"The Roffignac has long been the most mysterious of New Orleans's many signature cocktails. Drinks like the Sazerac or the Ramos gin fizz were readily revitalized during the craft cocktail movement of the early 21st century; but the Roffignac proved a tougher nut to crack. Named for nineteenth-century New Orleans Mayor Joseph Roffignac, the drink became one of the city's signature cocktails by the 1890s. After Prohibition, however, its place in New Orleans drinking culture never quite recovered. The recipe lingered on at Maylie's Restaurant, where it remained the house cocktail until the restaurant closed in 1983. By this point, the Roffignac had fallen into relative obscurity. In the new wave of cocktail culture that arose in the 2010s, bartenders and liquor enthusiasts across the country endeavored to make their own versions of the Roffignac. They tried to trace its origins back through the years and discover the true recipe for the beverage, often reiterating the same myths and legends about the drink. Robert F. Moss cuts through the noise to share the definitive story of this enigmatic cocktail. The Roffignac explains for the first time how this once-famous cocktail came to be famous-and how it almost disappeared before being resurrected. It also tells the story of dining and drinking in nineteenth-century New Orleans and explores how twentieth- and twenty-first-century conceptions of New Orleans have slanted our views of the drink's history. More than anything, it's a twisting and remarkable tale that highlights the central role that narrative has always played in our cocktail culture, and how slippery and unreliable those stories can sometimes be"--