UPDATE: Welcome, New York Times readers! I hope you look around while you are here.

Source: The Irrawaddy

That picture, my friends, is a sight to make me weep. That is the courtyard of the mighty Pegu Club itself in Rangoon, Burma. Nativity-place of the World’s Greatest Cocktail™. Once once of the great gentlemen’s clubs (the kind where the brass poles run horizontally along the foot of the bar) of the British Empire at its height, the club was last put to use as a military audit office and flop house for bureaucrats in the 1990s. Now, it rots as an abode for stray dogs. And the Burmese website that has this story (and many other beautiful, tragic pictures you should look at) describes its signature cocktail as “Gin and Rose’s lime juice”….

If you happened upon this post without knowing about the Pegu cocktail, it is not gin and Rose’s. That would be a Gimlet.

Look at that magnificent exterior, which is likely already past preservation. The building has been designated as a “heritage building” by the government, so I guess that’s something. As opposed to such actions here in the US, the protection of the Pegu Club consists entirely of a hand-written piece of paper held down by a brick that has fallen out of the wall which asks visitors to please not wreck the place.

The pictures I’ve shown you so far are from, I think, an anti-government outlet, and are designed to show the Pegu Club’s decay. Since first posting this, I got a tip from Ginger Bar Magazine about another set of photographs by Jacques Maudy and Jimi Casaccia on commission for the Yangon Heritage Trust. (They are apparently a preservation NGO who are endeavoring to preserve glorious architecture like thins in the area. Sadly, their website is currently the dreaded “under construction”) These photos are designed to help evoke how beautiful building like this could be, and evoke their past glory. Below is a quite different view of the Pegu Club. You can find many more, higher resolution photos on their website, or even buy their soon-to-be released book, Yangon a City to Rescue.

This sad story brings to mind something else I’ve been meaning to post about for a long time now. How the heck do you really pronounce “Pegu”?

Back when I discovered the Pegu in Paul Harrington’s Cocktail, a discovery that ignited my obsession with cocktails in general, I surmised that it was pronounced PEE-Goo. Then in 2000, we visited the American Bar at the Savoy in London, where my wife and I had a marvelous long conversation at our table with the legendary Peter Dorelli about the drink, which he thought was pronounced Pee-Zhou. I’ve always pronounced it thus since. But since Audrey Saunders opened her Pegu Club in Manhattan, most of the cocktail world has pronounced it PEG-oo, under the completely sound expectation that if Audrey says it, it very likely is so.

But I wondered.

So I picked up the phone and called the embassy of the Republic of Myanmar (what the communist junta renamed Burma to legitimize itself) in Washington, DC. I spoke to a marvelously helpful, if somewhat perplexed, young lady who had never heard the word Pegu or seen it written, at least not in English lettering. She agreed, however, to seek out someone at the embassy who was familiar with it, and call me back with the correct pronunciation. She did call back, (pro tip: say you are a “writer” working on a “story”, not a “blogger” writing a “post” if you want a call back) to tell me that a man in the embassy who lived nearby explained to her that the actual pronunciation is Puh-GOO.

So there you go. With that earth-shattering piece of investigative journalism out of the way, you can go back to calling the drink a PEG-oo, and I’ll keep right on calling it a Pee-Zhou, because I’m a creature of habit.

The fifty-first installment of Mixology Monday (a.k.a. The Carnival That Created the Cocktailosphere) has the theme of Lime, and is being hosted at… well, here! I’ll thus skip all the general introductory discussion, leaving that for the announcement and the eventual roundup, and delve right into my offering.

I’m a fan of Audrey Saunders’ Pegu Club, for numerous reasons beyond just the obvious, and I’ve reviewed the place twice. But one perfect detail of the joint is the magnificently crafted garnishes they offer, each used to highlight but one or two of their signature cocktails.
In particular, I love the tattooed lime wedges that perch on the rim of their Pegus. While there is virtually nothing Tiki about Pegu Club, this garnish does produce a subliminal sense of Far Eastern (as opposed to Polynesian) exoticism.
The wedges, which look very like the one pictured above, evoke the region of the Pegu’s origin like some totem of the Thugee cult. Of course, I don’t think the Thugees extended their reach into Burma, and I’m sure they didn’t accept citrus fruits as members….
I was mystified as to how they made these little rim-hugging gems, until the Peguwife had a chance to look at them. It took her about thirty seconds to figure how to at least approximate the results.

