by Alia Akkam
At the very top of the hotel, on the 52nd floor, is the New York Bar (yes, this is where Bob and Charlotte first broke the ice with, ‘For relaxing times, make it Suntory time’). Views of the wild, chaotic Tokyo skyline from the floor-to-ceiling windows are, of course, excellent, but they are compounded by Valerio Adami’s quartet of Pop Art paintings and Japanese sirloin steaks sizzling on the grill. Like the ‘Matured-Fashioned’ with Woodford Reserve bourbon aged in-house, fine-grained Japanese wasanbon sugar, bitters and orange peel, New York Bar exemplifies the importance of, albeit costly, simplicity.
No. 39
Mount Fuji Riff
OLD IMPERIAL BAR AT IMPERIAL HOTEL, TOKYO, JAPAN
Created by Julia Momose
INGREDIENTS
45 ml (1½ fl oz) Suntory Roku gin
15 ml (½ oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
15 ml (½ oz) simple syrup
25 ml (¾ fl oz) fresh pineapple juice
25 ml (¾ fl oz) double (heavy) cream 1 egg white
1 Amarena cherry, to garnish
METHOD
Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake, then strain back into the shaker and dry shake without ice until there are no more ice shards. Pour into a chilled coupe glass and garnish with an Amarena cherry on the side of the glass.
Close to Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, Frank Lloyd Wright, that leading light of American architecture, completed the second incarnation of the Imperial Hotel in 1923 (the original debuted in 1890). Designed to capture the attention of Western tourists, the courtyard-strewn complex was built on a floating foundation in a gripping Mayan Revival-meets futurist industrial style that, despite surviving the Great Kantō Earthquake, was heartbreakingly demolished in 1968. Preservationists were keen to see the lobby and reflecting pool reassembled at the Meiji-Mura open-air architectural museum in Inuyama. Likewise, when a new Imperial Hotel sprouted on the former site in 1970, they rejoiced that the Old Imperial Bar’s design made way for terracotta and Oyō stone salvaged from the Wright era. Aside from these gorgeous remnants of the 1920s, it is a deliciously old-school establishment, suggesting a time when A-listers such as Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio hid away at the hotel. Sit at the bar, its counter glowing with a symmetrical row of warm spotlights, and let the courteous bartenders make Martinis, pour Scotch over flawless cubes of ice, and replenish your kaki-pi, the addictive rice cracker and peanut bar snack that supposedly originated here.
It’s been served at the Old Imperial Bar for decades and still the exact recipe for the Mount Fuji, named for the volcano that Frank Lloyd Wright so adored, remains a mystery. Incorporating the six ingredients that star in the Mount Fuji, Julia Momose, creative director at the Japanese-inspired Chicago bar Kumiko, made her own rendition of the drink.
SPOTLIGHT:
POLITICS, PEOPLE AND CURRENT EVENTS
a garnish of history with every order
IT HAPPENED ONE DAY
When Caravelle Saigon opened, in 1959, it was considered one of Vietnam’s tallest and most modern buildings, but this welcome dose of luxury couldn’t alleviate the grief and unpredictability that hung in the air in the wake of the still-raging Vietnam War that had started in 1955. Five years later, for instance, a bomb would explode on the Caravelle’s fifth floor. If there was a comforting element to this new hotel, it was the presence of the Saigon Saigon Rooftop Bar because here politicians, international journalists such as Peter Jennings (the Saigon bureaus of ABC, CBS and NBC set up shop at the Caravelle in the 1960s) and soldiers alike could congregate over beers and watch the war underway on the other side of the Saigon River from its balconies and terraces.
Less intense are the tales of these American hotels steeped in political and cultural history:
The Hay-Adams, Washington, DC: This hotel is a tribute to bigwigs John Hay (the former Secretary of State and personal secretary to Abraham Lincoln) and William Adams (a historian, Harvard professor and scion of the presidential Adams family). A short walk to the White House, which opened in 1928, on the site where Hay and Adams once held lively salons in their Romanesque homes that attracted the likes of Mark Twain and Henry James. Off the Record seems like an old bar, but it isn’t (it arrived in 1980s). Still, the caricatures of political movers and shakers on the walls, and the Pear Martini-stoked happy hours on the red-tufted sofas hark back to a time when politicians, all the more zealous after a few rounds of Old Fashioneds, swapped secrets and plotted strategies.
