The Obituary Cocktail: The 'deadly' drink that symbolises New Orleans

Combining a martini's wallop with one of the world's most notorious spirits, this recently revived cocktail embodies the city's distinctive approach to life and death.

Like a rake's progress, it starts with gin. Then vermouth. Then absinthe, delivered by atomiser, eye-dropper or spoon. A lemon twist, with its burst of essential oils, anoints it.

My first Obituary Cocktail was in New Orleans, the city that invented it, forgot it and then revived it. In the eight years I lived there, it never appeared on a menu, but savvy local bartenders could make one on request. That evening's details are as hazy as the Wednesday after Fat Tuesday. I could not tell you the year, nor the season. I only remember it was good and that it was sometime after absinthe became legal again in the United States in 2007.

I drank it at Cure. Neal Bodenheimer's legendary bar is graced by an enormous scientific print of a palmetto bug, the flying cockroach residents know as the city's native bird. Uplighting shines through the liquor bottles, turning them into bejewelled reliquaries.

In a city that uses "costume" as a verb and shimmies into one at the drop of a hat, visuals are important. Poured into a vintage Nick and Nora coupe glass, the Obituary Cocktail is a head-turning drink. It also captures something of New Orleans' carefree approach to life and nonchalance in the face of death, where a clinking glass and party is often a response to worldly travails.

"[The Obituary Cocktail] sums up the allure and the appeal of the city," says Clayton Rosenthal, manager and head of the drinks programme at Fives, a cocktail and oyster bar located in a historic 19th-Century building on Jackson Square.

Rosenthal uses Old Tom gin, Drapo Dry vermouth and Mata Hari absinthe in his Obituary, warning first-time drinkers: "The first sip can be a bit of a punch in the mouth."

It's an appropriate warning for a cocktail that combines a martini's wallop with one of the world's most notorious spirits and then names the result after a death notice.

The Obituary Cocktail is a remnant of the louche and bohemian world of the French Quarter in the years following the end of Prohibition in 1933, when artists, writers and creatives like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote gathered in cafes and bars.

According to Sue Strachan, a New Orleans historian and author of The Obituary Cocktail, the drink was likely invented in Café Lafitte on Bourbon Street. She notes that the first known reference to the cocktail was in a 1942 guide to the city called "The Bachelor in New Orleans", which promised to introduce "unattached gentlemen and ladies of spirit" to "the Paris of North America".

But while the drink subsequently surfaced in newspaper columns, nobody seems to have recorded who invented it or who gave it its morbid moniker.

"There's no definitive documentation on how the cocktail got its name," says Strachan. "No doubt its powerful punch led to some rough mornings, much like the phrase 'death warmed over'."

Absinthe supplied its mystique and maybe a throb in the head. "The Obituary is about intrigue," Strachan adds. "You bring absinthe into the picture and suddenly you have a drink with a little mystery, a little bohemian spirit and a whiff of the forbidden."

During the Belle Époque (1871-1914), New Orleans was one of the US's greatest absinthe-drinking cities. Ted Breaux, a New Orleans-born historian and distiller who helped return genuine absinthe to the US market after its 95-year absence, says the finest French brands flowed into the city.

By the 1890s, absinthe was showing up in New Orleans drinks ranging from the Sazerac to the Absinthe Frappé and Absinthe Suissesse. Then it became notorious, Breaux says. The spirit was blamed for everything from nervous disorders to hallucinations before the US banned it in 1912. The blame, he argues, was its popularity, which encouraged cheap imitations and disreputable ingredients.

"You [could urinate] in a bottle and call it absinthe, much to my dismay," he says.

Breaux compares absinthe's role in a cocktail with something else New Orleanians understand instinctively. "If you have a bowl of gumbo, what happens when you put in a big dash of Crystal Hot Sauce? It amplifies the flavour and gives it a pop," he says. "That is what absinthe does to [the Obituary Cocktail]. Absinthe is cocktail hot sauce."

There was a problem, however: when the Obituary Cocktail was invented, its defining ingredient, absinthe, had already been illegal in the US for decades.

Strachan believes Café Lafitte stashed bottles of absinthe smuggled into the country by well-travelled patrons, while other bartenders reached for substitutes. The liqueur Herbsaint, developed in New Orleans after Prohibition ended, replicated absinthe's distinct anise flavours without its prohibited ingredients. Ojen, an Andalusian anise-based liqueur, was also used.

But after Café Lafitte moved down the street from its original location (now occupied by Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop) following a property dispute in 1953 to become Café Lafitte in Exile, the Obituary gradually slipped from view.

When Strachan began researching her book in 2023, she found only one bar – Jewel of the South in the French Quarter – that listed it on its menu. Since then, however, interest in the Obituary has begun to climb with a renewed focus on artisanal cocktails. Now, Strachan says, Fives, and Mildred's, a new martini bar located in the boutique Warbler hotel on St Charles Avenue, feature the drink.

In a way, the Obituary Cocktail embodies its birth city. Death and pleasure often occupy the same space in New Orleans. This is a city that holds an annual Vampire Ball in honour of the late hometown horror writer Anne Rice and where the corpse of local socialite Mikey Easterling even presided over her own 2014 wake, Champagne glass in hand.

"New Orleans is a very complex place," says Eric Seiferth, a senior curator at the Historic New Orleans Collection, the French Quarter's history museum. "The willingness to accept that two things can be in the same room at the same time is part of life here."

Unlike in other US cities, Seiferth says mourning in New Orleans has historically remained public, communal and intertwined with faith, music and life.

At funerals in New Orleans' African American community, it is not uncommon to see musicians parading through the streets in a celebratory "second line" procession. On Mardi Gras Day, the North Side Skull & Bone Gang, a historic Afro-Creole secret society, honours their ancestors by waking the spirits while dressed in skeleton costumes to remind the living of their own mortality. And on All Saints Day, 1 November, families gather in cemeteries to clean, repair and decorate ancestral gravestones and tombs.

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For Helena Heavey, a bartender at Avegno, a stylish bar and lounge in Uptown New Orleans, the Obituary Cocktail's very name encourages a quiet inventory of one's own mortality. 

"An Obituary can act as a memorium for the day, and however it's unfolding – if it's celebration or atonement," she says. "It's a very New Orleans way of drinking: with reflection. And the name encourages it."

New Orleans never needs reminding that death is nearby. An Obituary Cocktail blends pleasure, danger and beauty in a glass, daring drinkers to gulp it all down.

"It could be too much for most folks elsewhere," Rosenthal says, "but we see it as perfectly balanced."

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