Making a lime’s worth of wedges takes but a few minutes at most, and they are a great way of showing off without going the Full Penguin.

You will need the following:

• Cutting board
• Serrated knife
• A good, beautiful, richly green lime. The bigger, the better.
• A five hole citrus zester (like this one, for example.)

You will use the zester to tattoo the whole lime, then slice it into wedges. (This order of things may seem obvious to you, it wasn’t to me!)
I could get really wordy about how you create various designs (shut up, Guy!) but instead I decided to make a video tutorial of the process. Behold the awesomeness of the Pegu Blog’s first vlog entry!

As you get some experience with this technique, you’ll see that you can make your cuts in ways that will look better when you cut the wedges, and conversely that you can choose where to cut to make whatever design you have carved look better. It is especially a good idea not to run scratches very far longitudinally. They will likely take up an entire wedge and leave very little visual complexity. Even simple patterns will look very complex after slicing if you do them right.

You can do this method with any citrus wedge or peel, though I think it looks best with limes and worst with lemons. The lemons don’t give enough contrast to really look good. And it works with any cocktail (including lots of tiki drinks) but you are honor-bound to mix a Pegu for the first drink you decorate with it….

(See the end of this post for what is going on with this series)

While I have written about the Pegu Club before, no trip to New York would be complete without a visit and a post. For more reasons than just the name and the drink. Pegu Club is genuinely one of the nicest places to drink I have ever entered.

If Audrey Saunders is the Leonardo da Vinci of the modern cocktail lounge renaissance, then Pegu Club is her Mona Lisa.
When I first entered it a few years ago, I confess that I was a little disappointed. It was, to be honest, just a bar. There are no monkeys or parrots flitting though the rafters. The clientele tends more to the ordinary (like me) looking, rather than super-models. In short, the Vegas is notably lacking. In the interest of full disclosure, the first time I visited, my bartender was an undead zombie, but that was Halloween.
No, Pegu Club is just a bar, with the things that make bars nice. And Pegu Club does those nice things better than just about any place else I’ve been to date. (Note: the point of this trip is to see if New York’s other watering holes can top Pegu. Stay tuned.)

Maggie was surprised at how low-key the street entrance is, just a single glass door with security shutters. Like Cleveland’s Velvet Tango Room, I imagine that if you walked by Pegu during the day, you’d think you were looking at an abandoned address. In the best speakeasy tradition, you won’t find Pegu Club unless you are already looking for it.
There is ample seating away from the bar, with low chairs and tables ideal for a cozy date or a small party of friends. There is a delicious-looking menu of food, but I have always made sure I had a full stomach before visiting, so I cannot comment further on that.

The bar has wide, heavy wooden stools, and the bar top is made of a gigantic, three inch thick slab of natural wood with uneven edges. Behind the bar is a vast selection of liquors and liqueurs, on glass shelves and behind South Asianesque sliding wooden lattices. More impressive is the bewildering collection of house made syrups, tinctures, and bitters which populate the nooks and crannies behind and between the larger commercial bottles.
In the speed racks behind the bar are myriad other bottles, containing premixed components of the various drinks on the excellent cocktail menu. As with the tiki masters of yore, most are largely unlabeled. While the menu, which is not posted online, will tell you what is generally in your drink, you will not be able to duplicate it exactly just by watching it be made.
The menu is a simply fabulous perambulation through modern retro cocktailia. It begins (of course) with the Pegu Club, then touches on nearly every archetype of cocktail. As a Certified Cocktail Snob(TM), I usually feel obliged to sneer at at least half of the cocktails on even the best cocktail menu. But not this one….

The bartenders are fun to watch as they go about their craft. While nothing they do could remotely be equated to what people call “flair”, there is a subtle, marvelous showmanship in what they do. For hobby mixologists like me, there is a lot to steal here!

If you want to go off the menu, they have you covered. Ingredient-wise, they have it. No really, I bet you twenty bucks they got it. In they unlikely event you stump the bartender on what you want (I did, hah!), they have a custom house reference manual which will unstump them.
The one thing I find curious is this: If you want to modify a drink that is on the menu, you practically have to put the staff in a hammerlock to make it happen. Both times I’ve been there, I have asked for a Pegu with a gin other than what they use (Tanqueray). It is not easy to get this fulfilled.
The prices are remarkably, er, reasonable. I was fascinated by the simple fact that cocktails at the Pegu Club are a buck or three cheaper than drinks at our, admittedly nice, hotel lobby bar.

