Bars, Lounges & Nightlife Institutions — Part X, Satellite Houses

Every house in this chapter is defined by something that is not the drink. The American Bar by a book, the Connaught by a trolley, Bar Hemingway by a bartender, Bemelmans by a mural, Atlas by an archive, Jigger & Pony by a philosophy of service, and Harry’s by a bar shipped across the Atlantic in pieces.

Two of them wrote the rules a century apart. Ada Coleman ran the American Bar from 1903 to 1926, when women rarely worked behind a bar at all, and trained the successor who compiled The Savoy Cocktail Book in 1930 — the handbook every head bartender afterwards worked from. The Connaught Bar, opened 2008, is seventeen years old and is now the room every new hotel bar is built against.

And the counter-example matters: Jigger & Pony was opened in 2012 by two people who had never worked a bar — a consultant and a flight attendant — on the proposition that hospitality outranks craft. It reached the world top ten.