The Stork Club, 21 Club, El Morocco: The names alone evoke a golden era when the glittering social life of the Big Apple revolved around great speakeasies and nightclubs, those famed watering holes that drew the rich and famous when alcohol was legal and when it was not. From Prohibition through the 1950s, the rich and famous (and those who aspired to be) gathered at these spots to see and be seen, and measured their worth by what the gossip columnists said about them next day.
Nightlife columnist Lucius Beebe chronicled—and helped shape—what came to be called Café Society, noting of one of its most famous clubs that “to millions and millions of people all over the world the Stork symbolizes and epitomizes the de luxe upholstery of quintessentially urban existence. It means fame; it means wealth; it means an elegant way of life among celebrated folk.”
Join author and cocktail historian Philip Greene in a spirited look at the glamour of these legendary venues through the lens of the great drinks developed and savored there: the Twenty-One Club Cocktail, the Stork Club Cocktail, the El Morocco Cocktail, and the Julius Special.
Greene is co-founder of the Museum of the American Cocktail and author of To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, and The Manhattan: The Story of the First Modern Cocktail.
