You can spot the drink before you can spot the tennis. Walk into the grounds at Flushing Meadows on any afternoon in the last week of August and the first thing you notice is not a scoreboard or a queue or the roar coming out of a side court. It is the colour. Thousands of tall plastic cups moving through the crowd, each one holding a pink-red drink with three pale green spheres floating near the top, catching the light like something a set designer ordered in bulk. That is the Honey Deuce, and by any sensible measure it is now one of the biggest stars at the US Open.
That sounds like a joke until you look at what it does. In 2025 the tournament sold 738,459 of them across three weeks in New York, a jump of 32 per cent on the year before, which works out at roughly 17 million dollars from a single item on a drinks menu. More than three and a half million have gone out of the serving windows since 2011. For the 2026 tournament, which runs its Fan Week from 23 August and its main draw from 30 August through to the finals on 13 September, the price is holding at 23 dollars, souvenir cup included while supplies last. A cocktail has become a line on a Grand Slam balance sheet.
If you do not play tennis, if you watch it in the evenings with the sound low and a vague sense of who is meant to be winning, the Honey Deuce is possibly the most accessible thing about the sport. You do not need to understand a kick serve to understand a cold drink on a hot day in Queens. So here is the whole story: where it came from, why it works, what it says about the way tennis sells itself now, and how to make a very good one at home without paying stadium prices.
A drink that looks like the sport it belongs to
Strip away the mythology and the recipe is almost aggressively simple. Vodka, fresh lemonade, a drizzle of black raspberry liqueur, and three honeydew melon balls skewered and dropped into the glass. The official build is one and a half parts Grey Goose vodka to three parts lemonade with half a part of Chambord poured last so it sinks and blooms through the drink in that sunset gradient everybody photographs.
The name is the sort of pun you either love or refuse to acknowledge. Honey comes from honeydew. Deuce is the tennis term for forty all, the score that refuses to end, the one piece of tennis vocabulary that even people who have never held a racket seem to know. Put them together and you have a drink that explains itself in two syllables.
But the reason it works is the garnish, and the garnish was an accident. The melon balls look exactly like tennis balls. Not approximately, not if you squint: they are the right size, the right colour, and they sit at the top of the glass where a photograph will find them. Every person holding one is producing free advertising for the tournament, every hour, for three weeks. No marketing department has ever designed anything that efficient on purpose.
The farmers market accident that started it
The Honey Deuce was created by Nick Mautone, a restaurateur and drinks writer who was asked to come up with something for Grey Goose in the early years of its sponsorship of the US Open. The version he tells is disarmingly ordinary. He was at a farmers market, saw honeydew melon, thought about what it would look like scooped into balls, and realised he had a tennis ball sitting in his hand. The cocktail was built around the garnish rather than the other way round.
It arrived on the menu at the US Open in 2007 and cost 12 dollars. For years it was a nice touch, a well-made drink at a sporting event, the sort of thing a regular would order out of habit. It was not yet a phenomenon. The phenomenon came later, and it came from the cup.
Why the cup matters more than the cocktail
At some point the US Open started sending the drink out in a tall commemorative cup printed with the tournament branding and the year. That single decision changed the economics of the thing. You are no longer buying a drink. You are buying a drink and a souvenir, and the souvenir goes home in a tote bag, sits in a kitchen cupboard, and gets used for iced coffee in November while somebody explains to a visitor where it came from.
Collectors chase the old years. The cups turn up on resale sites after every tournament, listed by people who bought four drinks and kept three cups. Fans stack them by season on a shelf the way other people keep concert tickets. The tournament has effectively convinced hundreds of thousands of visitors to pay for merchandise and then thank it for the privilege, and the merchandise arrives full of something cold.
That is also why the price holding at 23 dollars for 2026 became a small news story of its own. In a summer where the cost of a day out has gone one direction only, the USTA left its most visible item untouched. Twenty-three dollars is still a lot for a cocktail. It is a good deal less than the outrage the same drink would have generated at twenty-six.
