Saving NoLa's Favorite Mardi Gras Cocktail From Extinction

“Wait one second, let me go see if I have any Peychaud’s.” Tommy Westfeldt leaves the room and returns wagging a small bottle of reddish-pink bitters. I’m sitting in Westfeldt’s Gravier Street office in New Orleans, where he runs one of the oldest coffee-importing businesses in the United States. Westfeldt, a Crescent City native, has been drinking Ojen since he was 18 years old. “You know, my father drank Ojen Cocktails, and my grandfather drank them too. It’s been around for as long as I can remember. We usually had it on Mardi Gras day and during Christmas, and sometimes when we went duck hunting,” he reminisces.

Ojen (pronounced oh-hen) is an anise-based liqueur that came into production in 1830 near the small town of Ojén, Spain, in southern Andalusia. It’s sweeter and far less alcoholic than absinthe, and always mixed over ice with seltzer and a few dashes of Peychaud’s bitters (“not Angostura,” Westfeldt emphasizes). In the mid-20th century, Ojen found a thriving market in New Orleans because of its popularity during Mardi Gras, though nobody knows exactly why. “You used to drink absinthe on Mardi Gras day for good luck, but that’s about all I know,” the renowned absinthe collector Ray Bordelon tells me.