Naked and Famous

The Naked and Famous is the mezcal cocktail that conquered the world by refusing to be complicated. Joaquín Simó created it at Death & Co in New York in 2011: equal parts mezcal joven, Yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, and fresh lime juice, shaken hard, double-strained into a chilled coupe, no garnish. Every ingredient is measured the same, nothing is muddled or infused, and the drink balances on the first try. That reliability, as much as the flavor, explains why it is probably the single most-served mezcal cocktail in serious bars worldwide.

Simó was open about the drink's parentage. He described it as "the bastard child born out of an illicit Oaxacan love affair between the Last Word and the Paper Plane." The Last Word is the classical equal-parts sour of gin, Chartreuse, maraschino, and lime; the Paper Plane is Sam Ross's equal-parts riff of bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon, created at Little Branch. The Naked and Famous takes the equal-parts skeleton from the first and the bitter-orange Aperol backbone from the second, then hands the whole structure to mezcal, whose smoke keeps the honeyed Chartreuse and the candied Aperol from turning saccharine.

The name is a music reference: "Tricky Kid," a track by the British trip-hop artist Tricky on his 1996 album Pre-Millennium Tension, where the lyric "naked and famous" appears. The attribution is as solid as modern cocktail history gets. Simó has given consistent first-person accounts, the recipe is printed in Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails (Kaplan, Fauchald, and Day; Ten Speed Press, 2014), and the International Bartenders Association added the drink to its Official Cocktails list in 2020, less than a decade after its creation.

The drink also marks a generational moment. Four years earlier, Phil Ward's Oaxaca Old Fashioned had eased mezcal onto New York drinkers through the familiar Old Fashioned format, with a base weighted toward tequila. The Naked and Famous needed no such cushion: mezcal stands as the only spirit in the glass, and by 2011 the audience was ready for it. Between the two sits the Division Bell, another Last Word descendant that Ward built at his bar Mayahuel in 2009. For the full documentation of this era, see the cocktails chapter; for the spirit itself, start with the mezcal entry.