The Roosevelt New Orleans: Seymour Weiss, owner of the Roosevelt New Orleans hotel, now part of the Waldorf Astoria collection, was buddies with Louisiana Governor and United States Senator Huey P. Long, who maintained a suite on the 12th floor of the hotel. The politician’s favourite drink was the frothy, labour-intensive ‘Ramos Gin Fizz’. He loved it so much that in 1935, as a publicity stunt, he finagled the Roosevelt’s then head bartender Sam Guarino to come up to New York and show the misguided staff at the New Yorker Hotel how to confidently make the drink. Named for the official cocktail of New Orleans, the Sazerac Bar debuted at the Roosevelt in 1949 and on opening day, a band of ladies – in the old incarnation of the bar women were only allowed to attend during Mardi Gras – showed up for what has been heralded as the Stormin’ of the Sazerac. Today, the Paul Ninas Art Deco murals and African wood panelling are suggestive of that mid-century promise, especially since many of those guests seated in club chairs will be waiting on a Ramos Gin Fizz.
The Algonquin Hotel Times Square, New York: Two-dollar-a-night beds was the going rate when the Algonquin Hotel Times Square opened in 1902. Purported to be the oldest and longest continuously operating hotel in New York, it is most fêted for the daily, booze-soaked Round Table lunches that transpired here for more than a decade among writers such as Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley and The New Yorker founder Harold Ross. By 1923, the first of the Algonquin’s resident felines became another off-the-wall fixture of the hotel. That optimistic, post-World-War-I literary spirit has surely faded, but if you use your imagination, The Blue Bar, which opened right after the end of Prohibition, can still whisk you away to another decade with its strong Rob Roy cocktail and fusillade of blue light.
Hotel Jerome, Aspen, Colorado: In the late 19th century, the Colorado Silver Boom put Aspen on the map, and ever since Macy’s department store president, Jerome Wheeler, opened it in 1889, Hotel Jerome has played a part in the city’s ascent from mining town to chi-chi ski resort. After the crash in 1893, Hotel Jerome managed to stay afloat as a boarding house, but after World War II celebrities started coming to stay at the renovated hotel on their ski sojourns. In 1970, when Hunter S. Thompson bizarrely ran for Pitkin County sheriff, he made the Jerome’s J-Bar his de facto office. A little wild-west kitschy, the rustic bar is where to go for subdued aprés-ski revelry and the ‘Aspen Crud’, a vanilla-ice-cream milkshake spiked with shots of Jim Beam bourbon that was invented at the J-Bar when it was forced to transition into a G-rated soda fountain during Prohibition.
Hark back to a time when politicians, all the more zealous after a few rounds of Old Fashioneds, swapped secrets and plotted strategies.
No. 40
Raspberry Calling
CHARLES H. AT THE FOUR SEASONS HOTEL, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
Created by Keith Motsi
INGREDIENTS
45 ml (1½ fl oz) London Dry Gin
15 ml (½ fl oz) Bokbunja raspberry wine
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Fino sherry
5 ml (1 teaspoon) crème de cassis
3 dashes of Peychaud’s bitters
3 dashes of absinthe
15 ml (½ fl oz) Honey Water*
15 ml (½ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
½ teaspoon egg white
*For the Honey Water (makes 120ml/4fl oz):
90 ml (3 fl oz) honey
30 ml (1 fl oz) hot water
METHOD
For the Honey Water, combine the honey and hot water in a jar and
stir. Refrigerate until chilled.
To make the cocktail, combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker and dry shake with no ice until foamy, then add ice to the shaker and shake again. Double strain into a Nick & Nora glass.
Decades before bars – and bartenders – acquired a celebrity sheen, there was the bon vivant Charles H. Baker Jr. A New York magazine writer, he inherited a sizable chunk of cash that funded a life-changing round-the-world cruise. His chronicles of mysterious cocktails sipped in far-flung locales led to the publication of The Gentleman’s Companion in 1939. Baker, whose droll book of anecdotes and recipes is prized in bartending circles, would surely have felt right at home in this swish bar named for him.
Opened in 2015, its design scheme merges two disparate sources of inspiration – New England speakeasies and Korean royal palace dress and ornamentation – translating to stand-outs such as metal panelling cast on stingray skins and a glass mosaic that suggests the technique of mother-of-pearl inlaid on lacquerware.
Cocktail menus change here, and so one themed around Baker’s travels to Mexico, say, would yield herbal creations like the crystalline ‘Ms Frida’ with tequila, grapefruit, lavender cordial, bergamot and tonic. ‘Remember the Maine’, the cocktail of rye, sweet vermouth, Cherry Heering and absinthe, which Baker discovered in Havana during the 1933 Sergeants’ Revolt and later immortalised in the pages of his book, is always a worthy order.
