The bar is dark. Your long Saturday night shift is over and you find yourself sitting quietly in an empty booth. The lights are low and you have tomorrow off. You want something to sip and enjoy that is easy to make and, crucially, doesn’t require any more cleaning. Reaching into the low-boy fridge you pull out a beautiful bottle of sweet vermouth—something made in Italy, with plenty of body. You grab the bottle of half-drunk Fernet off the backbar while taking a moment to recall how many shots you had during your shift (surely, less than eight, right?) and you pour some into a glass. There’s a bottle of absinthe still sitting out from making that one guy who ordered a Sazerac, so you add a splash to the drink. The last little bit of simple syrup is in a bottle waiting to be washed, so you pour that into the glass too. You add some ice, and, using a broken chopstick from your takeout sushi, stir it all up. In a last ditch effort to “be a bartender” you strain the drink into another glass and leave the ice behind. Though it can be thrown together with ease, this isn’t any ordinary post-shift drink. 

Of all of the drinks in the world, there are few as mystical and confusing as the Appetizer à L’Italienne—a drink that is not an appetizer but a digestif, and a name that is not Italian but French, despite having only one French ingredient. Originally published in 1892 by William Schmidt in The Flowing Bowl, this odd concoction may feel like it was made from leftovers after a night of service—and this is often how I end up with one in my hand—but the more you taste it, the more it becomes clear that this cocktail was produced by a master, someone who had learned all of the basics of his era enough to know that what sounds unusual on paper can be extraordinary in the glass.