1900s–1930s
Hotel bars and the books that came out of them
Why so much of the classic canon is traceable to a handful of hotel bars, and what their published books actually record.
An unusual amount of the cocktail canon comes from a small number of hotel bars operating in a narrow window. That is not because hotel bartenders were more inventive than anyone else — it is because hotels had the money, the international clientele and, crucially, the institutional interest in publishing a book.
Publication is the whole reason we know about them. Better drinks were almost certainly being made in places that never printed anything.
The books are the evidence
Harry Craddock's The Savoy Cocktail Book, published in 1930 from the American Bar at the Savoy in London, is the most consequential of these. It is a comprehensive snapshot of what a leading international bar was serving at the end of the 1920s, and much of the modern canon is filtered through it.
Harry MacElhone's books, from Harry's New York Bar in Paris, do a similar job for the expatriate scene. Between them they preserve recipes that would otherwise have vanished with the people who made them.
The limitation is obvious once stated: these books record what one bar served, not what everyone drank. Reading them as a complete picture of the era is the most common mistake made with them.
Attribution is harder than it looks
A drink appearing first in a printed book is evidence of when it was written down, not of when or where it was invented. Bar books freely recorded drinks made elsewhere, often without attribution, and the same drink appears under different names in different cities.
This is why so many hotel-bar origin claims are 'first printed in' rather than 'invented at'. The distinction is small in wording and large in meaning, and it is worth insisting on.
Women behind the bar, then and now
Ada Coleman ran the Savoy's American Bar for over two decades in the early twentieth century and is credited with the Hanky Panky. Her career is well documented, and worth naming because the standard telling of this period is otherwise almost entirely male.
That imbalance is partly real and partly an artefact of who got to publish. The books preserve the people who wrote books.
Show your working
What's actually established, and what isn't
Every claim on this page, with how well the evidence supports it.
- documented
The Savoy Cocktail Book was published in 1930, compiled by Harry Craddock of the Savoy's American Bar.
The book itself, with a printed date.
Supported by contemporary printed sources — a dated book, menu, newspaper or legal record.
- documented
Ada Coleman was head bartender of the Savoy's American Bar in the early twentieth century.
Contemporary press and hotel records; among the best-attested careers of the period.
Supported by contemporary printed sources — a dated book, menu, newspaper or legal record.
- widely-reported
Ada Coleman created the Hanky Panky for the actor Charles Hawtrey.
The account traces to Coleman's own later telling, repeated consistently since. A first-person account rather than an independent contemporary record.
Consistently repeated across reputable modern drinks writing, but without a contemporary source we can point to.
- disputed
A drink's first appearance in a hotel bar book means it was invented there.
Frequently assumed, rarely supportable. Bar books recorded drinks from elsewhere as a matter of course; first printing and invention are different events.
Two or more serious accounts contradict each other, and the disagreement has never been settled.
The short version
- The canon is skewed toward hotel bars because hotel bars published books.
- The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930) is a snapshot of one bar, not of an era.
- 'First printed in' is not 'invented at' — the distinction matters constantly.
- Ada Coleman's documented career is a useful corrective to how this period is usually told.
Drink the history
Recipes from this period
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