Drink Like a Pirate: The Tale of the Pirate’s Dream Cocktail

The Pirate’s Dream is a cocktail you’ve probably never heard of, created by a man you probably have. His name was Owen Brennan, patriarch of the Brennan family of restaurateurs in New Orleans. Nearly a century later, his descendants are still behind legendary establishments like Brennan’s, Commander’s Palace, Napoleon House, and other culinary landmarks.

Owen Brennan was also one of the great entrepreneurs and showmen of the French Quarter in the post-Prohibition years. He understood what tourists liked—and one of the things they assuredly liked was pirates.

Pirates had long fascinated Americans. But it was Robert Louis Stevenson’s widely read Treasure Island (1883) that helped transform buccaneers into folk legends. The book was adapted for film five times before 1934, when MGM released its hit version starring Wallace Beery and Lionel Barrymore. Pirates also filled the airwaves: The popular radio series Terry and the Pirates ran for over a decade beginning in 1937, and Errol Flynn became the embodiment of swashbuckling with Captain Blood (1935) and The Sea Hawk (1940).

Few American cities were more naturally suited to pirate lore than New Orleans. With its narrow streets and spalling buildings, the French Quarter had the vibe of a northern Caribbean haven where pirates bellowed for grog and wenches. It also had the historical advantage of once being home to an actual pirate, Jean Lafitte, who operated in the region into the early 19th century.

New Orleans embraced its role as a former pirate stronghold, and pirate lore became a core feature of the city’s nostalgia-driven tourism industry. The Pirate’s Chest Gift Shop and Tea Room touted its location on Pirates’ Alley, an otherwise unremarkable street off Jackson Square. Legend held that the alley was named for the pirates who once caroused there. Never mind that it ran between the Catholic church and city hall, and next to the jail, which is to say among the least inviting places for pirate nonsense.

A somewhat decrepit Bourbon Street building that predated the great fire of 1788 became famous among tourists as Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, despite a lack of convincing evidence that Lafitte ever owned it or that a blacksmith shop ever operated here. In the 1930s, the unremarkable tavern that occupied the building pivoted to lean heavily into its supposed connection with rogues and ruffians.

Owen Brennan was not to be left behind. In 1943, he acquired what many believe was the oldest bar on Bourbon Street, dating back to 1815, and gradually rebranded it as Jean Lafitte’s Absinthe House. For the edification of visitors, he created “The Secret Room” on a second-floor mezzanine, where department store mannequins and Mardi Gras costume cast-offs were arranged to depict the supposed meeting between Lafitte and General Andrew Jackson before the Battle of New Orleans.

But Brennan’s pirate-themed bar needed a signature drink. Thus was born the Pirate’s Dream.

Brennan once described the cocktail as “five ounces of rum, and grenadine and cherries and mint and stuff,” which sounds about right for Bourbon Street.

Brennan once described the cocktail as “five ounces of rum, and grenadine and cherries and mint and stuff,” which sounds about right for Bourbon Street. (He later clarified it also included orange juice, lemon juice, and bitters, and was served in a 26-ounce glass filled with crushed ice—a sort of proto-slushie.) A 1954 account in the Washington Afro-American praised it as having “all the elements that go into the making of a first-class party drink.”

The Pirate’s Dream was promoted on the cover of the bar’s cocktail menu, which featured an illustration of a menacing ship with a fluttering skull and crossbones. The drink came from “a treasured formula,” the menu crowed, and invited guests to “Recapture the Past with… the High Brow of All Low Brow Drinks.”

“Can you imagine a single drink that costs $2.50?” a visitor from Kansas City marveled in 1948. (Adjusted for inflation, that’s nearly $34 today—so, no.) Still, the drink became widely famous. The Chicago Tribune in 1963 grouped it with the Hurricane and Ramos Gin Fizz as a must-try New Orleans libation. That same year, Cosmopolitan reported that it was served in a “twenty-eight-ounce vase and features a fruit salad floating in four kinds of rum with twelve straws protruding.”

One report, unconfirmed, claimed that a limousine once pulled up to the curb outside the bar and a request came for a Pirate’s Dream to go—from none other than President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the back seat.

The Brennan family sold the bar in 1963 to focus on their flagship restaurant. Under new ownership, the bar for a time lost its luster. And the Pirate’s Dream soon sailed off into the mists of legend—arrrrguably the most famous of forgotten drinks.

The post Drink Like a Pirate: The Tale of the Pirate’s Dream Cocktail appeared first on Imbibe Magazine.