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The Fabled Pour

The craft cocktail revival

In the late 1980s a New York bartender was told to find a copy of Jerry Thomas. By 2005 New York had a hidden bar with house rules, a gin temple in SoHo and a generation that squeezed its own juice. How the classics came back.

By The Fabled Pour editorial team · 6 min read · Oct 11, 2026

For most of the twentieth century's second half the cocktail was in retreat. Sour mix came from a gun, the Martini was a glass of cold vodka, and the Old Fashioned had become a fruit salad. What turned it around was an old book, a restaurant man with a long memory, and a handful of bartenders who decided that the way things had been done in 1890 was worth learning again.

A list of twenty-six drinks

Joe Baum was one of the great New York restaurateurs of the postwar era. In 1984 he hired Dale DeGroff, who had worked for him before and had spent six years in Los Angeles tending bar at the Hotel Bel-Air, to build a cocktail bar on nineteenth-century lines. Baum's instruction, which has become the founding story of the revival, was to find a copy of Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide and work from there. DeGroff tested the idea at Aurora, Baum's restaurant on Madison Avenue, and in December 1987 the restored Rainbow Room opened with a cocktail list of twenty-six drinks.

The rule was simple and, at the time, radical: nothing without fresh ingredients. No sour mix, no bottled juice, no neon cherries. Robert Simonson's history of the period in Punch describes the late 1990s as a re-education, and DeGroff was its teacher. The Sazerac came back onto a list, and so did the Bobby Burns and the Gin Sling. Bartenders who read about the Rainbow Room went looking for out-of-print manuals, and traded what they found on DrinkBoy and the early online forums. The same thing was happening in London, where Dick Bradsell was stirring an Old Fashioned down in the glass over ice, a method he took from his mentor Ray Cooke and that undid decades of muddled fruit.

New Year's Eve, 1999

Sasha Petraske opened Milk and Honey on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side on 31 December 1999. It was tiny. There was no sign, because he did not want to disturb the neighbors, and for a while you needed a phone number that kept changing. Inside there were posted house rules, borrowed from the bar Angel's Share, about voices, hats and not approaching strangers. The room was hushed, the jazz was quiet, and the drinks were made with a care that nobody downtown had seen.

Petraske's standards became the trade's standards. There was no room for an ice machine, so he hand-cut large cubes and spears from trays, and his followers did the same long after Kold-Draft machines became the badge of a serious bar. The Gold Rush, a Whiskey Sour on honey syrup, and the Penicillin, on honey-ginger syrup, were born there. So was the modern speakeasy, the hidden bar that is hard to find, which Petraske came to regret as the gimmick outran the craft. Milk and Honey never made money. It moved uptown in 2013 and the old room became Attaboy. Petraske died on 20 August 2015, at forty-two, having also opened Little Branch, Dutch Kills, The Varnish in Los Angeles and a Milk and Honey in London.

A club in SoHo

The revival's third act was bigger and brighter. Audrey Saunders had trained under DeGroff. In 2005, with Julie Reiner of the Flatiron Lounge, she opened Pegu Club on the second floor of a building on the edge of SoHo, named for a British colonial club in Rangoon and the gin cocktail it had given the world. The Oxford Companion calls it the first large bar to fully embrace the craft cocktail aesthetic. Where Milk and Honey was tiny and hard to find, Pegu Club was a room you could find, with a long list of pre-Prohibition drinks, most of them gin, and Saunders's own creations such as the Gin-Gin Mule and the Old Cuban alongside them.

Its opening staff reads like a map of the next decade: Phil Ward, Toby Maloney, Chad Solomon and Jim Meehan each went on to open bars that shaped their own cities. Pegu Club closed in 2020. Its graduates did not.

What came back

Two classics show the shape of the revival better than any new drink. The Old Fashioned had been the 1806 cocktail with ice, then an Improved cocktail with liqueurs in the 1870s, then, during Prohibition, a glass of muddled orange and cherry that may have been designed to hide bad whiskey. That version survived among older drinkers for decades. The revival stripped it back to whiskey, sugar and bitters, first in London in the mid-1990s and then in the United States, and the drink returned to its 1880s form.

The Negroni's return was stranger. The drink is attached by a 1920 letter to Count Camillo Negroni and a Florentine bartender, but the equal-parts formula was not printed until 1947, and from the late 1970s to the 1990s it was considered lowbrow in its own country, served tall over two ice cubes as a club drink. American bartenders found it in the old books at the same moment drinkers were moving from sweet Martinis toward stirred, bitter things. Wondrich's entry in the Oxford Companion gives the reason it stuck: easy to drink and easy to make. Brad Thomas Parsons, in Punch, adds that a three-ingredient equal-parts template is hard to get wrong. It became the entry drink for a generation of new cocktail drinkers, and the Boulevardier, its bourbon cousin from 1927 Paris, followed.

The Daiquiri's return was the quietest and the most telling. Rum, lime, sugar, shaken hard. For a trade rebuilding itself on fresh juice and exact measures, it became the test drink. Nothing to hide behind.

Folklore and fact

Fact: the Rainbow Room's December 1987 opening, Milk and Honey's New Year's Eve 1999 opening, Pegu Club's 2005 opening, the Negroni's 1920 letter and 1947 formula, the Old Fashioned's fruit era and recovery. Folklore: that any one bar or person began the revival. Simonson's history is careful to spread the credit across New York, London, San Francisco and Portland, and across many hands. The honest version is a chain: Baum to DeGroff, DeGroff to Saunders and Petraske, and from them to every bar that squeezes its own limes.

Sources

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Sources

  1. Dale DeGroff, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  2. Thomas, Jerry (The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails), Oxford University Press, via Spirits and Distilling (2021) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  3. Where It All Began (the modern cocktail renaissance, 1995 to 2000), Punch (2020-12-02) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  4. The 21st-Century Cocktail Is Born (2000 to 2005), Punch (2020-12-15) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  5. Sasha Petraske, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  6. Pegu Club (The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails), Oxford University Press, via Spirits and Distilling (2021) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  7. Negroni (The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails), Oxford University Press, via Spirits and Distilling (2021) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  8. The Negroni's secret history, Punch (2021-03-26) · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  9. History of the Old Fashioned cocktail, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11
  10. Boulevardier Cocktail, Difford's Guide · secondary source, retrieved 2026-10-11

Fact check: verified