How a Philly Bar Perfected Seattle’s Iconic Cocktail
At Izzy's, an accidental stroke of genius is shaking up Seattle's legendary drink: the Last Word.
The Money Talks cocktail at Izzy’s / Photography courtesy of Izzy’s
Welcome to Just One Dish, a Foobooz series that looks at an outstanding item on a Philly restaurant’s menu — the story behind the dish, how it’s made, and why you should be going out of your way to try it.
I could give you 10 different reasons why you want to go try Izzy’s — the new(ish) izakaya(ish) spot on Lancaster Avenue, right in the heart of what passes for the action in Ardmore — but seven of them would be about the “Money Talks.” In the world of cocktails, it is both a riff and an original thought, an homage and a revelation. It is simple, straightforward, vibrantly green, sweet, sour, and punchy all at the same time — like a grown-up Sour Patch Kid made of melons and gin. And it’s one of the best cocktails I’ve had in a year.
The first time I had it, I drank in appreciative silence, staring out the big front windows at Izzy’s, waiting for the rain to stop. The second time, it was early on a weekday, and the bar was slow, so I asked the bartender about it. He talked for five minutes about rare gins, the PLCB, Carthusian monks, and the color green. He was proud of this drink (and deservedly so). He served a lot of them in the course of his daily business behind the bar. But I knew I needed to find out more because I have something of an obsession with (and a personal connection to) the classic drink it’s based on, the Last Word.
So last week, I made a phone call to James Cleland, the bar manager at Izzy’s. The guy who shook and poured the very first Money Talks.”The story of this drink?” he asks. “It’s cool, but also … kinda boring?”
And then he tells it to me. But it takes a little bit of time to get there.
See, the first thing you have to know about is Midori — the melon liqueur named for the Japanese word for “green.” It’s that tall bottle with the black cap, always sitting at the far end of the back wall, green like the radioactive ooze that turned Raphael, Donatello, Leonardo, and Michelangelo into Ninja Turtles. Ask a hundred bartenders, and 95 of them will tell you that they’ve never ordered a bottle of Midori in their lives. It just shows up, the bottle always a little bit sticky. Like it’s part of the architecture.
“I never ran a program where I purposely carried Midori,” Cleland tells me. And he has run a few. He’s spent years in the bar business — first in Boston with Max Brenner, then working with Ken Oringer at the Highball Lounge, Clio, and Uni. He came to Philly to run a cocktail program for Boardroom Spirits, then bounced to help open Solstice (which had the misfortune of debuting just a week before the pandemic shut the entire city down) and, after that, the Refectory in Villanova. He has opened bars and stocked bars and flipped through hundreds of order books, but he had never ordered a bottle of Midori. Like any of those 95 bartenders previously mentioned, it was always there but rarely considered.
Until, one day, he’s standing there behind the bar at Izzy’s, and one of his regulars comes in. A guy who warms a stool three, maybe four times a month. And this guy, for whatever reason, loves Midori.
“He points to the bottle behind the bar, and he says, ‘Oh, Midori! I love Midori. What do you make with that?'”
And Cleland tells the guy … nothing. He makes nothing with that. He’s not even sure what he could make with that. But it’s a quiet day, and this guy is a regular, so Cleland wants to make him happy. So he thinks for a minute. He recalls the recipe for the Last Word — a cocktail invented (arguably) in Detroit a century ago, forgotten for decades, then rediscovered in 2003 by a bartender named Murray Stenson at a bar in Seattle called the Zig Zag Cafe, who shook one up and inadvertently started the American craft cocktail revival.
The Last Word is basic-basic: equal parts gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice, shaken with ice, strained into a coupe glass. That’s it. It is brilliantly balanced, surprisingly complex, and dangerously drinkable. It has a punch, but it’s a sly one, hidden behind its sweetness and the cut of the lime. I know exactly how good the original can be because, once upon a time, I was a restaurant critic for a few awful seasons in Seattle. I hated it there, but the restaurants were phenomenal. And the Zig Zag was close to my office, so I spent a fair amount of time at Murray’s bar, with Murray at the stick, shaking up Last Words for me and whoever I was there with, drinking away the gray and the rain and the slugs and the bullshit. In the years since, I have put away Last Words in a hundred bars and tasted dozens of variations. Almost none of them have been any good.
But because of the Last Word’s simplicity, it is like catnip for bartenders searching for inspiration. Replace one element, and you have your own original riff. Replace two, and you feel like an artist. So Cleland goes right to that well. Gin and green Chartreuse? Done and done. He goes with an unusual gin choice: Tanqueray Rangpur, which is heavy with herb and spice notes from the Indian subcontinent. He subs Midori for maraschino and lime juice for lemon and, in a last-second flair of originality, hits it with a lime twist because limes are green and Midori is green, so, “thematically, it makes sense. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing lime twists,” explains Cleland.
This was the birth of the Money Talks. “A spur-of-the-moment thing,” Cleland says. “Got it on the first try.”
His regular loved it, of course. That regular told everyone about it. Word spread in the same way that it did when Murray made the original — passed regular to regular, friend to friend. And, quickly, this one-off became the secret drink everyone knew about and then took a place on Izzy’s cocktail menu among the rotating sake-tinis, classic highballs, and a nitrous-infused Dark & Stormy that probably would’ve been my other favorite drink had I not discovered the Money Talks first. He tells me that the menu is actually changing on the day we talk; that they make changes “whenever inspiration hits.” So he’s got a new sake-tini going up, a new variation of his tea-based cocktail service, “Tea For Two.” And in a week or so, he’s got another drink he’s hoping to slide in. It isn’t ready yet, but he’s working on it. Not everything is going to be a home run on the very first try. Some things take work.
But the Money Talks? That’s not going anywhere. That’s on the menu forever.
Cleland tells me that he now orders Midori regularly. “A case and a half a month,” he says. He doesn’t know if that’s the most Midori anyone in the state has ever ordered, but he thinks it might be. The Chartreuse can be problematic. He can’t always get as much as he needs from the PLCB because the French monks that make it aren’t producing the way they used to. He says the monks claim they’re spending more time communing with God, which gives them less time for making Chartreuse, but he doesn’t buy it. He thinks the problems are more earthbound. Supply chain issues. The bottles don’t look and feel the way they used to. But on the day we spoke, he had 14 bottles of green and yellow Chartreuse on the back bar — his “Chartreuse flex,” he calls it — so he’s good for a little while. And anyway, he thinks, somewhere, the Midori people must be very pleased with him. Back in the day — before Murray, before the Zig Zag — maraschino liqueur used to be rare. It wasn’t something anyone ever really stocked. No need when all you’re making are margaritas and lemon drops and the kind of candy-coated, college-bar crap that passed for American cocktails pre-2003. Now everyone has it. Everyone uses it. Now, craft cocktail bars are everywhere.
So maybe Midori is due its moment, too.
