How to Make a Stork Club, the Classiest Gin and Juice Cocktail You Can Drink

“If there had never been a Stork Club,” wrote Lucius Beebe, “mankind in his vast and urgent necessity would have invented one.” 

This line is what begins the Stork Club Bar Book, written by Beebe in 1946, and if you’re familiar with the the allusion he’s making—paraphrasing a famous quote from Voltaire, with Beebe inserting “Stork Club” where Voltaire had written “God”—then you’ll have a better sense of the reverence with which the author felt about the club in question. To a certain kind of well-heeled socialite in Post-War New York, the Stork Club may not have been the creator of the universe, but it might as well have been the center of it.

The Stork Club was the most famous nightclub in New York City. The Studio 54 of its time. Gloria Vanderbilt was a regular. It was the kind of place that could ban Humphrey Bogart for an insult and not miss a beat, and Beebe spends a good deal of the writing of the Stork Club Bar Book bathing the club in grandiosity. You could really open to any random page and be met with things like “to millions and millions of people all over the world the Stork symbolizes and epitomizes the de luxe upholstery of quintessentially urban existence” or “when the doings of glamorous society characters have been glorified in a manner to pale the chronicles of Belshazzar, the ranking name of all is that of the Stork Club.” Or how about one last example: His assertion, in discussing the conduct of the “people of consequence” at the club, that “a fistfight at the Stork is today more newsworthy than an atom bomb.” And he wrote that in 1946.

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As we’ve seen with the 21 Club or the Clover Club or any other such venerable establishments, any self-respecting drinking club needed its own drink, and so here we meet the Stork Club Cocktail, a juicy, racy summer cooler: Gin and a good amount of orange juice, with lime, orange liqueur, and a dash of Angostura Bitters. Curiously, while Beebe devotes whole pages of commentary to classics like the Daiquiri (which deserves it) and the Ward Eight (which doesn’t), the Stork Club Cocktail is merely listed as a recipe, and gets no editorializing but for the honor of the name. 

Fame is ethereal, and nothing that burns that bright can last; in 1965, the club closed, the building was demolished, and the space became Paley Park, a tiny urban oasis with tables and chairs scattered among lightning-shaped trees. As for the cocktail, it was, like all drinkable things worth knowing, completely forgotten about for decades, until Dale DeGroff dusted it off in the 1990s. DeGroff is the father of the American cocktail renaissance and has a Scorcese-esque fascination with all things New York; Beebe’s extended tribute to the Stork Club and the cocktails therein would’ve been irresistible. “I had this beauty on my menu for years at the Rainbow Room,” DeGroff wrote in his seminal 2002 book The Craft of the Cocktail, “but credit goes to the great Nathaniel Cook… chief barman at the legendary Stork Club.”

Which just leaves us with the drink: What is a Stork Club like? It is orange juice in a tuxedo. It is juicy and refreshing, lightly tart and gently strong. The cocktail world is full of orange juice cocktails for whom you need to offer excuses: The dated Bronx, the goofy Harvey Wallbanger, the bizarre Blood and Sand, the useless Screwdriver, each with a specific reason for existing, but each limited in their own way. The Stork Club on the other hand, when properly assembled, is at the grown up table, a cocktail featuring that most summery and charming of citrus fruits in a way that doesn’t remind you of a sepia photographs or Formica countertops. The Stork Club is, in short, the only of those that would be allowed in the Stork Club. Provided, of course, that it didn’t get itself banned.

Stork Club

Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds and strain up into a coupe or cocktail glass, and garnish with an orange peel.

NOTES ON INGREDIENTS

Ratios: This is not the version of the Stork Club you’ll get almost anywhere else. Standard recipes have more gin, less Cointreau, and less orange juice. My problem with them is that those recipes are boring. They make a fine Stork Club, but an uninspired one. My recipe, on the other hand, keeps the proof up and adds exuberance. It’s the only version of the Stork Club I have any interest in drinking, and I want to drink it all the time. I hope you agree.

Gin: I tried this with all kinds of gin, and I like it with nearly all of them. Beefeater is classic. Monkey 47 is particularly charming. Aviation is bizarre but great. I have no strong preference here, grab your favorite gin and have at it. The only thing I’ll add is that while Tanqueray is one of my favorite gins, it can sometimes read hot (ethanol-forward) in shaken drinks, and this drink is particularly susceptible to that, because orange juice tends to amplify, rather than subdue, the burn of alcohol (another reason why Screwdrivers are the worst drink anyone can name).

Cointreau: When you need orange liqueur in this quantity, you need it to be flawless, so I always reach for Cointreau. I do not work for them, I just appreciate it—when used a full ounce at a time, Cointreau brings a zesty juiciness along with the proof that the drink needs.

Orange Juice: Must be fresh. Juiced that day, fresh. Ideally that moment. If you have had freshly juiced oranges any time in your adult life you likely already know, but if you haven’t, do yourself a favor—juice a couple oranges for this drink. Freshly pressed orange juice is among the great pleasures of this world.

Bitters: Optional. Bitters change it. It’s definitely classic to add bitters, and what they do is take a bright and juicy cocktail, and add the friction of spice and bitterness. This adds complexity, but it also takes away from the exuberance of it. It’s hard to say. I like it both ways. For me personally, if the sun hasn’t set yet, I’ll leave the bitters out, and once it does, I put them in, but try it both ways and see which you prefer. Final note: Orange bitters is a compromise, halfway between those two poles. I’m not sure I like it as much as I do either of the others, but take that for what it’s worth.