Red Hook Criterium

Every March since the late 2000s, a bike race called the Red Hook Criterium (known as “the Crit”) tears through the Brooklyn waterfront neighborhood it’s named after. St. John Frizell has held a box seat to this spectacle from his perch at his bar Fort Defiance on Van Brunt Street. He recalls the early days of the race as an “unsanctioned, unsponsored, ad hoc race conducted without official permission in the middle of the night on Red Hook’s cobblestone streets,” with a vivid memory of witnessing three stacked tiers of bikes locked to the chain link at the 2010 after-party held at a third-floor walk-up across from the bar.

The race got bigger, and with that came sponsorship and additional races around the world in Barcelona, London, and Milan. Frizell commemorated the first Milan race with a special cocktail. “After all, this was the biggest sporting event to happen in Red Hook since Sir Thomas Lipton docked the Shamrock II during the America’s Cup in Erie Basin back in 1899,” he says. He reached for the Zucca Rabarbaro, the Milanese amaro that had just become available in the United States, and put it “front and center” in a lighter drink, so that “you could conceivably ride a bike after having one or two.” This “bitter and juicy highball” has remained on the menu ever since and is one of the greatest hits at Fort Defiance, especially during Crit Week.