The Roxie Ray is a strawberry-and-passionfruit tiki sour created by Simon Difford himself in June 2023, at The Clocktower — his own office and private bar in Rye, England. The name comes from Roxie Ray, the vocalist on Dojo Cuts' 2012 soul single "Lift Me Up," not from a bartender, a hotel, or a Polynesian myth. It's a genuinely documented modern drink — real creator, real place, real date — but the documentation itself runs exactly one source deep: Difford's Guide's own recipe page. No independent bar write-up, cocktail-book reprint, or second recipe site has picked it up yet, so treat the pedigree as specific but unverified outside its own house.
A drink invented in an office, named for a song from a record shelf — that's about as honest as tiki provenance gets these days.
A Song Title, Not a Place Name
Simon Difford built the Roxie Ray at The Clocktower, the Rye, East Sussex building that doubles as Difford's Guide's headquarters and Difford's own well-stocked private bar. He's credited elsewhere on the same site with several other in-house creations from the same period, so the Clocktower functions less like a public tiki bar and more like a working test kitchen. The name is a music reference: Roxie Ray sings lead on "Lift Me Up," a 2012 track by the Sydney soul outfit Dojo Cuts, off their album Take From Me.
That's the entirety of the documented history. There's no earlier "Roxie Ray" drink to reconcile it with — it isn't a relative of Ray Buhen's 1968 Tiki-Ti staple "Ray's Mistake," despite the shared first name; those two share no ingredients or story — and no second source beyond Difford's own recipe page has written the drink up. Treat it as a real but thinly attested modern original.
The Spec
Fresh strawberries get muddled first, then the shaker fills with two rums, a passionfruit liqueur, a whisper of amaro, lime, and two sweeteners — strawberry syrup and grenadine — in precise sixth- and quarter-ounce pours — the kind of small-batch modifier stacking that separates modern craft tiki from a simple rum punch.
Two rums doing different jobs
The bulk of the base is funky, overproof white rum — full-proof and full of ester punch so it can stand up to muddled strawberry and passion fruit liqueur without disappearing. A small pour of dark rum underneath adds molasses depth without pushing the whole drink toward brown-spirit territory.
A sixth-ounce of amaro, not a flavor you're meant to taste
Amaro Santoni's job here is structural: at 1/6 oz it's a bittering agent, not a headline ingredient, there to keep the strawberry-passionfruit combination from reading as candy. Cut it and the drink still works, it just gets sweeter and flatter.
Bottom Line
The Roxie Ray is a well-built modern strawberry tiki sour with real, specific parentage — Simon Difford, a working date, an actual bar — even if nobody outside Difford's Guide has written it up yet. Mix it on the strength of the recipe, not the folklore, because there isn't any folklore to lean on.