Last year, I was bar-hopping around the Village with Mary Kate — my then-girlfriend, now wife — when I noticed we were near Pegu Club, the iconic cocktail bar on West Houston Street. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to drop by to see how the old girl was holding up? Well, of course it would! It was always a good idea to drop by Pegu Club. We hoisted ourselves atop two bar stools in the center of the long, uneven wooden bar and surveyed the menu.
It was a list of old friends that never let you down, most of them invented by the bar’s co-founder and guiding spirit, Audrey Saunders. Gin-gin Mule, Old Cuban, Little Italy, Jamaican Firefly, the decadent Jimmie Roosevelt (cognac and Champagne and Chartreuse), and on and on. The menu rarely changed over the bar’s 15-year life. Why fix what ain’t broke?
I was newly glad that those modern classics were still on the menu when it became clear that Mary Kate had not tried many of the drinks. So we started ordering them, one by one, beginning with the Fitty-Fitty (a martini with equal portions of dry vermouth and gin that was revolutionary when first offered), and making our way through an Earl Grey Mar-TEA-ni (a sour with Earl Grey–infused gin) and Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini (a vodka drink laced with peaty Scotch and Pernod). We ended with the Kill-Devil, a bizarre and forbidding mélange of rhum agricole, green Chartreuse and bitters, topped […]
