The Naked and Famous is a modern classic built from four things in equal parts: mezcal, Aperol, yellow Chartreuse and lime juice. It was created by the bartender Joaquín Simó at Death & Co in New York, around 2011, and he has described it as the love child of two older drinks, the Last Word and the Paper Plane. Those two share one trick: take four ingredients, use the same amount of each, and the drink falls into balance almost by itself. This one keeps the trick and swaps in smoke.
| Ingredient | Measure |
|---|---|
| Mezcal | 22.5 ml (¾ oz) |
| Aperol | 22.5 ml (¾ oz) |
| Yellow Chartreuse | 22.5 ml (¾ oz) |
| Fresh lime juice | 22.5 ml (¾ oz) |
Squeeze the lime just before you start; bottled juice flattens the drink. Put all four ingredients in a shaker, fill it with plenty of cubed ice and shake hard for about 10–12 seconds, until the tin is painfully cold. Strain into a chilled coupe. The shake is not only about chilling: it adds water (bartenders call this dilution), roughly a quarter of the volume, which turns four strong liquids into something you can sip.
Use a mezcal you would be happy to sip, not the cheapest bottle. A fairly gentle, lightly smoky style works best here; a very smoky one will talk over the other three. Yellow Chartreuse is a French herbal liqueur made by Carthusian monks. The yellow one is milder and sweeter than the green (40% alcohol against 55%) with notes of honey and saffron. There is no direct substitute, which is why this drink has a bottle you have to buy for it.
Each ingredient does one job. Lime is the sour, and it holds up the whole drink. Aperol brings sweetness and a gentle orange bitterness. Yellow Chartreuse adds herbs and a honeyed sweetness. Mezcal gives smoke and a vegetal, earthy backbone, because the agave hearts are cooked in earth pits before they are fermented and distilled.
Four equal parts is a shortcut to balance, not a law. Move one part and you can taste exactly what it was doing.
Lime is a quarter of the glass, which is roughly where a sour sits comfortably: sweet and bitter from the other three, sour from the lime. The Paper Plane uses the same four-equal-parts idea with bourbon, Aperol, amaro and lemon; the Last Word uses gin, green Chartreuse, maraschino liqueur and lime. If you have read our piece on the Paper Plane, this will feel familiar.
Use the tool below to change one part at a time and see what happens to the glass, the share of lime and the rough strength. Scale it for a few friends too, and switch between ml and oz.
Swap the base and you get a different drink. Tequila blanco in place of mezcal keeps the structure but loses the smoke. Green Chartreuse instead of yellow makes it stronger and more bitingly herbal, so trim it a little. A splash of soda in a tall glass over ice turns it into a longer, lighter serve for a warm afternoon.
For a no-alcohol version, rebuild each part rather than just removing the spirit. Use 22.5 ml of cooled, strongly brewed lapsang souchong tea for the smoke (it contains a little caffeine, so maybe not as a late-night drink), 22.5 ml of an alcohol-free bitter aperitif for the orange bitterness, 22.5 ml of a chamomile-and-honey syrup for the herbal sweetness, and keep the 22.5 ml of lime. Shake with ice and strain. It will not taste like the original, because Chartreuse has no stand-in, but it holds the same shape: smoke, bitter, sweet, sour. Note that Aperol itself is 11% alcohol, so it is not an alcohol-free swap.
This looks light and orange, but it is not. Two of the four parts are 40% or stronger, and the estimate above puts it at roughly 18–19% alcohol by volume, well above wine, in a small glass. One is plenty for most people, drink water between rounds, and never drive after drinking.
If you only buy one thing for this drink, it is the Chartreuse; the other three are easy to swap. A mezcal with moderate smoke is more flexible than a heavily smoky one. Fresh limes beat any bottle. And a well-chilled glass makes the shaken dilution taste crisper, so put the coupe in the freezer before you start.