When Jim Hobart, an executive at the large advertising firm McCann Erickson, tries to lure Don Draper away from Sterling Cooper (see Betty’s Turkey Tetrazzini), he calls Don and suggests a rendezvous at “the Algonquin.” He’s referring to the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, home of the famed Blue Bar.
Though this meeting never takes place, at least as far as we know, the Algonquin was (and remains) a meeting place for movers and shakers in the business and creative worlds, a place the denizens of Madison Avenue in the early 1960s would have visited frequently.
The famed Algonquin Round Table, for which one the hotel’s current restaurants is named, was a group of actors, humorists, newspaper writers, and critics that met at a round table in the Algonquin for lunch every day from 1919 to 1929. Membership was fluid, but included, at one time or another, the sportswriter Heywood Broun, editor of the New Yorker Harold Ross, actor and humorist Robert Benchley, actress Tallulah Bankhead, and actor and comedian Harpo Marx.
Bartender Rodney Landers of the Blue Bar, and previously of the Plaza Hotel, recommended the classic Algonquin cocktail as befitting two advertising executives meeting quietly to discuss an employment matter. Made with a “top-shelf rye whiskey base,” the drink also includes vermouth and pineapple juice as its two other principal ingredients.
While Jim Hobart is a very persuasive man, we doubt even a couple of Algonquin cocktails, as fine as they are, would have persuaded Don to jump ship from Sterling Cooper.
THE LOBBY OF THE ALGONQUIN HOTEL
COURTESY OF RODNEY LANDERS, THE BLUE BAR, ALGONQUIN HOTEL, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
NOTE: Landers recommends using a top-shelf small-batch whiskey.
21⁄4 ounces rye whiskey (see note above)
3⁄4 ounce vermouth
3⁄4 ounce pineapple juice
Lemon twist, for garnish
YIELD: 1 DRINK