Vancouver

The Vancouver cocktail is popularly said to have been created in 1954 at the Sylvia Hotel, the first establishment in the city licensed to run a cocktail lounge, and its rediscovery has its own well-told story: in 2006 an elderly patron named Josiah Bates gave Gastown bartender Steve da Cruz a napkin recipe he recalled drinking at the Sylvia in the 1950s, and da Cruz spent years reviving and promoting the drink around the city. Research published by bartender and cocktail historian Alex Black in 2020 complicated that story.

Black located About Town, an undated Vancouver recipe book that he placed sometime between 1928 and 1942, containing a cocktail called the Vancouver made with dry, French vermouth, credited to no single author. Alongside it was a near-identical drink called the Fitchett, made with sweet, Italian vermouth and named for Joe Fitchett, a bartender at the private Vancouver Club. The book's own text credits Fitchett with the Fitchett cocktail, not the Vancouver, suggesting the Vancouver recipe circulated among Vancouver Club bartenders serving members through Prohibition-era British Columbia.

The drink later revived at the Sylvia Hotel and popularized by da Cruz actually followed the sweet-vermouth Fitchett formula, meaning the cocktail served worldwide since 2006 as "the Vancouver" was, by the earlier printed record, the Fitchett variant, while the original dry-vermouth Vancouver had fallen out of use. Bartenders and writers have since debated which vermouth belongs in the drink, with some serving it with both dry and sweet vermouth in equal parts as a compromise, as this recipe does.