Philip Duff on charity, love cuffs, and things that go “bang”.
Tag: internationalist
Duff on women. In bars. By Philip Duff There is an elephant in the room,…
By Philip Duff
I just survived a hurricane. Well, I say survived. Hurricanes ain’t what they used to be. Last year here in New York I bravely battled Hurricane Irene, which turned out to be mostly an opportunity for cute girls on the Upper East Side to walk around in short shorts and knee-high rubber boots ( a sight I found disturbingly arousing – must have lived too long in the UK in my youth). It rained a lot.
Creativity is knowing how to conceal your sources**. Do you know who said that? No? Well in that case, it was me! Aren’t I clever? Now give me some money.
Painful is the only way to describe the story of Tony Mason , who claims to have invented the Lynchburg Lemonade in 1980 at his bar. A Jack Daniels’ sales rep who visited the bar learned the recipe, communicated it up the corporate food chain, and JD rolled out a national Lynchburg Lemonade promotional campaign. A few years later, JD even launched RTD versions of the Lynchburg. Millions were sold.
From Harry Johnson to Salvatore Calabrese, Erik Lorincz and Francesco LaFranconi, the finest bartenders of past and present are those who have had to think about their words, who used smiles and body language to conceal their insecurity at speaking in a language not their own. The result? Charmed, entranced guests.
I was at two book launches in the last two weeks, both in New York: the official launch of The PDT Cocktail Book by Jim Meehan and the launch of New York restaurant Eleven Madison Park’s cookbook.
The latter was also a celebration of Eleven finally achieving the coveted third star from Michelin and the announcement that owner Danny Meyer was selling Eleven to his protégés, the authors of the cookbook, general manager Will Guidara and chef Daniel Humm.
Jim’s book is gorgeous – beautiful, heavy and brilliantly written. It’s a manual too, detailing the philosophies of PDT, the tools and equipment they use, even diagramming their mise-en-place. An amazing achievement. The Eleven Madison Park book is, if anything, even more mind-bogglingly good than their party was, and their party was at least as good as Jim’s book. (How cool was their party? Well, Jim was bartending there!). The Eleven book weighs more than 3kg, and is as beautifully photographed and typeset as any such high-end food-porn cookbook from a posh restaurant you’ve ever seen.
I promise this won’t be another bullshit piece about how we should all throw away our mobile phones and go back to the days when an evening’s entertainment consisted of standing around the piano singing vaudeville songs before a spot of light incest and some pipe smoking.
Bars are immeasurably better now that women are as welcome in them as men which is a development of recent occurrence.