Pegu Club

Gin, orange curaçao, lime, and bitters — the Rangoon colonial club signature published in Craddock's 1930 Savoy Book, revived by Audrey Saunders in 2005.

The Pegu Club cocktail was created at the Pegu Club in Rangoon, the capital of British Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), during the 1920s. The Pegu Club itself was the most exclusive British colonial social institution in Burma — a private club founded in 1882 for senior military officers and government officials administering the colonial territory, situated on a hill overlooking the city with a pavilion, gardens, and bar that served the British imperial administration at the height of its regional power. The drink — gin, orange curaçao, fresh lime juice, and both Angostura and orange bitters — was served as the establishment's signature cocktail and became associated with the studied, formal leisure of the British colonial officer class. Harry Craddock published the recipe in The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), cementing it in the international cocktail canon. The Pegu Club's name was adopted by bartender Audrey Saunders for her influential New York cocktail bar, which she opened in 2005 on West Houston Street in SoHo. Saunders had been mentored by Dale DeGroff and became one of the most significant figures in the American craft cocktail revival of the early 2000s. Her Pegu Club bar — named as a tribute to the classic drink and the lost colonial cocktail culture it represented — was instrumental in training a generation of bartenders who went on to open some of the most respected craft cocktail bars in the United States.