No. 41
Moods of Love
LONG BAR AT WALDORF ASTORIA SHANGHAI ON THE BUND, SHANGHAI, CHINA
INGREDIENTS
60 ml (2 fl oz) Michter’s bourbon
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) peach liqueur
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) Luxardo triple sec
METHOD
Combine the ingredients in a cocktail shaker filled with ice and shake. Double strain into a Champagne flute.
The origins of Long Bar – which opened when Waldorf Astoria did in 2010 – are distinctly undemocratic. In 1910, when privileged members of the snooty British colonials-only Shanghai Club began roosting in the building, its bar – then the longest in the Far East – was explicitly hierarchical. Women were banned entirely from the L-shaped mahogany bar, and only those gents of a particularly exclusive breed were allowed to perch in hallowed territory over by the window; the less socially fortunate were relegated to the back.
Today’s everyone-welcome version of Long Bar was faithfully recreated through archival photos, and is matched with marble tables, stained glass and live jazz.
A ‘Seaman’s Fizz’ (Havana Club rum, rosemary-honey syrup, grapefruit juice, cream, egg white) commemorates the Shanghai Club’s 1956 changeover to the Seaman’s Club, but the ‘Colonel Sanders Margarita’, with bacon-infused tequila and homemade pineapple and lemongrass purée, pays homage to Long Bar’s wackier fast-food roots: in the room where that now disassembled bar once stood, the fried chicken-scented kitchen of Shanghai’s first KFC outpost debuted in 1989.
No. 42
Blue Moon
LOBSTER BAR AND GRILL AT ISLAND SHANGRI-LA, HONG KONG
Created by Paolo De Venuto
INGREDIENTS
50 ml (1¾ fl oz) Absolut vodka
25 ml (¾ fl oz) blue Curaçao
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) St-Germain liqueur
5 ml (1 teaspoon) absinthe
30 ml (1 fl oz) freshly squeezed lemon juice
20 ml (⅔ fl oz) egg white
15 ml (½ fl oz) Cornflake Syrup*
1 cornflake, to garnish
*For the Cornflake Syrup (makes 2 litres/70 fl oz):
400 g (14 oz) cornflakes
2 litres (70 fl oz) mineral water
1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) caster (superfine) sugar
METHOD
For the Cornflake Syrup, combine the cornflakes and 1 litre (34 fl oz) of mineral water and mix with a hand-held blender. Strain the mixture, reserving the cornflakes and discarding the excess water. Place the cornflake pulp into a saucepan with the sugar over a medium heat and stir until dissolved. Cool the syrup and pour into a sterilised bottle. It will keep up to two weeks in the refrigerator.
To make the cocktail, dry shake all the ingredients with no ice or mix with a hand-held blender in a cocktail shaker for better foam. Shake again, then strain into a rocks glass over a single ice cube. Garnish with a cornflake.
There is no shortage of hotspots in Hong Kong and several of them are in hotels. Still, Lobster Bar and Grill is packed every night. A mainstay since opening at the Island Shangri-La, Hong Kong, in 1991 (stop in the lobby to regard the grandiose chandeliers), it has the attractive air of a cosmopolitan lounge, the kind of joint that present-day nightlife sees too little of. Well-worn, however, doesn’t mean stodgy. At least, not here.
One of the reasons Lobster Bar and Grill still resonates with so many is that there are rousing drinks on the thematic menus. On one that calls forth the 1933 James Hilton novel Lost Horizon, there is an Asian riff on the Gimlet, for instance, with apple liqueur, pomelo syrup and turmeric. An ingenious old fashioned (Michter’s bourbon, brown sugar, pink salt and chocolate) also gets the Far East treatment with the addition of toasted rice. Even a vodka Martini is reimagined here, with seaweed butter, oyster leaf and caviar stimulating lusty marine notes. A polite, outgoing staff, happy to engage in banter, only sweetens the evening.
Inspired by the green-blue river that weaves through the scenic Blue Moon Valley in Yunnan, China, bartender Paolo De Venuto created this drink. It’s whimsically bolstered by cornflakes – one of his favourite childhood snacks.
No. 43
Thaijito
THE BAMBOO BAR AT MANDARIN ORIENTAL, BANGKOK, THAILAND
INGREDIENTS
1 slice of fresh root ginger
1 slice of fresh lemongrass
3 wedges of lime
1 teaspoon brown sugar
60 ml (2 fl oz) Mekhong Thai Spirit
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) freshly squeezed lime juice
10 ml (⅓ fl oz) simple syrup
METHOD
Muddle the ginger, lemongrass, lime and brown sugar in the bottom of a rocks glass. Add crushed ice, then stir in the Mehkong, lime juice and simple syrup.
