Brown Derby

Today, the Brown Derby is difficult to find on any cocktail menu. But in 1930s Hollywood, this refreshing cocktail was all the rage. 

The Brown Derby didn’t earn its name from the horse race or the hat… Well not directly. In Los Angeles in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the best place to be spotted was at one of the “Brown Derby Restaurants.” The restaurants were, you guessed it, shaped like the popular men’s hat, but have since become known for much more. The Brown Derby’s Hollywood restaurant was the scene for a popular episode of “I Love Lucy,” the rumored birthplace of the Cobb Salad, and Shirley Temple herself even claimed that the beverage named after her was created there. 

Funnily enough, the cocktail named for the restaurant seems to be the one thing that wasn’t started there. Right across the street from all of this Hollywood glamor was the equally popular Vendôme Club, which housed one very bored bartender. Sometime in the mid-1930s, this bartender set out to create a whiskey cocktail that could be enjoyed specifically at brunch. He finally decided on a recipe that feels almost like a riff on a Whiskey Smash with grapefruit juice, honey syrup, and bourbon. Plus, a name that conveyed just how trendy this drink was – The Brown Derby. 

Who knows if the name choice was a hopeful way of trying to get the restaurant’s attention or just sheer uninspired laziness, but either way it’s easy to see how this cocktail made it in Hollywood.