“We are 1 million percent having a British invasion right now,” agrees Henry. She does publicity for luxe British handbag company Ruskin and British NA aperitif brand Mother Root, which entered the U.S. market last fall. In some ways, though, she adds, it never ended. “It’s interesting working with U.K. brands and seeing this mutual admiration. They look to us and we look to them as, like, the cool thing.”

Gin (and Cocktails) Rising

In the modern drinks scene, it’s hard to overestimate the staying power of the Martini. The cocktail has undoubtedly brought gin into fashion — perhaps with a touch of help from another classic, the Negroni — particularly among Gen Z drinkers, who reportedly drank more cocktails in the past six months than any other generation, according to a recent survey from drinks industry analyst IWSR. The modern Gimlet offers another, even friendlier on-ramp to gin’s botanical flavor notes thanks to its pairing with sugared lime. It still packs a fairly hefty punch booze-wise, meaning better bang for one’s buck.

So… is the Gimlet trending or simply timeless?

Not everyone’s falling for the Gimlet, or maybe they just don’t recognize the thing that’s morphed into a fresher, less cloying iteration of its former self.

“The Gimlet will never be an It Girl drink,” declares Sean Hoard, a partner at Portland, Ore., seafood joint Pal’s who cut his teeth at the East Village institution PDT. Then again, to him, the thing is still fossilized in amber made of Rose’s.

“Maybe this will be helpful for the ‘industry,’ so to speak. But the bars go really overboard with cocktail ingredients. And you order it, and you go, ‘What is this, fruit punch? Where’s the booze? Ugh, just give me a Gimlet.’”

In the year since Hoard and his partners opened Pal’s, he’s probably sold five Gimlets, made like tart gin Daiquiris. Those ordering Pal’s gin-based Black Flag cocktail might not know that they are in fact slugging a Gimlet variation boosted with lemon, salted grapefruit cordial, and a splash of Fernet.

“If the Gimlet is a two-note thing, what’s the harm in adding a third or fourth note?” Hoard asks.

He has a point that citrus, sugar, and spirit represents more of a template than something to relentlessly exalt. Then again, perhaps the Gimlet’s phoenix moment is another reminder that the public wants restraint in this drinking era, as in three or four elements “executed well with high-end or fresh ingredients,” says Cameron Nadler, beverage director at The Cooper hotel in Charleston, S.C. (My sister will be thrilled.)

Nadler is menuing a sparkling wine-topped Cooper (a.k.a. Southside) Royale at Bar Marti, the hotel’s poolside bar. The sole purpose of this fizzy, minty Gimlet riff is to be sipped on a sticky afternoon without giving it much thought at all. “Sometimes you want something that takes two minutes or 30 seconds to make: ‘Here you go, have fun,’” he says.

At Bar Bambi, Renshaw is pouring the Mandela Effect, a summery cross between a Gimlet and Spritz with gin, lime, and sugar clarified with Greek yogurt for a lactic tang that nicely complements the lime. If not for the menu descriptor, “there’s no possible way you could think it was a Gimlet, even though that’s what it is, structurally,” she says.

Renshaw, like the rest of the Gimlet loyalists I spoke to, generally loathes the idea of the drink becoming trendy, lest it bring out the haters or wear out its welcome via cheap gimmickery. Given its stubborn longevity, I’m not sure it’s necessarily longing for the limelight anyway, rather biding its time for that first warm June day, when nothing else will hit the spot quite like boozy limeade.

After a long pause, Renshaw offers up an analogy that satisfies her. “A Gimlet is like Chanel No. 5. It’s never going to be trendy, but it’s always going to hit.”

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