The New Orleans Drink That's Back From the Dead

With an unforgettable name, the Obituary has been down but never out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/dining/obituary-cocktail-new-orleans.html

https://archive.ph/QavIr



Few cities do spooky like New Orleans. Mix Anne Rice’s vampires, aboveground burials and a tradition of jazz funerals and you get a city undaunted by death. Mix gin, vermouth and absinthe and you get a martini-like cocktail that is equally bold — the Obituary. Dating back at least 85 years, the Obituary has slipped in and out of fashion without ever staying dead. But with martinis experiencing a renaissance of their own, its time seems to have come — again.

“Martinis are so popular across the country right now,” said Neal Bodenheimer, the owner of the James Beard award-winning cocktail bar Cure. “But, at the same time, our locals and tourists gravitate to things that feel uniquely New Orleanian.” And that dash of anise-forward absinthe “is definitely New Orleanian.” “The absinthe creates a flavor profile cocktail lovers expect from many of our city’s drinks,” Mr. Bodenheimer added, “just like the absinthe in a Sazerac or the Peychaud’s bitters in a Vieux Carré.” But the Obituary’s greatest appeal may be its name.


Sue Strachan traces the history of the Obituary in her new book. Credit...Cedric Angeles for The New York Times

That’s what drew Sue Strachan, the author of “The Obituary Cocktail,” (LSU Press, 2025) to the drink as a potential subject. “My first question was what could possibly be in a drink named after a death notice?” Ms. Strachan said. “It must be strong!” Her book covers the story of the cocktail, likely invented in the French Quarter at the bar Café Lafitte, named for an infamous 19th-century pirate and opened by a trio of bons vivants in 1933, the same year Prohibition was repealed.



In the 1942 travel guide “The Bachelor in New Orleans” by Robert Kinney, the Obituary is mentioned as one of two signature drinks at Café Lafitte. Later that decade, in 1948, a columnist for the now-defunct New Orleans Item-Tribune noted that Tom Caplinger, the bar’s owner, had invented the Obituary and offered up these instructions: “add a drop of absinthe to a Manhattan or a Martini and it becomes an Obituary.”

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Obituary

https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1027350-obituary

https://archive.ph/GbFx4



Named in a similar (morbid) spirit as the Corpse Reviver and Death in the Afternoon, this New Orleans-born, absinthe-laced twist on a gin martini is best served very cold in a very cold glass. If you can’t find absinthe, use pastis in its place to approximate the spirit’s herbal, anise notes.