Why I Hate Making Flaming Lamborghinis

I don’t have exact statistics, but I’d say 6 out of 10 Flaming Lamborghini orders ended in some kind of mishap — either someone or something getting burned, or something getting broken.

The most common accidents involved burning hair — especially women’s hair if they’d used a lot of hair products. I also saw several pairs of (fake?) eyelashes get scorched, many eyebrows, and in one case, a wig.

One guest also seared their lips. I’d just served the drink to a group and while they were snapping pictures, the straw had already melted. One of the girls tossed the straw aside and, before I could stop her, took a sip from the burning-hot martini glass. You couldn’t actually hear her lips searing, but they were stuck to the glass. Luckily, she was sober(ish) enough to throw the glass away — yes, it shattered.

The first time I ever heard about a Flaming Lamborghini was around 2014, when I was working at Marini’s on 57.

Back then, flair bartending was still a thing, but I wasn’t a flair bartender. So the first time I ever got a drink ticket for a Flaming Lamborghini, I actually had to check with my server to see if they’d made a mistake. I literally thought, “Like a toy car, on fire?!” My senior stepped in and explained it to me, and that night I made my first Flaming Lamborghini.

There are a few different serving styles depending on the establishment — some use wine glasses, some shot glasses, others martini glasses. In our case, we used all three. That made it visually impressive, but even trickier to execute.

The intricate glass tower

The first time — and honestly, most times — it was a little overwhelming. You need to set up the Galliano bottle on the martini glass, and you have to do it slowly so it doesn’t fall. Then comes the most intimidating part: lighting it at the table and pouring the alcohol slowly down the Galliano bottle. By now, the entire bar is watching you, taking photos, waiting for something amazing or catastrophic to happen.

It’s a built cocktail that takes several minutes to prepare at the bar. Then you deliver it to the guest and perform the flaming ritual. Guests inevitably pose for pictures, adjust their angles, and — because they’re in a group — usually argue over who’s going to finish it. All of this takes a lot of time, and I’m just standing there thinking, “How much longer do I need to be here?”

And when it’s all done — assuming there have been no mishaps — you still have to carry a hot, sticky Galliano bottle back to the bar like a weird walk of shame, and clean it off before the inevitable next order. Since it’s mostly a prop for the performance, we often used empty Galliano bottles, but empty or not, you still had to spend a lot of time cleaning melted, caramelized liquor off them.

Even harder than that was dealing with the people around the cocktail. Firstly, it’s a party drink. People order it on weekends. When the crowd is happening and the music is good, there’ll definitely be a Flaming Lamborghini.

No one ever orders it solo, or on a Monday night in an empty bar. If they did, that person probably had some serious issues — you either had an amazing day or a terrible one, and you needed a pretty strong reason to order a Flaming Lamborghini.

Before metal straws, plastic ones were used

In my three years of making Flaming Lamborghinis, gender was irrelevant. The only universal constant was that they were almost always ordered by groups of five or more, in their twenties to early thirties. Given that demographic, anyone ordering it had likely already been drinking, so they were excited to try it. They’d want to pose close to the flame, and every time, we’d do the same dance.

I’d ask them to move away — and they’d never listen. Inevitably, quite a number of them caught on fire.

To make things worse, Flaming Lamborghinis were rarely ordered solo. Once the first order went out and everyone in the bar saw it, suddenly everyone wanted one. Back then, I made it a personal rule to do no more than two orders per night. On busy nights, there was always a back-and-forth among my colleagues about who’d take the next — or hopefully last — Flaming Lamborghini order.

Eventually, I just got tired of smelling burning hair, cleaning sticky bottles, and having to tell grown adults to stop playing with fire.

For me, my last Flaming Lamborghini order — or so I thought — was in 2017. I had already sworn off making them, but one of my favorite regulars requested it for his birthday. Thankfully, it went off without a hitch, but it’s likely the last one I’ll ever make. It’s far less common now, and since I run a cocktail bar rather than a club, I rarely see one ordered. I’ve had two requests this year, but my house rules stand: no Flaming Lamborghinis.

by Jason Julian (Soma Cocktail Bar, Malaysia)