Kensington

When I was running the cocktail program at the original Franklin Mortgage & Investment Co. in Philadelphia, I always felt like the Quaker City deserved its own manhattan-inspired neighborhood riff. It was only a couple of years since I’d moved back to Pennsylvania from the Big Apple, where I’d learned to bartend, and the cocktail scene there was catching up fast, but you still had to look around for a brown and stirred. When you are a NYC-trained bartender trying to convince folks your mixed drinks are worth $12 in a town with a certain amount of eye-rolling for their close metropolitan neighbor to the north, making a drink called the Greenpoint or Carroll Gardens maybe isn’t the move.

I stumbled on what was one of my earliest mixed drink successes after grabbing a jar of orange marmalade with my lunch hoagie across the street at Di Bruno Brothers, the famous Philly Italian market. While the first couple of tries never really jibed the way I wanted them to, once I realized the bitter orange stuff was begging for the Perfect manhattan treatment—in which you include both sweet and dry vermouth—the recipe wrote itself. Relying on the rounder, usually gentler bourbon in place of the classic rye and Peychaud’s bitters to brighten and coax out the fruitier notes, the Kensington was born.

Don’t forget to double-strain this drink through a tea strainer to catch any bits of orange marmalade; like any dutiful neighbors, we should keep our neighborhoods clean.