Latest / Into The Barchive / King Cocktail: How Dale DeGroff Helped Spark the Modern Cocktail Renaissance
Transcript
- ITB: Into the bark hive where the past comes alive Forgotten drinks will revive we thrive Sip the tails, let them drive Welcome to the Bark Hive Hello, Barcaphists, and welcome to Into the Barkive, the podcast where we dive deep into the stories, people, and cocktails that have shaped the way we drink. I'm Tim Wright, Mixologist. You're above average curious drinker, and you're slightly tipsy tour guy through Boo's history. And I'm Dr. Blake Jones, historian, mixologist, and certified specialist of spirits, here to pour out the stories behind what's in your glass. There are certain bartenders whose influence you can trace through a handful of drinks. And then there are other bartenders whose influence you can trace through an entire generation. And today we're talking about a man who, depending on who you ask, either helped start the modern cocktail renaissance, or he was the modern renaissance. Of course, we're talking about Dale de Groff, also known as King Cocktail. And I think that title is interesting because it could sound a little self-important, but when you look at what de Groff Actually accomplish, it's hard to argue with it. I mean, he simply wasn't just a bartender, right? Who happened to become famous. He helped change what Americans thought a bartender was supposed to do. I mean, he helped restore generations of forgotten drinks in the American bar. He helped convince bartenders that fresh juice mattered. He had them think that quality of the spirits mattered, that Glassware mattered, that technique mattered, that ice mattered. I mean, hospitality matters. Yeah, and perhaps most importantly, that the history of the cocktail was not something you had to leave in a dusty old book. And that's really the theme of today's episode. Because DeGroff's legacy isn't simply a collection of recipes, it's a way of thinking. And today we're going to look at that less a legacy through two. Drinks, correct? We're gonna do one that's de groff's help make come back, right? A revival of some sort, and that would be the whiskey smash. And the other drink is one that de Groff created himself, the Fitzgerald. We're talking about preservation with intention or and intention. Yeah. And we're talking about looking backwards and looking forward. And that's a pretty good description of DraGroff's career. So let's go back to the beginning. Because before there was a rainbow room, before there was the craft of the cocktail, before there was the title King Cocktail, there was Dale de Groff trying to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. So grab your shaker and some fresh citrus. Because today we're going to raise a glass to the King Cocktail. Let's get into the Barclays. The first drink we're gonna make is one that Dale deGroff discovered in Jerry Thomas's 1862 bartender's guide made famous again, the whiskey smash. So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take three wedges of lemon. We're gonna pop those lemon wedges into our shaking tin. And so throw two and three in there. From there, we're gonna take a muddler and we're gonna muddle the lemon down. And so what this is doing is not only getting some of the juice from the lemon flesh, it's also getting some of the oils from the lemon skin to give us that fuller flavor. From there, we're going to add three-quarters of an ounce. Of simple syrup. And then two ounces of a quality bourbon. And so I'm using Nelson Brothers Reserve from the Nashville area where we're filming from. From there we're going to add four or five nut leaves. So got several sprigs here. I'm gonna find some that have leaves at the bottom. So there's one, two, and then we'll say three and four. Throw that in our shaking tin. Then we're gonna ice up the large And we're gonna shake her cup kill. Alright, from there we'll break the seal on our tin. We're gonna add fresh ice to our rock's glass. And then we're going to strain our cocktail into the rocks glass. You might want to double strain depending on how tight the coils are on your Hawthorn strainer. We're gonna top up with a little more ice. And then finally for the garnish, we're gonna take our remaining mint here, have a nice bouquet, kind of slap it against our hands to wake up that mint, add it to the drink, and we have our whiskey smash. Cheers. Our next cocktail is the Fitzgerald, a de Groff original. What we're gonna do in a shaking tin, do one and a half ounces of a gin. Here we're gonna use a London dry gin into our tin. Pretty simple, three-quarters of an ounce of simple syrup. This is a one-to-one ratio of water to sugar, three-quarters ounces. And our next ingredient will be three-quarters of an ounce of fresh lemon juice. So we'll take our little citrus f flooser here and give it a squeeze. Three quarters of an ounce. I think that little piece should get us right there. Perfecto. And we have to do four dashes of Angusur bitters. Eight dashes because we're using the Japanese bidder dasher. