If you want to taste history tonight, I've already prepared the complete shopping list with all the ingredients. Now, the legend.
The Cosmopolitan has one of the most contested origin stories in modern bartending. Most historians trace it to Cheryl Cook, a bartender at The Strand in South Beach, Miami, who in the mid-1980s created a pink, photogenic drink to showcase the newly fashionable Absolut Citron. A parallel story places it even earlier, in the gay bars of Provincetown, before it traveled down the East Coast.
The real turning point came in the 1990s when bartender Dale DeGroff refined the drink at New York's Rainbow Room and a certain TV show put it center stage: "Sex and the City". Carrie Bradshaw and her friends made the Cosmo a global symbol of metropolitan glamour, and Madonna once ordered 50 at a single party.
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