1946 The Stock Club Bar Book by Lucius Beebe

very close to perfection, his guess would be that one of its weighti– est, albeit intangible, assets is the superb organization of its staff and the circumstance that Mr. Billingsley has never lost a customer through failure to estimate a patron's importance, the improper allocation of tables or any injudicious approach whatsoever. In an institution serving, often enough, three thousand persons a day, many of them notables with a complete willingness to be imaginarily slighted or to turn on the flow of professional temperament, this is a notable achievement. And, over and above all considerations, there is the primary function of the Stork as a night club and restaurant: the service of liquor and food in that order of importa~ce. These are also the concern, in what is hoped will be a humaI_le and practical manner, of this Bar Book. The subject has engaged the attentions of many learned practitioners of the calling of beautiful letters. Of the making of many cookbooks and cocktail guides there is no end. But because drinking in the Stork Club manner is probably repre· sentative of the most civilized and urbane habits of American toss– pots, barring, of course, the mysteries and mannered potations of such esoteric oenophiles as Les Amis d'Escoffier and the Wine and Food Society, this essay is devoted to drinking as practiced in the various parlors, anterooms and state suites of the Stork. It embraces hardly at all the postured sniffing of debatable vintage years or the ceremonial evaluations of rare and improbably costly spirits, although it may be remarked in passing that the Stork's collection of dated cognacs and other eaux de vie of note is the most extensive 1 I in North America. Taste in drinking is, quite naturally, everywhere and at all times conditioned by economic resources, available types of wines and spirits, climate, society and a score of other more or less ponderable factors. The various native and Indies rums which were the first

xi: Foreword