The bottom line is this: Pegu Club is simply a perfect neighborhood bar, forget it’s legendary status. The staff is uberknowledgable and friendly. The atmosphere is neither pretentious nor distracting. The decor is understated, yet beautiful. And the clientele is friendly. A great crossroads to visit, be you a local or a visitor from far away.

The Summer New York Adventure is the first truly kid-free vacation Maggi and I have taken since, well, we’ve had kids. By day, we’ll be exploring Manhattan’s Garment District, buying fabric for Maggi’s coture workings, and by night we shall explore the SoHo dining and drinking offerings, which should give me some of the best material to blog about in a good long while! Cheers!

Over at Bostonist, they notice something scary: One Horseman has become three!

First, the world nearly lost Angostura Bitters. Here and there, shortages still rend lamentations from the throats of woeful cocktailians. If AB can be threatened, then no ingredient can be truly safe, can it? I dubbed this the Bitterlypse, but Bostonist points out that it was merely one horseman of a wider cocktail apocalypse.

Second (third in Bostonist’s reckoning) came the Egg Nazis, descending on that Citadel of Good, Pegu Club in Manhattan. Really guys? I’ve eaten in New York City. The Gotham health inspectors have more important concerns than the threat of a little raw egg white being served in glasses full of disinfectant.

And it still gets worse.

Third comes a fell horseman, sweeping away all the OXO two ounce mini measures from stores, and none appear on the horizon to replace them! These truly are dire times.

But here’s the really creepy part. There are four horsemen. What pestilence will this guy bring?

Via Bret Thorn of Nation’s Restaurant News, we have the latest sand in the gears of an enjoyable life, courtesy of our various fine governments.
The Man dropped in on the Pegu Club in New York City for a routine health inspection, and noticed the fact that they use raw eggs in certain cocktails. Apparently, raw eggs are illegal in New York, even if you warn your customers about their use.

Oooooh, scary!
(Original egg image stolen from here)

Guys, you have to use raw egg whites in certain cocktails… both old and new. Very few eggs in America actually have salmonella contamination. (Odds are, you’ll encounter one about once every 84 years.) Fewer of those eggs will actually result in a dose enough to get anyone sick, especially when said egg whites are mixed into a glass of disinfectant!
Now, I do understand that a tiny risk still exists, but I guarantee you are in a lot more mortal danger from the taxis and random New Yorkers you must pass simply to get to Pegu Club than you are from any number of Earl Grey MarTEAnis consumed once there. (Of course, if you are pregnant, the risks from raw eggs are much higher. But, um, if you are pregnant, there are a lot more dangerous ingredients in a Pisco Sour than that dollop of egg white!)
And why are raw eggs, even with a warning, a violation, while raw seafood is not?
Now, I am hoping that this is less of a pain in the butt than it first appears. Audrey Saunders’ FaceBook Page states, …we have to switch to pasteurized eggs in our cocktails. If that is all they have to do, that is in fact no great shakes. I use pasteurized eggs whenever I use egg whites in drinks. They only cost a few cents more, eliminate a microscopic risk, and are otherwise indistinguishable from regular eggs. But the other part of the story claims that raw eggs are not allowed. Does this mean raw, pasteurized eggs too? I’m pretty sure cooked egg whites in a Ramos Gin Fizz would produce rather sub-par results….
Anyone have some clarification on this? Are there any municipalities that do not allow raw eggs of any kind to be served? Is Nanny Bloomberg’s demesne one such?

One of my very first aims in starting this blog was to chronicle where you could find information on Pegus around the web, and by linking to those sources, raise their Google profile, and thus the Pegu’s profile.
Of course, along the way I instead created this magnificent edifice of a website, which contains in its pages the definitive sum of all Pegu knowledge.

I bow to the Buddah nature of your soul,
oh illustrious one….

Better close your [snark] tag there, Guy. It’s dripping.
Anyway, in so doing, I have sadly neglected my original charge of late. I ran across a mention on Saveur’s website of an excellently written little piece from Esquire’s Cocktail Historian, David Wondrich. It tells the tale of the Pegu Club (the original, British one) whence sprang the greatest of all cocktails. Wondrich spins a good tale in a short space, so you should read it in its entirety, and when you are done, wander through the rest of Esquire’s drink database for a lot more wisdom in the same vein..

