The Roosevelt New Orleans: Seymour Weiss, owner of the Roosevelt New Orleans hotel, now part of the Waldorf Astoria collection, was buddies with Louisiana Governor and United States Senator Huey P. Long, who maintained a suite on the 12th floor of the hotel. The politician’s favourite drink was the frothy, labour-intensive ‘Ramos Gin Fizz’. He loved it so much that in 1935, as a publicity stunt, he finagled the Roosevelt’s then head bartender Sam Guarino to come up to New York and show the misguided staff at the New Yorker Hotel how to confidently make the drink. Named for the official cocktail of New Orleans, the Sazerac Bar debuted at the Roosevelt in 1949 and on opening day, a band of ladies – in the old incarnation of the bar women were only allowed to attend during Mardi Gras – showed up for what has been heralded as the Stormin’ of the Sazerac. Today, the Paul Ninas Art Deco murals and African wood panelling are suggestive of that mid-century promise, especially since many of those guests seated in club chairs will be waiting on a Ramos Gin Fizz.
The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, New York: Two-dollar-a-night beds was the going rate when the Algonquin Hotel Times Square opened in 1902. Purported to be the oldest and longest continuously operating hotel in New York, it is most fêted for the daily, booze-soaked Round Table lunches that transpired here for more than a decade among writers such as Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley and The New Yorker founder Harold Ross. By 1923, the first of the Algonquin’s resident felines became another off-the-wall fixture of the hotel. That optimistic, post-World-War-I literary spirit has surely faded, but if you use your imagination, The Blue Bar, which opened right after the end of Prohibition, can still whisk you away to another decade with its strong Rob Roy cocktail and fusillade of blue light.
Hotel Jerome, Aspen, Colorado: In the late 19th century, the Colorado Silver Boom put Aspen on the map, and ever since Macy’s department store president, Jerome Wheeler, opened it in 1889, Hotel Jerome has played a part in the city’s ascent from mining town to chi-chi ski resort. After the crash in 1893, Hotel Jerome managed to stay afloat as a boarding house, but after World War II celebrities started coming to stay at the renovated hotel on their ski sojourns. In 1970, when Hunter S. Thompson bizarrely ran for Pitkin County sheriff, he made the Jerome’s J-Bar his de facto office. A little wild-west kitschy, the rustic bar is where to go for subdued aprés-ski revelry and the ‘Aspen Crud’, a vanilla-ice-cream milkshake spiked with shots of Jim Beam bourbon that was invented at the J-Bar when it was forced to transition into a G-rated soda fountain during Prohibition.
Hark back to a time when politicians, all the more zealous after a few rounds of Old Fashioneds, swapped secrets and plotted strategies.
No. 40
Raspberry Calling
CHARLES H. AT THE FOUR SEASONS HOTEL, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Created by Keith Motsi
INGREDIENTS
45 ml (1½ fl oz) London Dry Gin
15 ml (½ fl oz) Bokbunja raspberry wine
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Fino sherry
5 ml (1 teaspoon) crème de cassis
3 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters
3 dashes of absinthe
15 ml (½ fl oz) Honey Water*
15 ml (½ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ teaspoon egg white
*For the Honey Water (makes 120ml/4fl oz):
90 ml (3 fl oz) honey
30 ml (1 fl oz) hot water
METHOD
For the Honey Water, combine the honey and hot water in a jar and stir. Refrigerate until chilled.
To make the cocktail, combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and dry shake with no ice until foamy, then add ice to the shaker and shake again. Double strain into a Nick & Nora glass.
Decades before bars – and bartenders – acquired a celebrity sheen, there was the bon vivant Charles H. Baker Jr. A New York magazine writer, he inherited a sizable chunk of cash that funded a life-changing round-the-world cruise. His chronicles of mysterious cocktails sipped in far-flung locales led to the publication of The Gentleman’s Companion in 1939. Baker, whose droll book of anecdotes and recipes is prized in bartending circles, would surely have felt right at home in this swish bar named for him.
Opened in 2015, its design scheme merges two disparate sources of inspiration – New England speakeasies and Korean royal palace dress and ornamentation – translating to stand-outs such as metal panelling cast on stingray skins and a glass mosaic that suggests the technique of mother-of-pearl inlaid on lacquerware.
Cocktail menus change here, and so one themed around Baker’s travels to Mexico, say, would yield herbal creations like the crystalline ‘Ms Frida’ with tequila, grapefruit, lavender cordial, bergamot and tonic. ‘Remember the Maine’, the cocktail of rye, sweet vermouth, Cherry Heering and absinthe, which Baker discovered in Havana during the 1933 Sergeants’ Revolt and later immortalised in the pages of his book, is always a worthy order.
No. 41
Moods of Love
LONG BAR AT WALDORF ASTORIA SHANGHAI ON THE BUND, SHANGHAI, CHINA
INGREDIENTS
60 ml (2 fl oz) Michter’s bourbon
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) peach liqueur
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Luxardo triple sec
METHOD
Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Double strain into a Champagne flute.
The origins of Long Bar – which opened when Waldorf Astoria did in 2010 – are distinctly undemocratic. In 1910, when privileged members of the snooty British colonials-only Shanghai Club began roosting in the building, its
