Emily Cooper

The mother of the Goombay Smash.

Emily Cooper opened Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar on Green Turtle Cay—a small island in the Abacos chain of the northern Bahamas, population around 500—sometime in the 1960s. The bar is roughly the size of a small living room, built into the front rooms of a house, painted bright blue. It serves a single signature drink, the Goombay Smash, and Miss Emily made it with her own hand for decades. She guarded the recipe so closely that even her family didn’t know the exact proportions.

She is one of the more under-documented figures in Caribbean cocktail history, and that under-documentation is itself part of her story. Plenty has been written about the male bartenders of mid-century Havana, Singapore, and Cairo. Comparatively little has been written about the women who ran small Caribbean beach bars in the second half of the twentieth century, despite those bars producing several of the genre’s most-ordered cocktails.

The drink

The Goombay Smash, as served at the Blue Bee, contains coconut rum, dark Jamaican rum, triple sec or Cointreau, pineapple juice, orange juice, simple syrup, and a splash of grenadine. The exact proportions of Emily’s version are still not publicly known. The version Forbidden Altar publishes is a reverse-engineered approximation based on bartenders’ tasting notes and the consensus among Caribbean cocktail historians.

The name Goombay refers to a Bahamian musical tradition—specifically a goatskin drum and the rhythmic style associated with it. The drink is named for the music; the music is the heritage; the drink is the celebration of both.

The bar

The Blue Bee is, by any reasonable measure, one of the most famous beach bars in the Caribbean. It has been written about in Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and The New York Times. American sailors making the Abacos circuit consider visiting it a near-mandatory stop. The bar’s tiny size—maybe twenty customers comfortable at once—and its location on an island reachable only by ferry or small plane mean that visiting requires real intent. People go anyway.

After Emily’s death, her daughter continued running the bar. The Goombay Smash recipe remained closely held; the family has acknowledged that the version served at the bar is the original and that no published version (including widely-reprinted ones from cocktail books) is fully accurate.

What she left

A drink, a bar, and a small but meaningful entry in the larger story of Caribbean cocktail tradition that has been told largely without women at the center. The Goombay Smash spread across the Caribbean beach-bar circuit and became one of the genre’s standard tropical drinks; thousands of bars now serve it. The bar that started it is still open, still tiny, still painted blue, still on Green Turtle Cay.

Forbidden Altar treats the Goombay Smash as a Late Era cocktail and Emily Cooper as a Late Era figure—both because the dates are right, and because the drink’s diffusion through the broader Caribbean beach-bar circuit in the 1970s and 1980s is exactly the kind of late-period genre evolution the category is meant to capture. She belongs in the conversation alongside the more famous male bartenders of her era.

To go deeper

• Bar Miss Emily’s Blue Bee Bar, New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay, Abacos, Bahamas. Accessible by ferry from Treasure Cay. Cash only; ask for the Goombay Smash by name.
• Reading The Bahamian Ministry of Tourism has published occasional features on Emily Cooper; the most thorough secondary source is the Atlas Obscura entry on the Blue Bee Bar.