Here’s a pretty old school post for me: Let’s talk about Pegus being talked about around the Internet! After all, that was kind of my original intent for this blog, when I started it more than two years ago.
I got a Google Alert recently that a search engine/ask and answer site called Mahalo had just done an article on How to Make a Pegu Club Cocktail. Their recipe and procedure for making a Pegu is pretty solid, though I prefer Cointreau, and a little less of it. Also, I find this instruction in Mix the Drink fairly amusing:

Pour the gin, orange liqueur, lime juice, and bitters ingredients into a cocktail shaker (or a jar with a tight top) filled with ice cubes, not crushed ice.

Really? When was the last time someone made a drink so unusual and exotic as a Pegu in a mason jar? I mean, besides me when on vacation in a rented condo….
Also, the page includes a small version of this video from SavoryTV.com of Audrey Saunders of the Pegu Club in Manhattan. It’s a nice little video in which she discusses the story of the club and the cocktail, throws in a bit about Prohibition, and makes three drinks (including a Pegu) all in 99 seconds.
I embed the full sized video here. Enjoy.

Via Jacob Grier, comes this magnificent article in The Weekly Standard by Robert Messenger. It delivers a concise, precise snapshot of the modern craft cocktail industry. In addition, it addresses many of the issues we all face and discuss, in a clear and useful manner. It garnishes with a nice little digression on cocktail history and how it affects modern drinks. Finally, it sets forth a nice bowl of bar snacks in the form of an excellent discussion of the most important cocktail book ever, David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks.
I am stunned by how in a single article, he touches on so many things I’ve learned and experienced as part of writing this blog. He talks of such drinks as the Jack Rose, the Rickey, the Old Fashioned, and the Hemingway Daiquiri. While he applauds the return of the cocktail menu to establishments both great and mean, he points out how far we still have to go:

Many of these concoctions have the name of a classic cocktail, but just you try saying: “I see you make a Strawberry Caipirinha, any chance you could make me a Caipirinha?”

He uses Trader Vic and Don the Beachcomber as examples of what we once had as cocktail leaders that we lost and are only now replacing. He includes well deserved shout-outs to bartenders and impresarios such as Dale DeGroff and Audrey Saunders, and the men who are giving us ingredients to fuel the cocktail renaissance, such as Charles Rolls and Eric Seed.
Messenger’s review of Embury’s tome is especially annoying to me, as it reminds me that I haven’t done my own review as of yet, and now I’m going to have to do a better job when I do. His critical take-away from the book, which should also be yours, is that it contains all the basic principals you need to not just mix drinks, but mix great ones.
I will say that through much of the article, Messenger is a little too grumpy about the state of the cocktail world. In an article celebrating the resurgence of a culinary art, he is unnecessarily hard on those in the commercial mainstream who are taking hesitant first steps. All those Soli Blueberry Appletinis on menus out there are signs that people are paying attention. Rather than belittling them, a little encouraging criticism is more in order.
I’ll end with two final notes, if I may. First, the man clearly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to cocktails (emphasis mine):

Bringing a tray of four Pegu Clubs to your coffee table will liven up your guests, setting everyone to considering the drinks and their color. Like wrapped packages and Christmas crackers, well-presented cocktails add festivity to an occasion.

Second, it wouldn’t be a good cocktail article if the author didn’t make a variety of pronouncements in an off-hand manner that will cause a ruckus. For instance, I recommend that all you shaken devotees out there send Messenger angry emails.
By the way, if you’ve read all the way to here, why? Go read the whole thing!

If you read any number of cocktail blogs regularly, you will note that I am one of the few such bloggers who is not currently pickling him or herself in New Orleans right now. Fear not, intrepid reader, I’ll just have to put up enough content to take up the slack until they sober up (Check back in October). I’ve been in a new drink funk for a while, so I’m touring Talesbloggers’ houses while they are out, and stealing their drinks. In the interests of sending you to their blogs, I’ll leave out one critical item from recipes I repost here….

I’d be remiss if I didn’t do one of these posts on a drink by Stevi, at Two at the Most.

