Here’s a selection of innovative bartenders from today and times past who have helped shape the classic library of cocktails.
JERRY THOMAS
“The father of American mixology” learned bartending in Connecticut then went to California to work as a bartender, gold prospector, and minstrel show manager during the mid-19th century Gold Rush. He created his signature drink, the Blue Blazer, at the El Dorado gambling saloon in San Francisco. This involved lighting a mixture of Scotch and sugar afire and passing it back and forth between two mugs to create an arc of flame. He returned to New York in 1851 to open the first of several saloons he owned in his lifetime. He wrote The Bar-Tenders Guide in 1862, the first book of drink recipes published in the US. He created the Martinez cocktail, an ancestor of the martini, as well as many other drinks that appeared in several updates of his Guide. Thomas was a flashy dresser and showman behind the bar. Using bar tools embellished with precious stones and metals he developed elaborate techniques for mixing cocktails, sometimes while juggling bottles, cups, and mixers.
TRADER VIC
Victor Bergeron, Jr., a ribald and colorful son of a grocer, opened a pub he called Hinky Dink’s in Oakland CA in 1932. After various South Seas adventures over the next four years, he transformed the pub into a tropical restaurant with artifacts collected on his travels. He served potent tropical cocktails with adaptations of Polynesian dishes and soon became known to all as Trader Vic. He created the Mai Tai in 1944, a mix of Jamaican rum, orange curacao, orgeat and rock candy syrup, and the juice of a lime. Tahitian friends who sampled it declared “maita’i roe ae” which translates literally to “very good, and how!” and thus the drink got its name. He introduced the Mai Tai to the Hawaiian Islands in the 1950s. About 25 Trader Vic’s restaurants operated worldwide during the Tiki culture fad of the 1950s and 1960s featuring the popular mix of Polynesian artifacts, cocktails, and cuisine. Though many of the original restaurants have closed, Trader Vic’s has again grown to 25 locations.
COLIN FIELD
The Hemingway Bar at the Hotel Ritz in Paris is one of the most legendary bars in the world. Famous authors, diplomats, fashion models, bankers, playboys, and tycoons regularly stop there for a drink. Colin Field, the Hemingway’s head barman, cordially invites them in and mixes cocktails to suit each individual’s mood. Guests at a birthday party one night all wanted drinks made from coconut liquor, something not available in France. Field found coconuts in the kitchen and, with a few other ingredients, made coconut liquor for them on the spot. Field keeps himself well-read and informed, converses knowledgeably in several languages with his customers on everything from bullfighting to junk bonds, and introduces customers to each other. Twice named best bartender in the world by Forbes magazine, Field says “Being bartender at the Ritz is the greatest honor there is in my profession.”
AUDREY SAUNDERS
The Pegu Club, the name a tribute to a storied 19th century British officers club in Burma, opened in New York City’s Soho district in 2005. Owner Audrey Saunders, the “Libation Goddess,” serves excellently crafted classic drinks in her quest to revive the Golden Age of Cocktails last known in the 1920s Jazz Age or even earlier in the days of Jerry Thomas. There’s no soda gun at the Pegu, or sour mix, or lentil-shaped ice chips that make a stingy pour look generous. Saunders stocks soda in bottles, uses fat geometrically pure ice cubes, and makes drink mixes from fresh fruits and juice. There’s no vodka in sight either. She displays 27 brands of gin and a dozen of rye and will make a Martini or Manhattan in a classic style like none you’ve ever tasted. She proudly describes the Pegu as “a gin palace — a sophisticated environment to enjoy an aperitif cocktail.”
EDDIE DOYLE
Long before the TV series, Eddie Doyle tended the bar known now as Cheers Beacon Hill and warmly welcomed in Bostonians from all walks of life. He combined creative mixology skills with an outgoing personality to make customers feel at home “where everybody knows your name.” Called the Bull & Finch Pub until 2002, the bar’s exterior was used for the show Cheers and Doyle for its proprietor Sam Malone. He tended bar there 35 years and offered a smile and friendly conversation to as many as 5,000 patrons a day while Cheers was on the air (1982-93). He used the bar’s fame to launch an annual “Cheers for Children” charity which raised millions over the course of 25 years. In 2009, the City of Boston named the area around the bar Eddie Doyle Square in his honor.
DICK BRADSELL
This quirky and sometimes curmudgeonly British bartender is credited by the San Francisco Chronicle with “single-handedly changing the face of the London cocktail scene in the 1980s.” Dick Bradsell steered London away from fu-fu “style with no content” umbrella drinks in favor of a return to classics simply and precisely made with quality ingredients. As a bartender he is a student of human behavior, a wealth of bar basics, and a library of cocktail information. He invented many new recipes among them the Bramble, the Espresso Martini, and Russian Spring Punch and has won many awards for his cocktail excellence. He writes a regular column for Class magazine, a quarterly guide of “what to drink and where to drink it,” and judges up to a dozen cocktail competitions a year.
DON THE BEACHCOMBER
Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt opened Don’s Beachcomber Cafe in Hollywood in 1934. He decorated it with tropical artifacts from his Caribbean and South Pacific wanderings and served potent rum cocktails along with Americanized Cantonese cuisine. The bar, renamed a few years later to Don the Beachcomber, was such a departure from daily life it quickly gained popularity, especially with Hollywood celebrities. The Tiki style of eating and drinking became the craze over the next 20 years and by the 1950s there were several Don the Beachcomber restaurants across the country. Three of them still operate today in California and Hawaii. Gantt, who ultimately changed his name to Donn Beach, was known not only for his entrepreneurial skills but for his inventive mixology. He crafted the Zombie cocktail in the late 1930s and invented more exotic drinks than any other bartender.
GARY REGAN
Now known as gaz regan, the former Gary Regan came to New York in 1973 and spent 20 years tending bar at a variety of Manhattan establishments. He began to write about spirits and cocktails in trade magazines in 1990 and published his first book, The Bartender’s Bible, in 1991. He’s written eight other books since then, among them The Joy of Mixology which provides more than 350 classic recipes and classifies drinks and cocktails into about 20 families for ease of understanding those with similar characteristics. He writes The Cocktailian, a bi-weekly column for the San Francisco Chronicle, and his articles have appeared in at least a dozen other magazines in as many countries. When not writing gaz is on the road advising major distillery companies, judging cocktail competitions, and conducting workshops in the US, France, the UK, Australia and wherever else the work takes him.
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Find other accomplished bartenders in Who Was…?, Bad Hemingway at Harry’s Bar, and A Dozen Classics.