‘One of My Favorite Cocktails’: Celebrity Chef Bobby Flay Co-Signs ‘Game of Thrones’-Favorite Negroni Riff

Celebrity chef Bobby Flay walks the red carpet at the 148th Kentucky Derby on May 07, 2022, at Churchill Downs in Louisville, KY. (Photo: Jeff Moreland/Icon Sportswire via AP Images)

On a recent episode of the Always Hungry podcast, celebrity chef Bobby Flay reminisced on the surging popularity of retro cocktails in the modern American bar scene. Alongside his daughter Sophie Flay, Bobby honed in on the rise (and debatable fall) of craft cocktails in particular.

“One of the things that’s happened over the past decade or so is that we’ve seen craft cocktails sweep the nation […] Like any good thing, it got overdone. In my opinion, we wound up with a lot of questionable mixtures,” remarked Flay.

“But it created a really good cocktail culture in the restaurant and hotel business in the United States,” he continued. “It made it a lot more interesting. If you wanted to have a successful restaurant, you needed to have a cocktail list — you couldn’t just serve Gin & Tonics and Martinis.”

Though staples like the Margarita are still as popular as ever, consumers are increasingly demanding a new caliber of cocktail; recipes finished off with bespoke ingredients, flashy garnishes and alluring names that spread like wildfire on social media. Drinks like the Corpse Reviver, Cosmopolitan and Paper Plane are leading the charge, while reinterpreted classics like the Oaxaca Old Fashioned and Espresso Martini breathe new life into old favorites.

Liqueurs — especially Italian aperitifs like Aperol and Campari — have benefitted the most from this movement, catching the eye with bright colors and bittersweet flavor combos. On the podcast, Flay discussed his love for a particular cocktail that balances all these trends in one.

“One of my favorite cocktails is something called the Sbagliato, which literally means ‘mistake’ in Italian. The story goes, a bartender made a mistake mixing a Negroni, and instead of gin he used Prosecco,” said Flay.

“House of the Dragon” star Emma D’Arcy. (Photo: HBO Max/YouTube)

At the tipping point between 2022 and 2023, it was difficult to escape the all-encompassing grasp of the Negroni Sbagliato.

In an interview promoting HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” actor Emma D’Arcy innocuously mentioned that the recipe was a personal favorite. Within days, the simple mix of Prosecco, Campari and sweet vermouth took the Internet by storm, inspiring a cocktail trend that plowed through speakeasies and dive bars nationwide.

If you have a hankering for bygone days (i.e. a year ago), feel free to mix a Negroni Sbagliato up for yourself:

Negroni Sbagliato

(Photo: Sebastian Coman/Pexels)

Ingredients

• 1 oz. Prosecco or dry sparkling wine of choice
• 1 oz. Campari
• 1 oz. Sweet vermouth
• Orange twist

Directions

• Fill a glass with ice and pour in the Campari and sweet vermouth. Gently pour the prosecco on top and garnish the cocktail with an orange twist which has been expressed over the drink.

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