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Look up the history of this iconic drink and you'll find varying accounts of how the Bloody Mary became an American classic. Louis Perrin first served tomato juice as a beverage around 1917 when he purportedly ran out of orange juice and needed a quick substitute. But it’s widely agreed that the forerunner of the Bloody Mary was first created in the late 1920s by the Parisian bartender Fernand Petiot. Find out more about this drink’s fascinating history.

Drink has always been inseparable from food. The right beverage can enhance our enjoyment of food, just as the wrong choice can ruin it. This is ingrained into our eating habits, from milk and cookies to pizza and beer. Here are some simple tips to pull off your own successful pairings.

Pairing food and beverage is at the heart of gastronomy; eating and drinking is a unified experience and can affect people in a profound way. The success of any pairing is judged by what happens when a sip of a beverage interacts with a bite of food on the palate.

Every bartender I know has a ritual. Usually it takes the form of a shot (Fernet-Branca, Green Chartreuse, Grand Marnier), but I’ve always favored the long drink. After all the prep is done and the bar is set up, I fix myself a proper Bloody Mary. Check out my recipe for the perfect shift starter.  I started with the standard: vodka, tomato juice, salt, pepper, Worcestershire, and a dash of Tabasco. Since then, it’s morphed into a whole different beast.

Like most bartenders, I love bitters! Why? Simple: they add another dimension to the drink, quite literally. Think back to the basic biology lesson on taste, which states that there are four taste receptors on the tongue: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. So when we use bitters we are involving more of the tongue’s taste receptors in the imbibing experience. Learn how to help your customers acquire this special taste.