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. Ice Downer 10. And always give her a good shake. We will now take a nice rocks glass, get some fresh ice. Sexy glassware matters and it's strained. See that Ingasword gives that thing a nice pink color? Makes it sexy. And for the garnish, it calls for a lemon moon. So give it a cut, give it a slice, and just tuck it away. And here we have our Fitzgerald. Now that we've built the cocktails, let's build the context. King Cocktail. Well, before he was King Cocktail, we've got to understand a little bit about Dale deGroff's life. So he was born in 1948, the son of a Navy pilot, and his childhood was anything but stationary. He grew up in places including Rhode Island, the Marshall Islands, Pensacola, Florida, Spain, and Morocco. Well, which is an interesting beginning for someone whose career would eventually become so deeply connected to New York City. Yeah, right. He didn't initially set out to become a bartender. He had studied acting at the University of Rhode Island and eventually made his way to New York City. Okay. And like a lot of people who end up behind a bar, he did a variety of jobs. Bartending was just one of them. But eventually he headed west. I mean It was Los Angeles, specifically the Hotel Bel Air, if I remember correctly, where Bartini can began to, I don't know, turn something that he did into something that he had to take very seriously. And and I think that's worth emphasizing, because when we talk about the cocktail renaissance today, it's tempting to imagine that people like de Groff arrive fully formed, as if there was suddenly this brilliant bartender in 1987. Who had read Jerry Thomas and decided to save the cocktail. But that's not what really happened though, right? He was working as a bartender, he learned the profession, he worked in different environments, and then he just absorbed different techniques. Yeah, and then he encountered someone who would fundamentally change the trajectory of his career. And who is that? Joe Baum. And who is Joe Baum? He was a legendary restaurateurer, and you know, one of the greatest ones of the 20th century in the United States. And in the mid-1980s, he was putting together a new restaurant in New York called Aurora. And Ballum hired de Graff to run the bar, and then he gave him a very strange assignment. He wanted a 19th century cocktail program. So the fresh juices, classic recipes, no shortcuts. No soda guns and no artificial mixers. And he pointed de Groff toward Jerry Thomas. With one little omission. He didn't tell him that Jerry Thomas's book was written in like 1860, blah blah blah. 62? Yes. Okay. So, and of course that makes a wonderful story. De Groff went looking for this apparently contemporary cocktail book in bookstores along Fifth Avenue. Eventually you figured out the book Baum wanted him to find was How to Mix Strints or The Bon Vivant's Companion, published in 1862. And that book became the beginning of something much larger because suddenly DeGroff wasn't simply making drinks. Yeah, he was studying the history of the profession. He was looking at formulas that had largely disappeared from American drinking, and he was learning. That the techniques and standards of the 19th century bar were in many ways more demanding that had what than what had become common in the American bars of the late 20th century. And that gets us to the problem that Dragoff was trying to walk, but I guess he was walking into, right? Because by the 1970s and 80s, American cocktails had become synonymous for many places of like convenience. They were just quick cocktails. That's the reference to the soda gun piece, right? Like pre-made sour mixes, bottle juices, the soda guns, generic spirits. Yeah, and drinks that were often built around speed and consistency rather than flavor and craftsmanship. Okay. Now, to be fair, there were some historical reasons for that. Prohibition had disrupted the American bartending profession, the skilled workforce change. with industrialization you had mass-produced mixers, the rise of convenience foods, and changing drinking habits. The cocktail survived, but much of the craft surrounding it had eroded. So de Gross's response wasn't to invent something completely new. It was to ask, what did we lose and how can I get it back? Yeah. Now, from there in 1987, Joe Bond did something else. Okay, so this is the Rockefeller Rainbow Room piece, right? Yes. Okay. So DeGroff was put in charge of this bar, the r Rainbow Roo in Rockefeller Center. Mm-hmm. And then this is where that story gets kind of interesting, right? Yeah, because the Rainbow Room wasn't some sort of neighborhood cocktail bar. This was one of the most glamorous rooms in all of New York. Sixty-five floors up. Art Deco's surroundings, Manhattan spread out below the windows, and a clientele that expected spectacles. And this is where DeGroff had the perfect laboratory. I mean, a very public laboratory in fact. And the mission was simple. Keep the bar as elegant as the room. Yeah, and according to the Oxford Companion of Spirits and Cocktails, It described the Rainbow Runes bar as becoming the headquarters of the cocktail revolution. And I mean, this isn't hyperbole. De Graff brought in fresh fruit juices, better spirits and liqueurs, fine