The numbers behind the pink drink
The scale is worth sitting with. Nearly three quarters of a million Honey Deuces in 2025. A third more than the year before. Around 17 million dollars in revenue from a glass of raspberry lemonade with a stick of melon in it.
The effect spills out past the gates too. Retail data shared after last year showed a huge spike in shoppers buying the ingredients together during the fortnight of the tournament, people going home and rebuilding the drink in their own kitchens because they had seen it on television for two weeks. That is the part that should interest anybody who thinks about how sport makes money now. The tournament sold the drink inside the grounds and, at the same time, sold the idea of the drink to everybody watching from a sofa in another time zone.
Tennis has spent years trying to work out how to reach people who are not already fans. It turns out one answer was a garnish.
What the other Slams put in your hand
Every Grand Slam has its edible signature, and comparing them tells you a lot about the four events.
Wimbledon has strawberries and cream, priced at 2.85 pounds in 2026, a rise of fifteen pence on the year before and still the most famous bargain in sport. Alongside it sits a glass of Pimms at 13.45 pounds. The first Pimms bar opened at the All England Club in 1971, and the pairing has become so fixed that the strawberries are a scoring system of their own: people measure the fortnight in punnets. Wimbledon sells restraint and tradition, and it prices the strawberries almost as a public service.
Roland Garros pours champagne. Moet and Chandon has been part of the furniture in Paris for years, and the mood is exactly what you would expect from a tournament that treats a fortnight on clay as a social season. Nobody is being handed a novelty cup at Roland Garros.
The Australian Open, watching the Honey Deuce work, built its own answer: the Lemon Ace, a citrus and passionfruit drink designed to taste like an Australian summer, all fresh lemon, passionfruit and mint. It is a straightforward attempt to bottle the same lightning, and it tells you the Honey Deuce is now a template rather than a curiosity.
And New York sells New York: loud, pink, photographable, expensive, and completely unbothered about being any of those things. If you want the full picture of how that atmosphere works after dark, we went deep on the night sessions at Arthur Ashe earlier this month, and the drink is a supporting character in every one of those evenings.
The rest of the 2026 menu
The Honey Deuce gets the headlines, but the food operation around it has quietly become one of the better restaurant districts in Queens for three weeks a year. The 2026 tournament runs five restaurants, around 70 concession stands and 78 portable carts across the site.
This year the culinary line-up added some serious names. Cosme, the restaurant from chef Enrique Olvera, brings its duck carnitas. Miznon, Eyal Shani's Mediterranean fast-casual chain, is new to the Food Village with its green beans in a paper bag and pitas stuffed with schnitzel and tahini. Salt Hanks, the West Village sandwich shop that grew out of a very large internet following, is serving a prime rib French dip with a pot of jus for dunking. Morimoto is back. COQODAQ turned up with chicken nuggets and caviar, which is either the most New York sentence ever written or a dare. KIMBOP, from restaurateur Simon Kim, is serving a version of his mother's recipe.
On the drinks side the Honey Deuce now has company: the tequila brand Dobel runs a bar with Jose Andres restaurant Oyamel, where the Ace Paloma comes with grapefruit soda and a black salt rim. Nobody is going to dethrone the melon balls, but the menu has stopped being a single trick.
If you are actually going, the free days are the value play. Fan Week runs from 23 August with qualifying, practice sessions and the Mixed Doubles Championship, and grounds access on those days costs nothing at all. We wrote a full guide to what Fan Week actually gets you, and the short version is that the same cocktail tastes considerably better when the tennis around it was free. For everything else about the tournament itself, the draws, the courts, the history, our US Open guide has it.
How to make a Honey Deuce at home
Here is the good news for the several million of us who will be watching from a kitchen rather than a stadium: this is an easy drink. It is a raspberry lemonade with a hat on. If you can pour, you can make it.
The build, per glass:
Chill a tall glass properly. Ten minutes in the freezer, or fill it with ice water for five minutes and tip it out. Fill the cold glass with ice, right to the top. Pour in one and a half parts vodka. Top with three parts fresh lemonade. Finish with half a part of black raspberry liqueur, poured gently over the top so it sinks in a slow ribbon rather than mixing straight in. Garnish with three honeydew melon balls on a skewer.
