The Craft Cocktail Revival: 1990-2010

The craft cocktail revival did not begin with a movement or a manifesto. It began with one man being told he couldn't do something and doing it anyway. In 1987, Dale DeGroff was hired to run the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York, and he proceeded to insist on fresh-squeezed juice, quality spirits, and recipes from pre-Prohibition bar books. His employers thought he was eccentric. His customers thought he was a genius. Within a decade, what he was doing had a name: craft cocktails.

Dale DeGroff

King Cocktail

DeGroff had grown up working in bars and restaurants, apprenticing under legendary restaurateur Joe Baum. When Baum hired him for the Rainbow Room, DeGroff had access to resources most bartenders could only dream of: a bottomless budget, a world-class kitchen, and a clientele willing to pay for quality. He used them to reconstruct what the Golden Age had actually been.

He tracked down pre-Prohibition bar books — Jerry Thomas's 1862 guide, Hugo Ensslin's 1916 Recipes for Mixed Drinks — and began making the drinks as originally specified: fresh lemon and lime juice, quality spirits, proper ice. The results were revelatory. A Whiskey Sour made with fresh lemon and quality bourbon tasted nothing like the sour-mix abomination that passed for the drink in every other bar in the city.

DeGroff's influence was multiplied through the bartenders he trained and inspired. Audrey Saunders, who would go on to open Pegu Club in 2005, worked under DeGroff. Tom Colicchio cited DeGroff's approach as an influence on how he thought about ingredients in his kitchens. The principle was simple but radical: use the best available ingredients and understand what you're doing.

Milk and Honey

Sasha Petraske's Vision

On New Year's Eve 1999, Sasha Petraske opened Milk and Honey on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It seated fewer than twenty people, had no sign on the door, required a phone reservation, and imposed a code of conduct that included rules against name-dropping, fighting, and unnecessary loudness. It was, by design, the opposite of a nightclub.

What Petraske was doing was not primarily about cocktails — though the cocktails, made with fresh juice, quality spirits, and meticulous technique, were extraordinary. He was reimagining what a bar could be as a social institution: a quiet, intimate space where the drink and the conversation were primary, rather than the spectacle. The Craft Cocktail Renaissance found in Milk and Honey its defining aesthetic.

The Speakeasy Revival

Milk and Honey's no-sign door and reservation requirement were partly practical — the space was tiny — and partly philosophical. Petraske wanted to control the environment, to ensure that the people who found their way in were there for the right reasons. The model spawned dozens of imitators, many of them genuine and some merely theatrical. "Speakeasy-style" became a marketing category, complete with fake phone booths and actors in period costume. The distinction between authentic craft and craft as performance would become one of the defining tensions of the revival.

Back to Fresh Ingredients

The Technical Rebuilding

The craft revival's most immediate and legible achievement was the restoration of fresh ingredients. Fresh-squeezed citrus became the baseline expectation at any bar claiming craft credentials. Shaking technique was reconsidered: the cobbler shaker versus the Boston shaker, the proper ratio of ice to liquid, the duration of a shake. Stirring got the same attention — a properly stirred Martini is thirty to forty slow rotations in a mixing glass over large ice, producing a drink that is cold and diluted but not aerated or cloudy.

Ice became a fetish object. Large-format ice — the one-inch cube, the hand-carved sphere — chills a drink more slowly and melts more slowly, producing less Dilution over the course of drinking. Specialty ice companies appeared in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, supplying bars with clear, dense ice from purified water. The Cocktail Shaker and the Bar Spoon were reconsidered as precision instruments rather than blunt tools.

The Spirits Renaissance

The craft revival coincided with, and accelerated, an explosion in spirit quality. Artisan distilleries began producing small-batch bourbons, rye whiskeys, and gins that gave bartenders better raw material. The importation of quality vermouths, amaros, and liqueurs — long unavailable or ignored in the American market — expanded the palette.

Perhaps most importantly, the revival created an educated consumer. By 2005, a significant segment of bar-going Americans knew what a Negroni was, understood the difference between a well gin and a craft gin, and expected their Old Fashioned to be made without sour mix. This consumer knowledge was the most durable achievement of the craft revival: it changed what the market demanded.

The Spread

From New York to the World

By 2010, the craft cocktail movement had spread from New York to San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Melbourne, and dozens of other cities. London's Artesian Bar at the Langham Hotel won World's Best Bar four consecutive years from 2012. Tokyo's bartenders, already skilled in the techniques of the The Art of Stirring Cocktails and the Japanese hard shake, found a global audience for their precision and restraint.

The spread brought its tensions. "Craft cocktail" as a marketing term was rapidly drained of meaning, applied to venues with no interest in craft and no bartenders with any knowledge of history. The line between genuine craft and craft aesthetics was constantly negotiated. But underneath the marketing noise, the core achievement — fresh ingredients, quality spirits, educated bartenders, historically informed recipes — had taken root. The Modern Era had genuinely changed what a cocktail could be.