Thailand was still known as Siam when the Oriental, now part of the Mandarin Oriental collection, opened on the Chao Phraya River in 1876. As the kingdom’s first luxury hotel, it courted royalty, but a fair share of writers, such as W. Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene, also camped out here. The Authors’ Lounge, coveted daily for afternoon tea, is an airy, white-washed shrine to that literary history. Guests who yearn for cocktails, not Darjeeling tea, know that the Bamboo Bar, at the other end of the hotel, awaits. Bangkok’s first jazz venue, it traces back to 1953. All these years later, it’s still the turf of musicians, only now they perform in a sleek room that retains its tropical modernist character with walls of glowing bottles and tiger print juxtaposed with rattan.
The Thaijito, a twist on the Mojito made with Thailand’s own Mehkong, a spirit that’s not quite a whiskey, not quite a rum, is quaffed regularly here, but the bar also conceives special menus, like the Compass. By trying drinks laced with ingredients such as cashew nuts, bee pollen and coconut flower, bar-goers take a sensory tour of Thailand.
SPOTLIGHT:
MENU DESIGN
flights of fancy to whet the appetite
SUM OF ITS PARTS
A room that leaves you breathless, or at least allows you to suspend a humdrum reality over the course of a Manhattan or two, and barkeeps who whip up cocktails with surprising combinations of ingredients are the hallmarks of great hotel bars. But hotel bars, given their power to eradicate everyday routines, can – and often do – push the envelope with their intricate narratives. Some might call this method novelty, but it’s merely succumbing to a personal idea of wonderland.
Entry to ROOM 309 at The Pottinger Hong Kong, for example, is invitation-only. At ‘reception’, a guest receives a key card t
hat grants them access to the clandestine third-floor parlour. There, in a 22-seat den flaunting antique lion-head wood pillars, they choose from two different menus by Tasting Group’s Antonio Lai. One is devoted to Golden Key Classics like the French 75; the other to ‘invisible’ elixirs including the ‘Crystal Old Fashioned’ (peanut-butter bourbon, homemade wood-chip bitters, banana concentrate), listed, of course, on a transparent menu.
At the bi-level, mid-century-styled Jigger & Pony, inside the Amara Singapore, patrons settle in for the evening with a ‘Madame President’ (a Negroni that telegraphs the Singapore Botanic Gardens with Monkey 47 gin, kaffir dry vermouth, orchid and bitter-melon liqueur) with a playful Campari lollipop. The carbonated Mineral Vodka Soda with lime-infused Belvedere and birch sap is another common nightcap order. Both have appeared on Jigger & Pony menus, which are always creatively laid out like a magazine.
Brandishing such catchy cover lines as ‘The Decade Ahead’, its pages are divvied-up among the different drinks, revealing their stories in the form of newsy articles and culminating with a grid of all the cocktails conveniently listed on the back of each ‘issue’.
In Montreal, at Fairmont The Queen Elizabeth, guests at Nacarat will be handed a menu that doubles as a tasting wheel. Strewn with pictograms, it orbits through bitter, spicy, umami, sour and sweet profiles, helping stumped imbibers make informed choices when they land on cocktails like the zippy ‘Toadka’ (vodka, white vermouth, sweet peas, mint cream, mushroom-wasabi tincture) and bourbon-raspberry ‘La Marsa’, redolent of Tunisia with (bell) pepper sorbet and citrus foam.
Cocktail menus are equally imaginative at Midnight Rambler, the Dallas lair from husband-and-wife duo Christy Pope and Chad Solomon inside the Joule hotel (Pagan Ritual: Rites of Spring, or the holiday-season-ready Island of Misfit Drinks). But the list is only one piece of an evocative puzzle. There are also the neo-classical cocktails embracing modernist techniques such as the ‘Savoury Hunter’ (lemongrass- and makrutleaf gin, lime, coconut, coriander [cilantro], Thai chilli) and ‘Tiger Style’ (Batavia arrack, calamansi, palm sugar, pippali, egg white, cassia aromatic essence); and a rock ’n’ roll aura thanks to dark leather, metallic finishes and a terrazzo checkerboard floor. The playlist, including tunes from The Sonics, The Velvet Underground, Ike and Tina Turner, and The Rolling Stones, was also carefully assembled to channel the 1960s and 70s. ‘Hotel bars lend themselves to fantasy and escapism,’ says Pope, which, adds Solomon, ‘allows for more experimentation both with the overall experience, and the drinks themselves in terms of flavours and service presentation.’