Southside

Classic Cocktail

A classic shaken gin sour built with London Dry gin, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, and mint.

Method

Method & Technique

The Southside is a shaken citrus cocktail with fresh mint.

Add London Dry gin, fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, and healthy mint leaves to a shaker tin. The mint may be pressed very gently if needed, but it should not be crushed or pulverized. Add ice and shake hard until the drink is thoroughly chilled and properly diluted.

Double strain into a chilled coupe or Nick & Nora glass. Finish with a fresh mint sprig that has been lightly awakened to release its aroma.

The shake should do most of the mint extraction. Healthy mint leaves release substantial aroma while being shaken with liquid and ice, so aggressive muddling is unnecessary. Heavy pressure tears the leaves, extracts bitter green flavors, and leaves unattractive fragments in the finished cocktail.

Fresh lemon juice supplies the drink’s acidity and keeps the sugar and mint from making it feel heavy. Lime can also produce a historically and stylistically valid Southside, but it creates a sharper, greener profile. For consistency, lemon is the LMA service standard unless the approved house recipe specifies otherwise.

Double straining is important. It removes ice shards and small mint particles, creating the clean appearance and polished texture expected from a cocktail served up.

The finished drink should taste like gin, citrus, sugar, and fresh mint in balance. It should not taste like bottled sour mix, mint candy, bruised herbs, or sweetened gin water.

Related Core Methods

Guest Story

The Southside is a strong recommendation for guests who enjoy gin, fresh citrus, mint, or clean and refreshing cocktails.

A useful guest description is:
“It’s a bright gin sour made with fresh lemon, simple syrup, and mint. It’s shaken, served up, and refreshing without being carbonated or overly sweet.”

It can work well for a guest who enjoys a Mojito but is open to gin. The mint provides a familiar cooling character, while the gin and up-style presentation make the Southside feel leaner and more polished.

It is also a good alternative for someone who wants a fresh gin cocktail but does not want something as spirit-forward as a Martini or as bitter as a Negroni.

The drink should not be presented as sweet mint lemonade. A proper Southside remains a gin cocktail first, with enough citrus and sugar to support the spirit and enough mint to provide aroma and freshness.

For bartenders, it teaches fresh-herb handling, citrus balance, clean shaking, and fine straining.
For an operator, it is a relatively simple, attractive cocktail that can also serve as a useful foundation for seasonal variations.

Method

Guest Story

Origin

Where It Came From

The Southside is a classic gin, citrus, sugar, and mint cocktail whose exact birthplace remains uncertain.

Several origin stories connect the drink to Chicago’s South Side during Prohibition, the Southside Sportsmen’s Club on Long Island, and New York’s 21 Club. Those places may have helped popularize particular versions, but none can be confirmed conclusively as the cocktail’s original source.

What can be established is that the drink family existed before Prohibition. An early Gordon’s South Side appeared by the 1910s, and a published South Side Fizz soon followed. That early fizz combined gin, mint, sugar, lemon, lime, and carbonated water. The shorter, noncarbonated Southside served up today appears to have developed from that established family of mint-and-gin drinks.

This earlier documentation matters because it makes the familiar story that Chicago bootleggers created the drink solely to cover rough gin unlikely to be the complete history. The Southside may later have become associated with Prohibition bars and gangland Chicago, but it was already circulating before national Prohibition began.

The modern cocktail is best understood as a mint-driven gin sour: spirit, fresh citrus, sugar, and mint, shaken and served cold. It is related to the Southside Fizz, but it is not simply a Mojito made with gin. It contains no rum and, in its standard short form, no soda water.

For LMA service, the drink should be clean, cold, bright, aromatic, and refreshing. The mint should lift the cocktail without turning it grassy, bitter, or full of shredded leaves.

Notes

Bartender Notes

Deep Dive

The Southside looks simple, but it exposes poor herb handling and weak sour balance immediately.

LMA Service Spec
2.00 oz London Dry Gin
0.75 oz Fresh Lemon Juice
0.75 oz Simple Syrup, 1:1
6–8 Fresh Mint Leaves

London Dry gin is the LMA standard because it provides juniper, citrus, dryness, and enough botanical structure to remain present against mint, lemon, and sugar.

A softer or contemporary gin can also work, but the approved bottle should be tested in the complete recipe. Floral, cucumber-driven, or lightly junipered gins may create a delicate version, but they can also disappear behind the mint or make the drink feel softer than intended.

Lemon, Lime, or Both
There is no honest reason to pretend the Southside has always used only one citrus.
Early members of the drink family used lemon, lime, or a combination of both. Modern recipes remain divided. Lemon produces a clean, bright, rounded sour profile. Lime produces a sharper, greener drink that can feel closer to a Gimlet or gin-based Mojito. A split of lemon and lime reflects some of the drink’s early fizz structure.

For LMA operations, choosing one default is still necessary. Fresh lemon provides a broadly balanced restaurant version and remains the LMA service standard. Lime and split-citrus builds are legitimate house variations rather than mistakes.

Mint Handling
Mint is the most important execution point.
The leaves should be fresh, green, cool, and aromatic. Blackened, slimy, dried-out, or wilted mint should never enter the drink or appear as its garnish. Guests smell and see the garnish before tasting the cocktail, so tired mint damages the entire presentation immediately.

Mint does not need to be destroyed to release flavor. A gentle press may be used, but the subsequent shake will pull considerable aroma into the drink. Hard muddling extracts more chlorophyll and bitter vegetal character while breaking the leaves into small fragments.

Double straining removes those particles and gives the finished cocktail a cleaner texture and appearance.

Syrup Control
The LMA recipe assumes standard 1:1 simple syrup.
If a house uses rich simple syrup, the quantity must be reduced and the recipe retested. Using 0.75 ounce of rich syrup without adjustment can make the drink heavy and overly sweet.

Bartenders must know what syrup is inside the service bottle. “Simple syrup” is not a complete operational standard unless its ratio is defined.

Service Formats
The standard Southside is shaken, double strained, and served up.
A Southside Fizz is the longer, carbonated member of the family. It adds soda water and is generally served in a fizz, Collins, or highball glass.
A Southside Royale adds sparkling wine for a more celebratory version.
An Eastside typically introduces cucumber into the gin, mint, citrus, and sugar structure.

Serving the drink over ice, using lime, combining lemon and lime, adding cucumber, or topping it with soda can all work, but each choice changes the finished identity and should be treated as an intentional house specification.

A properly made Southside should be cold, bright, aromatic, lightly sweet, and refreshing, with clean gin structure and recognizable fresh mint. It should not be grassy, syrupy, cloudy, warm, or filled with shredded herbs.