El Presidente: Havana's Boardroom Martini

Stir it. This is a spirit-forward drink wearing tropical colors, and shaking would beat air and cloud into something that wants to stay clear and slick. Two ounces of white rum lead, an ounce of dry vermouth lengthens and dries, half an ounce of orange curaçao brings sweetness with an edge, and a single barspoon of grenadine does the rest. That barspoon is the whole game. Pour with a heavy hand and you get cough syrup with ambitions. The grenadine should tint the drink the color of a faded photograph and sweeten it just past dry, nothing more. Use real pomegranate grenadine, not the red dye they sell next to the maraschino cherries. Stir thirty seconds over good ice, strain into a chilled coupe, and express an orange twist over the top so the oils sit on the surface where your nose finds them first.

Build it on paper and the El Presidente is a Martini. A base spirit stretched and seasoned by an aromatized wine, in this case white rum and dry vermouth instead of gin and the same vermouth. That spine—spirit plus fortified wine—is what files it next to the Bamboo, the Adonis, the Bobby Burns, and the Algonquin, drinks that look unrelated until you notice they all lean on vermouth or sherry to do their talking. The curaçao and grenadine are accents, the orange bitters and olive of this particular house. Swap the gin for rum, dial the dryness with a touch of sweet, and you have not invented a tiki drink. You have built a Martini in a Cuban accent. Same architecture, different climate.

The drink is tangled up with Cuba in the Prohibition years, when thirsty Americans sailed south and Havana's bartenders got very good very fast. The name nods to Gerardo Machado, the Cuban president whose tenure ended in the kind of way that does not make for happy anniversaries, though some credit an earlier president and the truth is lost in the rum. Constantino Ribalaigua at the Floridita and his peers were turning out drinks of real precision while American bars were busy hiding gin in teacups. The El Presidente was the elegant one, the cocktail for people negotiating things, and it carried that boardroom polish all the way into the American cocktail revival decades later, when somebody dusted off the old Cuban manuals and remembered that white rum could be serious. The arguments over proportions are eternal. More vermouth or less, curaçao or triple sec, grenadine measured in drops or in defiance. Get the grenadine wrong and the whole thing collapses into a beach drink. Get it right and you understand why men in linen suits ordered these by the round.