How Do You Make Jeff Koons’s ‘Split-Rocker’ Margarita?

Jeff Koons (after a few too many Split/Rocker Margaritas?).
Photo: Aaron Sherman.

As if the entire Whitney Museum, one of Manhattan’s most iconic public plazas, the side of every other tour bus, and the exterior of Midtown’s massive H&M store weren’t enough, Jeff Koons mania has spread to another corner of New York City: The Summer Garden and Bar at Rockefeller Center.

In honor of his nearby public sculpture Split-Rocker, the artist and the bar have teamed to develop a similarly split cocktail, dubbed the “Split/Rocker Margarita,” and made up of equal parts traditional frozen margarita and strawberry margarita, the New York Post reports. The idea for the drink came about because Koons was spending so much time hanging out at the bar during the planning and installation of the sculpture.

“It sort of developed organically,” Rachel Insler, a spokesperson for the bar and restaurant, tells the Post. “He had a lot of frozen margaritas—well, not a lot, but a few.”

koons-split-rocker-07

Jeff Koons, Split-Rocker (2000) at Rockefeller Center.
Photo: Benjamin Sutton.

But how, exactly, do you make a split margarita?

“The bartender shakes [classic and strawberry margaritas] into the glass at the same time to get a vertical split,” Insler explains. “It’s definitely the kind of thing you’ll see a server walking by with and say, ‘What’s that?'” That’s $14, to be precise.

The best thing about the Post‘s report on the Split/Rocker cocktail, though, is when the tabloid refers to the ubiquitous sculptor as “the James Franco of the art set.” We will very happily take that as confirmation that the Post does not regard Franco as a legitimate member of the art set.


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