The golden age of hotel bars

The cocktail was born in American saloons, but it grew up in hotels. Between the opening of the Waldorf in New York in the 1890s and the outbreak of war in 1939, the grand hotel bar became the place where recipes were standardized, written down and sent around the world.

The brass rail

The Waldorf opened on Fifth Avenue in 1893, joined the Astoria next door in 1897 to become the Waldorf-Astoria, and its bar, which regulars called the Big Brass Rail, was the model of the American hotel bar in its prime. We know it mostly through Albert Stevens Crockett, a newspaperman who knew the hotel from its first days and who later worked as its publicist. In 1931, with the old building demolished two years earlier to make way for the Empire State Building and Prohibition still in force, he published Old Waldorf Bar Days, half social history and half recipes. The recipe half came from a leather-bound bar book kept by Joseph Taylor, one of the hotel's original bartenders, who gave it to Crockett after his last shift in 1929, so it records what was actually poured, down to drinks named for the customers who ordered them.

Crockett's book was a memorial. The bar it described had been closed by law for a decade. That is part of why the hotel bar's golden age looks the way it does from here: its American chapter ended in 1920, and its European chapter was written largely by Americans who had left.

Coley at the Savoy

Ada Coleman was not supposed to be a bartender. Her father had worked for the D'Oyly Carte family, and after his death Rupert D'Oyly Carte offered her a job in the bar at Claridge's in 1899. A wine butler there taught her to make her first cocktail, a Manhattan. In 1903, when Frank Wells retired as head bartender of the American Bar at the Savoy, she took over, and she kept the post until early 1926. At least five newspapers covered her retirement. She was the most famous barmaid in the country, served Mark Twain and the Prince of Wales, and left one drink that is still on the list: the Hanky Panky, gin, sweet vermouth and a dash of Fernet-Branca, made for the actor Charles Hawtrey, who asked for something with a bit of punch in it. The story is the bar's own, passed down with the drink, which is the honest way to label it.

Her successor had been working behind her for years. Harry Craddock, born in Stroud in 1875, had gone to America in 1897 and worked the great New York hotel bars, the Hoffman House and the Knickerbocker, before Prohibition closed them. He liked to say he mixed the last legal cocktail in the city and sailed the next day. In 1920 he returned to England and a dispense bar at the Savoy. By 1926 the hotel wanted an American in charge of its American Bar, and Craddock, who had the accent, got the job.

1930

The Savoy Cocktail Book was the hotel's idea, and Craddock compiled it. Published in London by Constable in 1930 with Art Deco illustrations by Gilbert Rumbold, it collected about 750 recipes: the American canon he had carried across the Atlantic, the drinks that were emerging from the bars of post-war Europe, and a few of the house's own. The historian Gary Regan called it probably the most important cocktail book of the twentieth century, and it is still reprinted today. Craddock earned nothing from it.

Two drinks in the book matter for our list. The French 75, gin and champagne with lemon and sugar, appears there in the form most bars still use. And the book prints both a Singapore Sling and a Straits Sling, which brings us to the other side of the world. Craddock went on to co-found the UK Bartenders' Guild in 1934 and to open the Dorchester's bar at the end of the decade. He retired in 1947 and died in 1963, buried in a common grave.

Place Vendome

The Ritz Paris had opened on 1 June 1898, with Cesar Ritz as host and Auguste Escoffier in the kitchen, but its bar came later. The Cambon bar opened in 1921, and the man asked to run it was Frank Meier, an Austrian from a family of innkeepers who had trained at the Hotel Cecil in London, spent seven months at the Hoffman House in New York in 1903, and run his own Brunswick Bar on the Rue des Capucines from 1908 until the war. Meier ran the Ritz bar on commission. By the accounts that survive, his job was largely a manager's and a host's: he met guests at the door, and the mixing was often left to others.

In 1923 he served a Sidecar made with cognac from 1865, a bottle older than the hotel. In 1936 he published The Artistry of Mixing Drinks, printed in Paris in English, with his own creations marked with his initials. That same year the hotel finally let women into the Cambon bar; until then they had waited in a room across the corridor. The hotel today names a bar for Hemingway, its most famous drinker.

The Long Bar

At the far end of the empire, Raffles Hotel in Singapore had its own bar culture, and its own drink. The hotel's account is that the Singapore Sling was first mixed at the Long Bar in 1915 by a Hainanese bartender named Ngiam Tong Boon, in a room known as the rendezvous of planters, where the rubber men of Malaya spent their weekends and brushed their peanut shells onto the floor. The pink, juice-like drink, the hotel says, let women drink gin in a room where etiquette allowed them only tea.

The record is more layered. Slings appear in Singapore newspapers from 1897 and a Pink Sling in 1903. Ngiam worked at the Long Bar from 1899 and died in 1915, the year the hotel gives for the drink's invention. Robert Vermeire printed a Straits Sling in 1922 and Craddock printed two versions in 1930, and none of them has pineapple juice or grenadine. The hotel's earliest recipe evidence is a 1936 note a visitor wrote after asking a bartender how it was made, and the fruit-heavy version served today is tied by Difford's Guide to the hotel's relaunch in the 1970s.

Folklore and fact

Fact: Coleman's tenure, Craddock's book, the dates of the Cambon bar and Meier's book, the Waldorf's opening and Crockett's history are all documented. Folklore, or at least unverified: Craddock's last legal cocktail, the Hanky Panky anecdote as told by its creator, and the 1915 Singapore Sling in its modern form.

Sources

• Old Waldorf Bar Days (listing). Kitchen Arts and Letters, Albert Stevens Crockett, Aventine Press, 1931. https://www.kitchenartsandletters.com/products/op-old-waldorf-bar-days
• Ada Coleman. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/people/51549/bartender/ada-coleman
• Harry Craddock. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/people/51726/bar-manager/harry-craddock
• Meier, Frank. The Oxford Companion to Spirits and Cocktails, Fernando Castellon, Oxford University Press, 2021, via Spirits and Distilling. https://www.spiritsanddistilling.com/dictionary/acref-9780199311132-e-67
• Ritz Paris: history. Famous Hotels, undated. https://famoushotels.org/hotels/ritz-paris
• Long Bar, Raffles Singapore. Raffles Hotels and Resorts, undated. https://www.raffles.com/singapore/dining/long-bar/
• Singapore Sling. Difford's Guide, undated. https://www.diffordsguide.com/encyclopedia/446/cocktails/singapore-sling
• Old Waldorf Bar Days (Pink Lady column). Massachusetts Beverage Business, 2023. https://archives.beveragebusiness.com/?p=33197
• Waldorf-Astoria (1893 to 1929). Wikipedia, undated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldorf%E2%80%93Astoria_(1893%E2%80%931929)
• The Savoy Cocktail Book, first edition. Sotheran's, undated. https://sotherans.co.uk/products/craddock-harry-gilbert-rumbold-illustrator-the-savoy-cocktail-book
• The Savoy Cocktail Book. The Marginalian, Maria Popova, 2011. https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/08/19/savoy-cocktail-book/