The Negroni is dead — long live literally anything else…
Finally! The world’s worst cocktail seems to have bitten the bright orange dust. But which more palatable mixes will spring up in its place?
Words: Jonathan Wells
Photography: Tom Hartford
Oh, well — it was nice while it lasted. But it wasn’t really, was it? Call us uncultured, but we never really were bowled-over by the old Negroni. Unfortunately for us, the bright red king of Italian aperitivos has been causing something of a stir these past few years, springing up on every cocktail menu from Bergamo to Bermondsey. A ‘renegronaissance’, if you like. But we don’t like — we don’t like at all.
And here’s why. We’re pretty sure that people only pretended to like the Negroni because other, cooler people told them they should. There’s no way, when Florentine bartender Fosco Scarselli first mixed the heinous thing into existence back in 1919, that he thought people would still be drinking them by the bucketload in All Bar One a century later. Yet drink them they did. Two summers ago, you could hardly move for glasses of the stuff. Vinegary, venomous Negronis being sloshed by the sloshed; everyone having a merry old time wincing their way through mouthful after medicinal mouthful. But then, last year, we finally began to wise up.
“We never really were bowled-over by the old Negroni…”
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