On Bourbon Street in New Orleans sits an ancient bar called the Old Absinthe House. Built in the early 1800s, the building was transformed into a bar when mixologist Cayetano Ferrer invented a cocktail called the Absinthe House Frappe in 1874.

Most people in the U.S. aren’t all that familiar with Absinthe, which was a banned substance in our country for most of the 20th century. Distilleries stopped producing Absinthe, a highly alcoholic beverage with hallucinogenic qualities, in the U.S. in 1912.

The U.S. lifted the ban on Absinthe in 2007, but the legal product you’ll find on the shelves now isn’t the same psychoactive substance from the old days. Impressively, the Old Absinthe House stood for nearly 40 years before the Absinthe ban and survived 95 years while still calling itself “Old Absinthe House”. Now you can go in and actually drink Absinthe there legally! Now that’s surviving!

Las Vegas, of course, isn’t shying away from the newly legal Absinthe. Downtown Cocktail Room has a menu of interesting Absinthe cocktails. Ask for the Huntridge or the Emerald Isle if you’re trying to try it out, or just ask the bartender to mix up something for you. Absinthe is so new that mixologists are coming up with new concoctions by the day. Don’t be shy about asking for Absinthe all around the city either.

The New York Times ran a story on the return of Absinthe in December 2007, and check out another informative website on the storied alcohol here.