“Oh, rubber duckie, you’re the one…” the Muppet Ernie croons during bath time on the beloved children’s show Sesame Street. Ernie—along with Bert, Big Bird, Kermit the Frog, an early version of the Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch—made their onscreen debut on November 10, 1969. Today, fifty-one seasons and 4,591 episodes later, it’s fitting that those who grew up with the show can give it and Jim Henson, the Mississippi native who created the Muppets and voiced Ernie in the early days, an appropriate toast.
“This cocktail was a group effort led by our previous bar manager,” says Logan King, the current bar manager at CAMP, a Greenville, South Carolina, restaurant that opened earlier this year. “We all love Sesame Street. I would wake up every Saturday and watch it, and my parents had to go fight at the toy store to get me a Tickle Me Elmo.”
The team started with the tiny rubber duck garnish and worked backwards. “The thing is, with the duck in there, that drink had better look like a bathtub,” King says. To achieve the right blue, the cocktail relies on a combination of Combier Le Bleu, which is darker, and a coconut simple syrup, which lightens the color and thickens the consistency. The other secrets are Brazilian cachaça, pineapple rum from Hilton Head, banana liqueur, and lemon. The finished product, dubbed “You’re the One,” is fruity and sweet, and King reports that those who order one generally order a second (though perhaps that’s because they want another rubber duck to take home).
“When I drop it off for people, I always say, rubber duckie, you’re the one,” says King. “And they either look at me confused, or they finish the line: ‘You make bath time lots of fun.’”