Two details separate a decent version from a very good one. The first is the lemonade. Use fresh, properly tart lemonade rather than anything from a bottle labelled lemon drink, because the whole cocktail is balanced against that sourness and a sweet mixer turns it into syrup. The second is the melon. Freeze the honeydew before you scoop it. Cold, firm melon gives you clean spheres instead of sad wet lumps, and frozen balls double as ice that does not water down the glass.
The kit that makes it easy
None of this needs a home bar. It needs about four objects, most of which cost less than a single round at the tournament.
A stainless steel melon baller is the one non-negotiable item, and it is the cheapest thing on the list. A double-ended one gives you two sizes, which matters more than you would think when the melon is hard and cold.
Serve it in the right shape of glass. The drink is built tall over a lot of ice, so a set of collins or highball glasses does the job, and the height is what gives you that layered pink gradient. If you are drinking in the garden, reusable plastic tumblers are closer to the stadium experience anyway.
Measure it. The ratio is the whole drink, and eyeballing spirits at home always drifts generous. A simple cocktail jigger keeps every glass tasting like the last one.
For the garnish, a handful of stainless cocktail picks beats a wooden toothpick, and they last for years. If you are making the lemonade properly, a citrus press turns a bag of lemons into juice in about four minutes.
Ice is the quiet variable. Small ice melts fast and thins the drink out by the second changeover, so large silicone cube trays are worth the freezer space during a two-week tournament. And if people are coming over, batch it: mix the vodka and lemonade in a glass pitcher with a lid, keep it in the fridge, and add the raspberry liqueur and melon to each glass as you pour so the layers stay intact. A serving tray with handles saves you three trips during a tie-break.
If you are planning the whole evening rather than just the drink, our guide to hosting a US Open watch party covers the timings, the food and the eternal problem of what to do about the four-hour five-setter that starts at eleven at night.
The version for people who are not drinking
The Honey Deuce is easy to build without alcohol, and it comes out better than most virgin cocktails because the drink was never really about the vodka. Fill the glass with ice, top it with fresh lemonade, add a spoonful of raspberry syrup or a splash of thick raspberry cordial poured last so it still sinks, and skewer the three frozen melon balls exactly as before. You get the same colour, the same garnish, the same photograph. Serve it in the same glass and nobody at the table has to announce anything about what they are drinking, which is the entire point.
For children, drop the syrup to a drizzle and add a squeeze of lime. Frozen melon balls, it turns out, are the most reliably popular thing you can put in front of a nine-year-old.
What a melon ball says about modern tennis
There is a slightly snobbish argument that goes: a Grand Slam should be remembered for its champions, not its concessions. It is a fair point and it misses something.
Tennis at the top has a genuine problem holding attention across a long season. Between the four majors there are months where a casual viewer cannot name the tournament being played, and the sport has spent a decade trying to fix that with new formats, new events and louder presentation. The Honey Deuce solves a different version of the same problem, and it solves it sideways. It gives people who are not tennis obsessives a reason to turn up, a thing to hold, a picture to post and a story to tell. Some of them stay for the tennis. A good number come back next year.
The drink also flatters the event honestly. It is bright, unserious, unmistakably New York, sold to a crowd that arrives in the afternoon heat and stays until the floodlights come on. It fits the US Open the way strawberries fit Wimbledon: not because a committee decided it should, but because it turned out to describe the place.
And there is something quietly pleasing about the fact that the whole empire started with a man at a farmers market noticing that a melon ball looked like a tennis ball. Nearly twenty years and three and a half million cups later, that is still the joke at the centre of it. Every one of those drinks is a small visual gag about the sport being played fifty metres away, handed over a counter to somebody who may not know the difference between a slice and a topspin backhand and does not need to.
Make one this fortnight. Freeze the melon the night before, get the lemonade properly sharp, and put the glass down somewhere you can see the television. Then keep the cup. In February, when the tennis has moved to the other side of the world and New York is grey, it will be sitting in your cupboard holding pens or orange juice, and it will still smell faintly of a summer evening in Queens.
