The Royal Hawaiian, a gin cocktail starring pineapple and orgeat, is a stunning example of the nontiki tropical canon. The cocktail “is tropical and lush, but it has a really beautiful restraint where a lot of tiki drinks are really baroque and opulent,” according to Matt Young, who served the drink at Cane & Table for over a decade. Young is very particular about every aspect of the cocktail, from the overproof gin to the freshly juiced pineapple and exacting orgeat. In his recipe, he breaks with the original spec and makes the drink more New Orleans–friendly by serving it over pebble ice.

A smash hit from industry icon Trick Dog’s first menu, the frothy tequila-based sour remains one of the few early drinks for which the bar keeps all of the ingredients on hand to make at customers’ request—and those requests still roll in, 10 years in.

A perennial favorite, this clarified cocktail takes a drink whose essence relies on both a beach and a blender, and makes it the sort of drink you’d sip near the fire. Our Piña Colada Milk Punch maintains the drink’s tropical spirit with coconut water, pineapple juice and rum (with Velvet Falernum for extra credit), but it’s transformed through the addition of scalded milk and clarification of the mixture with a cheesecloth before being ladled, punch-style, on the rocks.

This bubbly, rose-tinted aperitivo drink from New York’s Maialino (vicino) reads like a cross between a Negroni and a Gin & Tonic. Instead of Campari, beverage director Patrick Smith turns to Mulassano Bitter, a lighter Italian red bitter with a slightly lower ABV, to reinforce the drink’s refreshing profile, alongside Cocchi’s Vermouth di Torino Extra Dry, a newer aromatized wine from the cult-favorite producer. For Maialino, a now-closed restaurant with a notable vermouth service, the chance to spotlight an interesting vermouth in a recipe was an exciting one. “I like the fact that the E Tonico [was] sort of a bridge from the vermouth service to the cocktail menu,” says Smith.

Inspired by what he calls “the most bitter character in literature,” Toby Maloney’s Eeyore’s Requiem is a “deep, dark Negroni, turned on its head.” The drink starts with a base of bitter complexity by stacking three different amari amped up with aromatic French vermouth and juniper-rich gin. “This drink is an excellent foil to the sweet, bumbling, fruity drinks with very little brain,” says Maloney.

New Orleans has its very own Martini riff. Typical of the city of its birth, which has absinthe practically running through its veins, the Obituary differentiates itself from other dry Martinis through its inclusion of the French wormwood spirit where there might otherwise be bitters. William Elliott, of Brooklyn’s Maison Premiere, characterizes the drink as a “stylized New Orleans Martini” that, he notes, makes a perfect pairing for the bar’s renowned oyster program.

The provocatively named cocktail, created at Townhouse in London in 2003 by Douglas Ankrah, is a Martini in name only, but has gone on to become a modern classic. Made with vanilla vodka, passion fruit liqueur and passion fruit purée, its final flourish is a shot glass of chilled Champagne served alongside the drink (intended to alternate with the cocktail as a palate cleanser).

Michael McIlroy’s Rome With a View falls somewhere between an afternoon-appropriate Collins and an Americano. Where an Americano is built with bitter Italian Campari and sweet vermouth, McIlroy swaps in dry vermouth, and, like a Collins, he built it with the refreshing structure of spirit-citrus-sweetener-soda. Low-alcohol and bracingly bittersweet, it conjures warm afternoons looking out over an ancient Italian city.

Top honors in our blind tasting of freezer Martinis went to Bobby Heugel, the Houston-based cocktail bar owner and a known Martini obsessive. The panel recognized this drink’s classic London dry profile and embraced it right off. (Heugel has been known to sell this rendition as a 750-milliliter “Bobby’s Martini” at Anvil Bar & Refuge.)

In this updated 1930s-era recipe, orgeat and Angostura bitters bring a rich mouthfeel and aromatic spice notes that tilt the axis of the sour toward the tropical realm. The simplicity of its build is reflected in several more modern tropical cocktails featuring gin, including the Sleeping Lotus and Royal Hawaiian.