cocktail route is an American term from the 1880s. At first, it referred to any drinker’s habitual peregrination from saloon to saloon, but by the turn of the twentieth century it had come to refer to the loose group of 25-cent saloons (when that was a lot to pay for a drink), hotel bars, and other drinking establishments favored by a town’s most dedicated social drinkers. The largest and sportiest cities would have more than one such route; to have none would mark a town as sleepy. Cocktail routes, their stops and their travelers were ever changing, but their pillars—bars such as New York’s Hoffman House, San Francisco’s Bank Exchange, and Harry’s New York Bar in Paris—tended to remain constant year in and year out. See Hoffman House; Bank Exchange; and Harry’s New York Bar.
By: David Wondrich