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The U.S. Open Already Has a Winner: the Honey Deuce Cocktail

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/dining/drinks/honey-deuce-us-open.html

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A few weeks ago, Daniel Zausner, the chief operating officer of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, received an important call from T.J. Murphy, the chief executive of Baldor Specialty Foods. “He says, kind of half joking around, ‘I’m out here in California, making sure the melon ball production is on schedule.’ ”

In the dog days of late summer, the National Tennis Center in Queens, N.Y., home of the U.S. Open, one of professional tennis's four Grand Slam tournaments, becomes the city’s single greatest consumer of honeydew melons. Or rather grape-size honeydew melon balls, which garnish every one of the hundreds of thousands of Honey Deuce cocktails sold at the Open each year.

During the 2024 tournament, tennis fans guzzled 556,782 Honey Deuces — a sugary-tart mixture of lemonade, Grey Goose vodka and raspberry liqueur served in a plastic commemorative cup — to the tune of $12.8 million in sales, making it by many measures the most profitable cocktail in sports.

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Once sold from a single stand, the Honey Deuce is now available all over the U.S. Open grounds.Credit...Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times

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Taking a picture of your Honey Deuce at the Open has become its own status symbol.Credit...Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times

“It’s sold in carts, it’s sold on both levels of Armstrong, it’s at Grandstand, it’s sold on all levels of Arthur Ashe Stadium, it’s sold everywhere on the grounds,” said Mr. Zausner, who joined the National Tennis Center in 2001 and five years later led the push for the Open to introduce a signature cocktail. In 2018, the Open began offering a frozen version, and this year a complimentary mini version of the drink will make an appearance at a pop-up bar in Grand Central Terminal.

Though the cocktail was preceded in both stature and fame by the Pimm’s Cup, the subtly floral concoction served since the 1970s at Wimbledon, Mr. Zausner drew inspiration for the Honey Deuce from a decidedly more American event: the Kentucky Derby, and its mint juleps.