Despite proudly hailing from Madison, Wisconsin, Toby Cecchini likes to stress that The Long Island Bar, the Brooklyn bar he co-owns with Joel Tompkins, is decidedly not a Packers bar.
That being said, a few not-so-subtle nods to the storied Green Bay NFL team—like a vintage Jim Beam decanter shaped like a Packers player by the cash register, or the Tavern League of Wisconsin sticker in the window by the entrance—pop up throughout the bar like Easter eggs. And then there’s the Lombardi Room, in the back of the bar, named after the Packers’ legendary head coach Vince Lombardi.
I have spent many hours in this room keeping Cecchini company while watching countless basketball, football, baseball games and tennis matches. It’s where I’ll likely watch Super Bowl LX (go Seahawks!) and where I’ve come to love the bar’s low-key, off-menu cocktail, The Gridiron (aka The Football Drink).
The predecessor to Cecchini’s Gridiron, a low-ABV drink that makes a perfect gameday cooler, is The Erin. Cecchini made it up on the spot one winter night at the request of a customer wanting something with whiskey and amaro. He threw together a take on a Manhattan on the rocks made with whiskey, Bigallet China-China Amer, the bar’s house sweet vermouth blend and Avèze (which he later changed to Suze). The drink is finished with five dashes of allspice dram and garnished with lemon and orange twists. “I’m very bad at drink names so I asked the woman to name it, and she dubbed it ‘The Erin,’” Cecchini recalls. “Let me guess… your name is Erin?”
The cocktail became an L.I.B. staple, so popular that it warranted batching the equal-parts bitter liqueurs and vermouth in a cheater bottle.
Enter: The Gridiron. One Sunday, Cecchini was in Lombardi and craved something light and sessionable because, when watching football, “once the action of the game starts building up, you’re just going to sit there and pound five or six of [whatever you’re drinking] in a row,” he says.
He doctored some bubbly water with one-and-half-ounces of Erin Mix. “I dashed some of that into a big glass of soda water and was like, I’m a genius,” he says with a laugh. “There’s the dull earthy bass notes and extreme bitterness of the Avèze; Bigallet amer has bitterness and caramel and a top note of clementine peel that’s just superb; and the vermouth brings that vinous wine-inflected thing with a little sharpness and wormwood.”
This was never intended as a drink Cecchini would make for anyone else. “I’d just make one for myself while watching sports back there, and friends who joined me to watch the game would be curious what I was drinking,” he says. “I’d say, ‘It’s my dumb football drink,’ and soon enough they wanted their own Football Drink.” His staff, though, objected to the name (“They thought it was the stupidest name ever,” says Cecchini) and entered the off-menu drink in the POS system as The Gridiron.
The drink, however you want to call it, has stuck, and for good reason. “When you inundate cold and refreshing soda water with this mix it punches well above its weight,” says Cecchini. “You feel like you’re drinking a real drink but you’re not getting all loopy.”