glassware, classic techniques, and a cocktail menu that treated fresh cocktails as something worth reading about. I mean, think about that for a second. You've got today a cocktail menu with twenty drinks that that doesn't seem Pretty unusual, right? That's just kind of ha modern day just happenstance. But DeGroff was doing something different when he was doing his. He was putting the cocktail itself back in the center of the bar. The menu featured classics that people actually recognize, the Manhattan, the Martini, the old fashioned. But also it had some of those drinks that were much harder to find, the sidecar, the Jack Rose, the Bronx, Ramos Gian Fizz, heck the Sazerek. Yeah, and that list is important because it illustrates something about de Graff's philosophy. He wasn't interested in classic cocktails just because they were old. He was interested in them because they were good. History was a resource, not a museum. And the rainbow room became one of those places where the phil philosophy was very visible. There were no soda guns, as I mentioned before. There were no Prefab sour sour mixes, like everything was fresh. When a drink called for lemon or orange, they use actual fruit. And de Groff was a showman. And that's another important part of the story, because the modern craft cocktail movement sometimes gets portrayed as very serious. Lots of tinctures and measurements, lots of dish discussions about extraction and dilution. And this is what I like about de Groff because he understood the bartending. Could be a form of theater. It was theater. And hospitality is that performance. There's a wonderful example of that with citrus. Yeah. DeGroff had used a technique he had seen at Chasen's in Los Angeles. When expressing an orange peel, he'd light a match and flame oils over the drink. And suddenly the garnish wasn't just a garnish, it was an event. Ooh, right. The ooze and ahs. And that became part of the Rainbow Room's experience though. You weren't simply getting a martini. You were watching someone make a martini. And even the glassware mattered. De Graff went looking for the sort of small cocktail glasses associated with Nick and Nora Charles in the Thin Man movies. The glass wasn't readily available anymore, so a new mold had to be made. And that's the kind of details that tells you that he was trying, well, I guess it tells you what he was trying to accomplish. He wasn't saying, let's make cocktails old fashioned. Let's he was like, hey man, let's rediscover the standards of making like really good cocktails and caring about making those cocktails. Absolutely. All right. A little bit about him. Let's now drive dive down into his cocktails. Technically not his. The whiskey smash. Yeah, so obviously the smash is not a de Graff invention. Okay. It's part of a 19th century drink family. Going back to the Oxford companion, it's described the smash as an American drink featured by Jerry Thomas in the eighteen sixty-two guide. The basic idea of the smash was spirit, sugar, mint, and ice. Okay. Very julepy. Yeah, so Thomas famously described it as a julep on a small plan. Okay. And I mean, I guess that's a very nineteenth-century way of saying Here's a Met Jula, but we're gonna make it a little less dramatic. But the Smash was a maze of drinks in the like 40s and fifty eighteen forties, eighteen fifties, right? Yes. So the brandy smash was especially popular. And then, like a lot of Thomas's recipes, you know, you would have a category, whether it was sour or cocktail or smash. So you had brandy smash, gin smash, whiskey smashes. But by the end of the 19th century, the drink was fading and By the twentieth century it was a historical curiosity. Then DeGroff comes back. Yeah. And he's not merely copying Jerry Thomas here, he adapted the idea. Again, a a template, if you will. He took a template and then elevated it. Yeah, so the addition he made is if Jerry Thomas described the smash as spirit sugar mint and ice. Jerry Dale de Groff, on the other hand, throws in those lemon wedges. Yeah. And they're very important here. It changes the cocktail tremendously. Again, fresh citrus, but the fresh oils that get expressed while you're muddling, fantastic cocktail. Yeah, and so h de Groff's version of the whiskey smash sits somewhere between Jerry Thomas's whiskey smash and a whiskey sour. Yeah. That does make us I guess if you ordered the smash today you can think that de groff like do you think of de groff when you order it or do you think this is somebody else's rendition of that cocktail anymore? I guess it's all about the presentation part for me. Yeah. Right? Are they actually muddling in front of you or because if not, then yeah, I would go, hmm, it's a sour. Mm-hmm. Right. So they started making s these smashes differently after that time, or what happened there? So de groff is not telling people like you gotta like this because it's historical. He and it what people are doing, you can also add other fruit, like other renditions of this strawberries. Or peaches. yes. And muddle the peaches and maybe you add some lemon and peach because you're not getting like enough juice to make this essentially like a sour. But