We all know that the Mimosa and the Buck’s Fizz are essentially the same drink, and the consensus is that the Buck’s Fizz came first, invented circa 1921. The Mimosa is understood as having been invented at the Paris Ritz by head bartender Frank Meier, and it appears in Frank’s 1936 book, The Artistry of Mixing Drinks. It’s further known that the Paris Ritz didn’t even have a bar until 1921. So, when did Frank invent it during that 1921 - 1936 window? The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails succinctly states that “The drink was reputedly created in 1925 and attributed to Frank Meier, head bartender at the Ritz in Paris.” It should be noted that Frank also called it the Champagne Orange. While researching my 2018 book A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris, I found evidence as early as 1923. Indeed, if you look at poet and publisher Harry Crosby’s diary, you’ll see a few entries in August of 1923. In his diary entry from August 25, Harry Crosby wrote:
Geraldine and champagne orangeades at the Ritz and afterwards to dance in the Bois and to dance in the Montmartre and finally at dawn to Les Halles where we were the only two dancers. Seven o’clock and the end of the last bottle of champagne and a crazy bargain with a sturdy peasant to haul us to the Ritz in his vegetable cart . . . upon the heaped-up carrots and cabbages while our poor man strained in the harness . . .[i]
Four days later, on August 29th, Harry wrote:
“I feel so lifeless, haven’t even the courage to go out in the canoe, too weary to work at stocks and bonds or even to read the Bible. All I am good for is to drink champagne orangeades with Geraldine in the garden of the Ritz, the only oasis in the stagnant August Paris.”
Does anyone know of anything before August, 1923 to place the Champagne Orange/Mimosa at the Paris Ritz?
[i] Harry Crosby, Shadows of the Sun: The Diaries of Harry Crosby, ed. Edward Germain (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1977), 36.
“All I am good for is to drink Champagne orangeades…” Hahaha.
I’m kind of surprised that this doesn’t call for bitters like a Champagne Cocktail would. I imagine that it would improve the rather bland flavor. Never been a fan of orange juice in cocktails. But if one must…
As background on Crosby, he was quite the character. He and his wife Caresse were super hedonistic, entertained lavishly, and lived rather luxuriously in a gorgeous townhome on the Ile Saint-Louis in Paris. Every morning Caresse, wearing a red bathing suit, would paddle Harry to work down the river Seine, to drop him off at the Place de la Concorde, so he could go to “work” at his billionaire uncle’s (J.P. Morgan) bank, Morgan, Harjes & Co., as a stockbroker. That explains the references to “the canoe” and working “at stocks.” Ahhh, the ennui of the very rich… He quit that taxing job on New Year’s Eve 1923, and he and Caresse opened the very successful and influential Black Sun Press. Did I mention that Harry and Caresse often entertained in their giant bathtub? Or that they had a dog named Clytoris?
For hat it’s worth, Crosby’s is the earliest mention I’ve found as well (I should have consulted the four full pages of notes I wrote in very small letters in the back of Shadows of the Sun before finalizing the Oxford entry). That is one of the wettest books I own, which is really saying something. Lots of absinthe, lots of Champagne cocktails, not a little vodka, and plenty of everything else.
As for the Buck’s Fizz, I’d look in the society pages. Being a private club, what happened within the walls of the Bucks Club stayed within them, as is customary with such institutions. But things did leak out on occasion. For example, in the “Racing Ragout” column of the Tatler for August 15, 1934, “Guardrail,” its author, mentions Malachi McGarry at the Bucks Club tent at the Goodwood races (a fixture there and at Ascot since at least 1930), “mixing firkins of Bucks Fizz.”