The Craft Revival

Dale DeGroff at the Rainbow Room in New York started reading old cocktail books in the early 90s and making the drinks the way they were originally written. Milk & Honey opened in 1999. Audrey Saunders opened Pegu Club in 2005. Phil Ward, Sam Ross, and a generation of bartenders rebuilt the craft from the ground up. Fresh ingredients came back. Bitters became important again. New classics were invented in deliberate conversation with the old ones — the Gold Rush, the Penicillin, the Paper Plane, the Black Manhattan, the Oaxaca Old-Fashioned.