Cocktail · Medium strength
White Russian
Vodka, coffee liqueur, cream — the Dude's drink, and the dessert cart's rival.
How to order it: Rocks glass, cream floated or stirred. The rug really tied the room together.
Flavor profile
The recipe
- 2 oz vodka
- 1 oz coffee liqueur
- 1 oz heavy cream, floated
- Build over ice; rocks glass
- Stir as much or little as you like
The story
The White Russian descends from the Black Russian, created in the late 1940s by Gustave Tops at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels for Perle Mesta, the American ambassador to Luxembourg. Someone, history is vague on whom, added cream by the mid-1960s, and the White Russian settled into decades of dessert-cart respectability before slowly going out of style. Then The Big Lebowski arrived in 1998, and Jeff Bridges's Dude, padding through Los Angeles with a "Caucasian" perpetually in hand, single-handedly resurrected it. Neither drink, incidentally, is Russian; the vodka alone earned the name. It endures because comfort, like the Dude, abides.
Adjacent pours