Some drinks you grow into. I’m a bourbon guy, mostly, and gin cocktails never did much for me — until a Wednesday afternoon in Cabo, sitting at the open-air bar at Solaz — right beside the resort’s outdoor pizza oven, with the slightest hint of wood fire in the air — when the bartender set down a pale green coupe with a lemon twist and I finally met the Last Word.
It was my birthday, we had a couple of hours before dinner, and I asked for something I hadn’t had before. What arrived was a hundred years old and tasted brand new. My one-word review, texted on the spot: amazing.
A drink that disappeared for fifty years
The Last Word comes from Prohibition-era Detroit, where it was created at the Detroit Athletic Club. Four ingredients in equal parts — that’s the whole design — and then, like a lot of good things from that era, it vanished. It slipped out of circulation for decades, surviving mostly as a line in an old cocktail book, until Seattle bartender Murray Stenson dug it up in the 2000s and put it back on his menu. From there it spread the way good drinks do: bartender to bartender, city to city, until a cocktail Detroit forgot became one of the defining drinks of the modern cocktail revival.
Part of why it works, I think, is that nothing in it can hide. Equal parts means every ingredient has to pull its weight — the gin, the lime, and two liqueurs with big personalities.
What was in the glass
Solaz made mine with Tanqueray gin, and — this matters — with the real supporting cast. The bottles came out where I could see them: Luxardo Maraschino, in its signature straw-wrapped bottle, and Green Chartreuse, the French herbal liqueur the Carthusian monks have made since the 1700s. No substitutes, no house-brand shortcuts. A Last Word lives or dies on those two bottles, and the bar had both.
The result: bright and herbal up front, the lime cutting through, then the maraschino’s dry cherry-almond note underneath, and a long, complex finish from the Chartreuse that kept changing as it sat in the glass. Cold, balanced, and dangerously easy to drink. It also happens to be a beautiful drink — that pale green in a coupe, with nothing but a strip of lemon twist on top.
The recipe — make it at home
This is the easiest classic cocktail spec in the world to remember, because it’s the same amount of everything.
The Last Word
Makes: 1 cocktail
Ingredients
- ¾ oz (22 ml) gin — Tanqueray, like they used at Solaz
- ¾ oz (22 ml) Green Chartreuse
- ¾ oz (22 ml) Luxardo Maraschino liqueur
- ¾ oz (22 ml) fresh lime juice
- Lemon twist, to garnish — Solaz served mine with lemon; a lime twist is also classic
Method
- Chill a coupe or Nick & Nora glass.
- Add the gin, Green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur, and lime juice to a cocktail shaker filled with ice.
- Shake vigorously for 10–15 seconds, until well chilled.
- Double-strain into the chilled glass and serve straight up, without ice.
- Express the twist over the drink, then drop it in or discard it.
To make two: use 1½ oz (45 ml) of each ingredient and shake in one batch.
One home-bar note: Green Chartreuse has been genuinely hard to find in the US the last few years. The monks capped production — they’d rather pray than scale up, and honestly, respect — and supply never caught back up. So the hardest part of making this drink at home is the bottle most people don’t have. I got lucky: there’s already a bottle of Green Chartreuse in my cabinet at home, which means my home version needs nothing more exotic than a bottle of Luxardo and fresh limes. If you’ve got the Chartreuse, you’re 90% of the way to this exact drink.
My Rating
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5/5
I don’t hand out superlatives to gin drinks — my shelves at home run brown, not clear. But this cocktail earned its word. Amazing is what I said in the moment, and a few hours of hindsight at a birthday dinner didn’t change my mind. A hundred-year-old equal-parts drink, made with the right bottles, at a bar in Cabo: if you’re staying at Solaz, sit at the bar and order one.
Highlights
- Equal parts, nothing to hide behind — gin, Green Chartreuse, Luxardo Maraschino, fresh lime
- Made with Tanqueray and the genuine liqueurs, not substitutes
- Bright, herbal, and balanced, with a finish that keeps developing
- A Prohibition-era Detroit original, rescued from obscurity in 2000s Seattle
- Dead simple to make at home — if you can find the Chartreuse
- Open-air bar beside the resort’s outdoor pizza oven — a hint of wood fire in the air while you drink
Good to know
- The Last Word: ¾ oz each of gin, Green Chartreuse, Luxardo Maraschino, and fresh lime juice; shaken with ice, served up
- Had at the open-air bar at Solaz, beside the outdoor pizza oven, a Luxury Collection Resort, KM 18.5 Carretera Transpeninsular, Cabo Real, San José del Cabo — resort phone +52 624 144 2100
- Green Chartreuse (55% ABV, made by Carthusian monks in France) has been in short supply in the US since the monks limited production — expect a hunt if you’re buying a bottle
- The occasion: a birthday-afternoon drink on Wed Oct 21, 2026, ahead of our birthday/anniversary dinner at Riccio Di Mare — our third Riccio night of the week, after Sunday and Tuesday
