The Drink That Started With a Delayed Flight

It was 1943, a flying boat bound for New York had been in the air for hours, and the weather turned bad enough that the captain brought it back down on the Shannon Estuary instead of pushing on. The passengers came ashore cold, soaked, and furious in the way only exhausted travelers can be. At Foynes Airport in Limerick, Joe Sheridan, the chef on duty, poured coffee, added a shot of Irish whiskey, sweetened it, and floated cream on top to warm them up. Sheridan had talked his way into that job with an application that ran exactly one line: "Dear Sir, I'm the man for the job. Yours sincerely, Joe Sheridan." It worked, as did his drink on the fly. Sheridan and his coffee moved with the rest of the operation to the newly built Shannon Airport. That is the address most people credit today.

Its second life started with a travel writer named Stanton Delaplane, who drank one at Shannon, could not stop thinking about it, and talked Jack Koeppler at San Francisco's Buena Vista Cafe into trying to recreate it. The whiskey and coffee were the easy part. The cream would not float the way it had in Ireland, and the two men spent a night in November 1952 failing at it in increasingly undignified fashion, reportedly until Delaplane nearly fell over on the cable car tracks outside. The fix came from the city's mayor, who ran a dairy business on the side and knew that cream aged forty eight hours and frothed just right would sit on top of hot liquid instead of sinking into it. That fix for stranded passengers now shows up on drink menus from coast to coast, most people ordering it with no idea it started with a delayed flight and a chef working with what was on hand.