it's more than just sweeten whiskey with mint like a julep. Okay, so you can reasonably say then today that de Groff didn't like come up with this, but he didn't invent the smash, but he definitely reminded American bartenders that the smash existed. Absolutely. Okay, over to the Fitzgerald. Mm-hmm. What's the story behind this Fitzgerald? And the story's almost as good as that drink is. Okay. at the rainbow room, de Groff had a customer who wanted a gin drink. He was tired of the gin and tonic, which was the gin drink leading into the modern cocktail renaissance. So essentially de Graff created a gin sour with Angostura bitters. that is exactly a perfect like that is the simplest breakdown that it describes it perfectly. Yeah. And at first the drink had a wonderfully generic name. It was it was called. The gin thing, right? Yeah. And when you're in the rainbow room surrounded by like the opulent decor, that's probably the least rainbow room name imaginable for a drink. I don't know. But I imagine a little pink-ish hue drink that comes out that's served in a rock's glass, and it's like somebody looks at it and goes, I want that pink thing. Well, it's gin. Yeah. Well, then I want that gin thing. I c I kind of see how a name like that could come up. But Again, it it didn't fit the vibe. No so someone suggested naming it after F. Scott Fitzgerald. Okay. Who was famously associated with gin, just as Ernest Hemingway was associated with many drinks. But specifically the Daggery. Yeah. So the name Fitzgerald stuck. And that's a perfect example of Degroff's approach though, right? Just taking something simple, like a gin sour. Mm-hmm. Adding a little extra pot pepper to it, a little flair with that Ingersora bitters and pfft. Sexy and tasty. Yes. And again, the bitters are what changes the architecture of the drink. Add spice, bitterness, some aromatic depth, and you got something a little more composed than just that straightforward gin sour. Now walk me through this though. We we've talked about this rainbow room, but there was a period of time that the rainbow room was A school? Well, I mean, not in a literal sense, but like a training ground. DeGroff had a large staff. So unlike Sasha Petrovsky's later bar Milk and Honey, which was a very small space, the Rainbow Room was a much larger space, so you had a much larger staff. So he had to teach bartenders how to make drinks that many of them had never encountered. Their menu had dozens of cocktails, and it took months before the rainbow room kind of introduced this new cocktail program to train the team. I could imagine walking into a bar, like as a bar manager, bar director, whatever, and and and the instructor of many a bartender's underneath you. And your boss is pretty much telling you, here are 20, 30, 40 bartenders. Now you're going to teach them how to make a rainbow's fizz, right? Here you're gonna teach them how to make a Sazerac, a sidecar, those other classics that I the Jack Rose, right? But you're not going to use free batched ingredients. You're not going to use a soda gun. You're not going to and you're going to do it with theatrics, with not flair, but with intention. Yes. And and the interesting thing is that the rainbow room wasn't some tiny laboratory where no one noticed. It was successful. It was one of the centers of Manhattan society. And that matters, but because DeGroff demonstrated that a high quality cocktail program wasn't merely like some romantic history version of bringing back the drink. It could work as a business. I mean, to me, that is one of the most important parts of his legacy. He provided craftsmanship that could be commercially viable, right? You could use fresh juice, you could stock good spirits, you could train your bartenders, you could serve drinks that required actual technique. And then people would pay for those types of cocktails. Yeah, and once the model worked at the rainbow room, it became something that other people could copy. The Oxford companion notes that de Grasse's philosophy spread through seminars and workshops and what he called cocktails. Hill safaris, where it was essentially walking tours of the innovative bars of New York City. And this is where the next generation comes in, people like Audrey Saunders, we talked about Sasha, Sasha Petrowski, Julie Raynor, the bartenders who would open places such as the Pegu Club, Milk and Honey, the Clover Club, and countless other influential bars, right? Yeah, I mean, if DeGroff had simply been a brilliant bartender at the rainbow room, we'd be talking about him as a great bartender. But he became a teacher and a mentor and an advocate and an author and an educator, and that's how influence compounds. this sounds fairly familiar. A bartender and an historian. Yeah, and I mean I guess this is where de Graff's legacy fits in our podcast into the barcode especially well. He helped establish the idea that bartenders should know where their drinks came from. And that sounds obvious now, but it always wasn't that way. Today, if you're s a serious bartender, it's sometimes too serious of a bartender. You're expected to know the difference between a sour and a daisy. You're