Toby Cecchini's "Other Boulevardier"
The Story and Exclusive Recipe Behind The Long Island Bar's Off-Menu Boulevardier
The “Other Boulevardier”
One of my go-to cocktails at my favorite Brooklyn local, The Long Island Bar, located just up the block from my apartment, is their house take on the classic Boulevardier, the traditionally equal-parts blend of whiskey, Campari, and sweet vermouth. Created by the bar’s co-owner Toby Cecchini for the opening menu in 2013, the LIB Boulevardier quickly became one of the bar’s signature drinks and has remained on the menu ever since. “I tried to take if off the menu after six months and people screamed bloody murder,” Cecchini once told me.
Five years ago I wrote about the LIB Boulevardier for PUNCH, breaking down how Cecchini mastered his final formula, leaning more into the Boulevardier’s dual nature as a Manhattan with Campari rather than a whiskey Negroni, by splitting the whiskey base with two different ryes and perfecting the vermouth ratio with a custom blend of two contrasting expressions. “I want the base spirit in my cocktail to be basso profundo,” said Cecchini in the PUNCH story. And unlike most Boulevardiers, served over a big rock, at LIB the ruby-red cocktail stands tall in an elegant coupe adorned with a thick swath of aromatic lemon peel. “I feel like I get some of the credit for helping exhume [the Boulevardier] in a way and shepherding it along to some degree, but I didn’t make up this drink,” said Cecchini.
These days, though, when I’m courtside at the bar when Cecchini Is behind the stick and ask for a Boulevardier, he’ll likely counter with, “Which one?”
While it’s not on the menu, over the last year or so he’s occasionally been offering an updated, and very different, take on the LIB Boulevardier for industry friends and regulars to try. This “other Boulevardier” mostly sticks to an equal-parts spec, though amps up the proportion of rye, as is often the case with this drink. But his choice of red bitter and vermouth shifts the bracing and bold classic into an entirely different direction.
As Cecchini told me in my recent story on the Essential to Aperitivo Bitters for PUNCH: "Whenever I try any of the many new aperitivi and bitters out there, I'm always measuring how it plays against or stands apart from Campari. If they're too close to Campari, but not as good, that's like doing a cover song, but playing it exactly like the original and that never works. When you're doing a cover song, you have to completely take it to a different place."