1 · Opening
The American Bar at the Savoy has been serving cocktails since the 1890s, which makes it the oldest surviving bar of its kind in Britain and one of the oldest anywhere.
2 · Why it matters
The bar is where American mixed drinks entered European luxury hospitality, at the moment when César Ritz and Auguste Escoffier were reinventing the hotel around it. The Library records all three in the same building.
Its second contribution is a person. Ada Coleman ran the bar in the early twentieth century, invented the Hanky Panky, and was the first woman to be famous in a profession that spent the following century pretending she had not been. Harry Craddock followed her and wrote the Savoy Cocktail Book, which codified the discipline for the world.
A bar that produced both the canonical book and the first celebrated woman bartender is not a hotel amenity. It is where the trade was written down.
3 · Signature & ritual
The Hanky Panky; a pianist; a room whose walls carry the hotel's twentieth century; the book still in print.
4 · What this house does not solve
A house that codified the canon is now measured against it: every guest arrives with expectations formed by a book written on the premises a century ago.
Its history is also a burden of interpretation — the Coleman story was neglected for decades and is now marketed, which is better and not the same as having been credited at the time.
And like the Connaught Bar, it belongs to a hotel: its future is a line in someone else's capital plan.
5 · LHL connections
- LHL-H-077The SavoyThe house.
- LHL-P-004César RitzRan this hotel while the bar was becoming an institution.
- LHL-P-005Auguste EscoffierThe kitchen of the same building and the same years.
- LHL-S-099Connaught BarThe modern London bar that repeated the achievement.
6 · Timeline
- 1893The American Bar is established at the Savoy ⚑.
- 1900s–1920sAda Coleman runs the bar and invents the Hanky Panky ⚑.
- 1930Harry Craddock publishes the Savoy Cocktail Book ⚑.
- 20th–21st centuriesContinuous operation; the book remains in print.
7 · LHL story
“The Woman Who Was Forgotten” — The bar that gave the world its cocktail canon was run, at its height, by a woman whose name the trade then managed to overlook for eighty years.
Source framework
- Hotel archives; the Savoy Cocktail Book; standard cocktail histories.
- ⚑ Founding year and Coleman chronology require two sources.
Sources
What the entry rests on. Each reference records the specific facts it supports, so a disputed line can be traced to the account it came from.