New Orleans exalts the art of the cocktail Posted on July 22nd
By Kathy Finn
NEW ORLEANS (Reuters Life!) - Ted Haigh was
fascinated by Hollywood’s portrayal of cocktail culture even
when he was well shy of legal drinking age.
For Haigh, watching William Powell and his on-screen wife
Myrna Loy sip from thin-stemmed glasses and exchange clever
banter in the 1934 classic “The Thin Man” was intoxicating.
“I kept wondering, what are they drinking and what does it
taste like?” said the 51-year-old.
Such images sparked a lifelong fascination with the history
of drinking and brought Haigh to the opening of the Museum of
the American Cocktail, where he is curator.
It’s a clubby wood-and-glass space that pays tribute to one
of America’s favorite pastimes with displays of hundreds of
cocktail artifacts that Haigh has amassed over several decades
of collecting.
Vintage cocktail shakers, Prohibition-era newspapers,
one-of-a-kind whiskey bottles and some of the oldest known bar
tools and cocktail recipes in the country are among the
exhibits.
“I used to want to just keep it all to myself, but then I
realized I could do a lot more good by sharing it with the
world,” says Haigh, widely known by his online nickname, Dr.
Cocktail.
Set inside the Riverwalk Marketplace retail center along
the New Orleans riverfront, the cocktail museum is the
brainchild of New York bartender Dale DeGroff and his wife,
Jill.
Their idea was to populate the museum with Dale’s extensive
inventory of cocktail memorabilia. But after becoming
acquainted with Haigh and seeing his rich collection, they
persuaded him to lend his treasures to the new museum.
As to the locating the museum in New Orleans, DeGroff said
he didn’t have to think twice.
“This is the town where men and women sat together in
barrooms in the 19th century, when that wasn’t happening
anywhere else in America,” says DeGroff, who has tended bar at
New York landmarks like the Rainbow Room. “That’s because in
New Orleans, the bars were called coffeehouses, which made it
OK for ladies to enter.”
New Orleans is a natural place for a monument to drinking.
The city is home to such classic cocktails as the Sazerac
(recently designated the “official” cocktail of New Orleans by
the Louisiana legislature), the Ramos Gin Fizz and the Brandy
Milk Punch.
To emphasize the point, the opening coincided with the end
of a five-day citywide “festival” of cocktail tastings and
bartender seminars called “Tales of the Cocktail.”
DeGroff said the cocktail museum will benefit from its
association with its next-door neighbor, the Southern Food &
Beverage Museum, a fledgling institution also designed to
celebrate the region’s gustatory prowess.
The cocktail museum’s opening drew dozens of cocktail
enthusiasts, including a few of New Orleans’ best-known
bartenders who no doubt arose earlier than usual to attend the
mid-morning event.
“The museum tells the story of drinking, and drinking is an
American story,” said veteran bartender Chris McMillian, a
founding member of the museum who pours and shakes at the
Renaissance Pere Marquette Hotel.
Renowned for his Mint Juleps, McMillian is a font of
cocktail lore and is quick to offer that rum was one of
America’s earliest “cash crops.”
“The Pilgrims, you know, were originally headed for
Virginia,” he explained. “They only stopped in Massachusetts
because they were running out of beer.”
The Museum of the American Cocktail is open Monday through
Saturday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., on
the second floor of Riverwalk Marketplace, 1 Julia St., New
Orleans.