‘Cocktail King’
When Dale DeGroff was asked to create a cocktail menu featuring old and forgotten classic drink recipes for the restaurant Aurora and then the legendary Rainbow Room in New York City, he didn’t know he was helping to start a revolution in the way Americans drink.
DeGroff worked for Joe Baum, who had pioneered seasonally changing menus at The Four Seasons and also operated Windows on the World. Baum tasked DeGroff with creating a new kind of cocktail bar, one featuring pre-Prohibition drinks with all fresh ingredients, no mixes.
“He told me to get a book by Jerry Thomas,” DeGroff says between mixing cold drinks on the porch of the home he shares with his wife, Jill, in Pawcatuck, a village in Stonington.
Thomas was a pioneering mid-19th-century bartender whose 1860s book Bar-Tender’s Guide was an early and influential drink-recipe tome. But it had been out of print for decades. To find it, DeGroff had to hunt for a copy in used bookstores and then had to recreate and relearn many of the forgotten techniques and ingredients explained in the book.
When the Rainbow Room reopened in 1987 with DeGroff ’s pre-Prohibition-inspired cocktail menu, the 65thfloor space at 30 Rock became a Camelot for cocktail lovers — ground zero in the craft cocktail revival that would eventually spread across the country, resulting in suspenders-wearing bartenders shaking and twirling drinks with the skill of chemists and the passion of painters.
DeGroff ’s menu featured then-almost-unheard-of drinks in New York City, such as pisco sours and mojitos, and shaped the modern cocktail bar. DeGroff tracked down the small martini glasses used by the main characters in the 1934 classic film The Thin Man and reintroduced them to the cocktail world as the Nick and Nora martini glass. His cosmo recipe became the definitive take on the cocktail and helped popularize it after Madonna was photographed by an Associated Press photographer drinking one at the Rainbow Room in the 1990s.
In 2002, DeGroff, by then known as the King of Cocktails, published the first edition of The Craft of the Cocktail. The most recent edition, The New Craft of the Cocktail, was released in 2020. Since it was first published, the book has helped train a generation of bartenders.
In 2004, DeGroff and his wife founded The Museum of the American Cocktail, a New Orleans-based nonprofit dedicated to preserving the history of the cocktail. Partially raised just across the border in Westerly, Rhode Island, DeGroff moved to New York City to become an actor, dropping out of the theater program at the University of Rhode Island to do so. “I was sure that I’d be walking the Broadway boards in no time,” he says. That didn’t quite happen, but DeGroff kept his feet busy. “I did walk a lot of other boards behind three feet of mahogany.”
As he pushed to get his acting career off the ground, he worked in advertising and then the restaurant industry. He fell in love first with the social aspects of the New York City bar. “In New York it takes you 30 seconds to realize that everything happens in the bars and restaurants,” he says. Because many people had such small homes, much of their social life and time with friends and family takes place in the local bar. “These neighborhood bars, in many cases people remain loyal to them for 30, 40, 50 years — this is like extended family,” DeGroff says.
This social aspect of the bartending trade is what’s on most display on his Pawcatuck porch during a recent visit as he regales visitors with stories of unionized New York City bartenders who wouldn’t make the drinks on his menu and Associated Press reporters drinking before and after trips overseas. He serves a drink called the Punch Royale, which features freshly grated nutmeg and cognac and the Oude martini, a drink inspired by the precursors to the martini featuring Old Duff genever. Both drinks are incredible.
DeGroff is thrilled by the way craft cocktails have spread, adding that he enjoys cocktails in nearby Mystic and loves trying new drinks in his travels, preferring to sample the local specialties rather than order any specific drink. “I’m really a ‘when in Rome’ kind of person,” he says. “We now have the luxury of amazing craft bars in almost any city or town.”
DeGroff and his wife moved to Connecticut during the pandemic, and DeGroff has been sharing his knowledge and skill at book-signing events and trainings for local bartenders.
The secret to a good cocktail, he says, is, not surprisingly, balance. It’s all about skillfully combining “sweet, sour and bitter, strong and weak” flavors.
However, DeGroff ’s advice for making drinks extends beyond ingredients and taste. Each drink he serves is steeped in history and lore — the liquid serving as a kind of fuel for storytelling and fostering human connection. This is part of the equation that DeGroff says new bartenders should pay attention to. He advises making sure you’re stepping behind the bar for the right reasons. “It’s not so you can become famous, so you can become this or become that, but because you really are a sociable person,” he says. “You like to be in that environment, and you also have good powers of observation and like to make people feel good. You really need to have all that stuff going for you, and then you have to learn the profession. A person who doesn’t have that stuff can be a brilliant, brilliant bartender technically, but they’ll always have an empty bar.”
This article originally appeared in Connecticut Magazine. Follow on Facebook and Instagram @connecticutmagazine and Twitter @connecticutmag.