In 1926 in Hollywood, a man named Wilson Mizner opened a restaurant in the shape of an enormous hat. It was an era of novelty buildings (igloos, ice cream cones, hot dogs, etc), bizarre spectacles and drew the kind of attention that bizarre spectacles would continue to draw in Los Angeles for 100 years to come. He painted it brown and called it the Brown Derby, “derby” being the American term for the English bowler hat.
Atop the domed roof of the restaurant was perched a sign, itself shaped like a derby (yes, I am thrilled to report that the hat was wearing a hat) that said “Eat in the Hat,” and apparently, all of this worked so well that it quickly became one of the most popular restaurants in Hollywood. Ordinarily, that would be the end of the story. The Brown Derby cocktail would be, of course, the house cocktail of the famous Brown Derby restaurant, right? Annoyingly, the answer to that question is no, and this is one of the two reasons you’ve probably never had one—if it actually had been the house cocktail of the Brown Derby, the drink would have been a lot more famous.
No, the Brown Derby’s origin is more circuitous than that, essentially a game of telephone that got twisted up by a rogue greeting card writer, and deserves a brief overview. These three ingredients— bourbon , grapefruit, and honey—show up in the Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 under the name of the De Rigueur Cocktail. Large chunks of the Savoy are then plagiarized by a greeting card magna.