8 Amazing Places to Drink in NYC, from the Inventor of the Craft Cocktail

Enough of Dry January already

In a town that had supposedly seen it all, New York went absolutely bonkers when the hand-crafted cocktail arrived in the early 2000s. Why wouldn’t it? Drinks made with this much care hadn’t slid across a bar since the late 1800s when the suspendered, mustachioed “Professor” Jerry Thomas was shaking cocktails on Broadway and 22nd. (If you ever wondered where the “mixologist look” came from, this is where.)

This guy didn’t invent this look. Photo by Antoni Shkraba.

Thomas was an utter showman and a booster for booze. A publicity poster of the era summed it up, calling him “the pioneering virtuoso of that blessing to mankind, the quintessential American concoction: The cock-tail!”). Thomas and his cock-tail had a good run, but once Prohibition arrived creative cocktails disappeared and American drinking was diminished to backyard wine and bathtub gin.

Two world wars with strict rations offered the country little more than cans of beer. The 1950s favored gin-and-tonics and sour mixes. Hippies preferred pot (and other things) to booze throughout the 60s and 70s. For nearly a century, excellent cocktails, served with flare, seemed like a thing of the past.

Then the wealth and opulence of the 1980s arrived. An aspiring actor and Rhode Island native named Dale DeGroff got a job at Manhattan’s swanky Rainbow Room just in time. The old art deco space had fallen into disrepair for 50 years, but when DeGroff arrived, the splashy 1930s supper club on the 65th floor was undergoing a full restoration thanks to Wall Street cash and drinkers ready to throw that money around.

The Rainbow Room is where NYC cocktails were reimagined in the 1980s. Photo by Bradford Schultze.

DeGroff found some old Jerry Thomas recipes in the rare section of a Manhattan bookstore and started creatively mixing a wider range of liquors, mixed, mashed and infused with herbs, fresh juices and spices. With that, he created the craft cocktail as we know it today and earned this century’s title of “The Cocktail King.”

The mixologists of the early aughts learned from DeGroff. There would’ve been no Milk & Honey, no Attaboy, no Flatiron Lounge, if it weren’t for DeGroff (and, of course, Thomas before him). Few of those bars are still around, but DeGroff is, and he recently told me favorite watering spots while shaking cocktails in the speakeasy-style Hidden Bar in the back of Hotel Eventi. (It’s of note that Hidden Bar didn’t make the cut.)

Here’s what did:

Dale DeGroff, 76, still shakes cocktails in NYC. Shown here at Hidden Bar for a special event. Photo by Kerri Allen.