supposed to know that a Negroni had a lineage, a lineage. I mean, three three weeks worth of episodes here, kids. You know what a jewel of his. But that historical consciousness wasn't always a part of everyday bartending. DeGrosh helped reconnect bartending with its own literature, right? Jerry Thomas, Harry Johnson, old cocktail books, old recipes, old techniques. And that became part of this educational movement. We're kind of still in that educational movement that is has followed in 2002, about graduation time. DeGroff published this book called The Craft of a Cocktail. And an entire generation of bartenders, that book became a gateway. Yeah, which means that in DeGroff's influence isn't confined to the people who ever had the privilege of sitting at his bar, whether it was at Aurora or the Rainbow Room or Blackbird. You could be a bartender in Nashville, or London, or Tokyo. And you could encounter de Groff through a book, through a recipe, through a class, through a bartender who learn from somebody who learned from de Groff. That's how tradition works, though. It isn't just one person handing knowledge directly down to another, it becomes a chain. DeGroff is one of those major links in our modern chain of American bartending. Absolutely. And And de Groff's influence expands beyond the Rainbow Room. Okay. The Rainbow Room closed. Yes. Right? So where where do we go from there? So the Rainbow Rune ended in the late 1990s, but of course his de Groff's influence expanded after that as he consulted on bar programs. He continued teaching. in two thousand four he spearheaded the founding of the Museum of the American Cocktail. Which is An absolute perfect project for him, right? Because in the Rainbow Room, it was all about putting historical cocktails back into practice. And this Museum of American cocktails was about preserving the teaching the history of of those cocktails, right? Just preserving and teaching those histories. Yeah. And then in 2005, de Graff became one of the founding partners of the Beverage Alcohol Resource or B AR Bar program. And that was another major development. Month. Instead of simply teaching individual drinks, the bar program created a structured approach to spirits and cocktail education. And that idea is incredibly important because the modern bartender isn't just someone who knows how a recipe works. A serious bartender understands that's those spirits. Production, they understand the history, the hospitality, the sensory, and then balance. Yeah. And de Graff helped make that kind of professional education part of the conversation. Wow. He also continued to advocate for bartenders as professionals, not merely people who happen to work around alcohol. And I think that's probably the heart of his legacy now. He elevated the profession without making it inaccessible. And he took history seriously without being trapped by it. He valued technique without Turning cocktails into laboratory experiments. And he understood the ultimate purpose of all of it was hospitality. Today we made two drinks. The Whiskey Smash, a 19th century drink that DeGroff helped bring back to a modern American cocktail drinking. And then the Fitzgerald, the modern drink of his own creation that became a classic in its own right. And those two drinks tell us everything we need. Need to know about Dale de Graff. He was a historian who knew how to bartend, a bartender who knew how to teach, a teacher who knew how to tell a story, and a traditionalist who understood that tradition only stays alive if somebody is willing to use it. His legacy can still be seen every time a bartender reaches for fresh citrus instead of a bout bottle of sour mix, for every time. They put a real cocktail menu together every time a bartender digs through some kind of old dusty book looking for something forgotten. Every time that somebody takes a classic recipe and then asks, what might it become if I do something just a little different? And every time a young bartender learns not just what to make, but what. And I think that's a pretty good place to leave King Cocktail. Not on a throne. But behind a bar. Still teaching, still tinkering, still looking backward and forward at the same time. Let us know on social media about your attempts to make historical cocktails and your own original creations. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. If you're enjoying the show, leave a rating or have some kind of interaction with us. It helps help other barkists find us. So like, subscribe on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok. Or for those podcasts, Spotify and Apple. And now we're starting to feel that first little turn toward fall. The days are getting shorter and the air is beginning to change, and we're going to take that seasonal shift as an excuse to put something a little more rustic into our glasses. So next time on Into the Barkive, we're talking hard cider cocktails. We'll dig into cider as a drink, as an American tradition, and as a cocktail ingredient. And of course we'll be mixing a couple of drinks along the way. Until next time, keep exploring the past, one drink at a time, as we dive deeper into the bark.