Stevi offers up the Gin Gin Mule, a delicious creation of Audrey Saunders. Audrey is the impresario behind the greatest named cocktail bar in the world, and meeting her would have been one of several legitimate reasons I’d have loved for this series to have been replaced with one ACTUALLY blogging Tales. Stevi offers up this drink as part of a review of Pacific Distillery’s Voyager Gin. It’s a boutique gin, made in Washington State. Stevi tries to claim, Voyager Gin is available in many Washington State Liquor Control Board stores, but I think we all know that’s a lie….
At any rate, here’s the complete recipe:

Yes, I gave the whole recipe again. This time I’m relying on the mostly obscured photo I’ve run with each of these posts to get you to visit Stevi’s. Her drink shot is just beautiful, and will add to your anticipation when you give this drink a try. I imagined her drink when I was sipping my much less photogenic attempt….

I was in New York over the weekend, doing a murder mystery party for a group called The Supper Club New York. It was a good party, and I enjoyed doing it. But for me personally the highlight of the trip was a chance to at last visit the Pegu Club at 77 W Houston St. in Manhattan.
I started this little blog as a way to spread the word on my favorite obscure old-time cocktail, the Pegu. That’s right, you find yourself at this very moment attending a evangelical revival! I have no idea how many people I’ve gotten to try a Pegu for the first time, but it has been many manys of manys, if my Sitemeter logs do not lie. All that said, I imagine that my efforts have been a drop in the bucket, compared with the number of people who’ve discovered this drink at the eponymously named Pegu Club. I heard about it for the first time shortly after I started writing this blog, and have wanted to get there ever since. Alas, any business in the New York area in the meantime has not left me with the time to go and explore. This trip I made sure I had the time!
As an added bonus, my excursion took me there on Halloween. The people watching was wonderful, though I could have done without the guy wearing nothing but the Borat sling standing next to me on the subway on the way back to the hotel. (Click this link if you don’t know what I mean. On second thought, don’t.)
During the day, I doubt you’d even know the club is there. It has no sign at all, and you enter through a single swinging glass door. At night, the door is illuminated internally, highlighting the crest and name engraved in the glass. You climb a set of stairs and enter a long room with dining tables surrounding a surprisingly small bar. The decor is restrained but hardly the Victorian or Southeast Asian look I imagine you might have found at the namesake club in colonial Burma. It was busy but not overly packed. I delayed just long enough checking my coat to lose out on a temporarily open seat at the bar and had to stand.
One of the four bartenders quickly spied me, stuck as I was behind better-looking customers, and I ordered a Pegu. It came directly in a an old-style cocktail glass (rounded bowl, properly small), with a carved lime wedge as a garnish. Theirs differs from the orthodox (i.e. my) recipe. They use both Orange and Angostura bitters, and Orange Curacao instead of Cointreau. In combination, you have a drink that is very good, but brighter, sweeter, and a little less bracing then my usual. I enjoyed it nonetheless as I watched the bartenders work. Unlike the majority of your standard bars, most people there were ordering the cocktails on the menu. (Also unlike the majority of bars, the drink on the menu looked really good….) It was really more akin to watching sushi chefs working than bartenders. Each drink had its own unique garnishes, and special glassware to be served in. Ratios seemed exacting, and the guys behind the bar took a respectable amount of time to make each drink. The ice cubes I saw were ocean liner-endangeringly big.
When I finished my Pegu Club, I asked a second bartender to make for me a One True Pegu, as I call it, the way Peter Dorelli taught me to make them at the American Bar at the Savoy. Damned if the one he made me wasn’t better than the ones I make myself. I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or grumpy about that. I think I’ll try upping the egg white next time to see.
All my cocktailgeeky instructions to the bartender led to an interesting conversation with a young couple beside me from North Carolina. They were in New York so that she could run the NYC Marathon. What she was doing out drinking cocktails two nights before a marathon, I’ll never know. Regardless, it was a good reminder that happily wrangling with the bartender about your drink is usually a great way to get into a conversation with your fellow patrons!
I can’t recommend the Pegu Club enough, even if they do use Orange Curacao instead of Cointreau and mispronounce their own name. It is fun, well-run, well-lit, not too loud, and surprisingly not-too-ruinous in price. Many of my readers who live near, or even work in, a fine craft cocktail lounge like this will not find it quite the alien experience this midwesterner did, but I’m sure you’d find it great regardless.