Harrington, Paul (1967–), is one of the pioneers of the twenty-first-century cocktail renaissance. A native of Bellevue, Washington, he tended bar at Enrico’s in San Francisco and the Townhouse Bar & Grill in nearby Emeryville, which he had helped to make famous for its cocktails. In 1995, he was recruited by HotWired (the pioneering new website for Wired magazine) to provide cocktail recipes and content for the CocktailTime part of the site. Before long this led to a column, the Alchemist, which provided weekly recipes for often classic cocktails and discussed their histories. The column was enormously influential, introducing many bartenders and home mixologists to what a properly made cocktail should be. The content of the site was repackaged and slightly updated in 1998 in the book Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, which he wrote along with Laura Moorhead, his editor at HotWired. It is one of the foundational texts of the cocktail movement that followed.
Soon after, Harrington quit bartending to work as an architect, returning in 2012 to set up the bar program at the well-regarded Clover restaurant in Spokane, Washington. One of Harrington’s signature drinks is the Jasmine. He created it in 1990 while working at the Townhouse as a riff on the Pegu Club cocktail. It is made from gin, Cointreau, Campari, and lemon juice (inspired by a Charles Schumann book, Harrington only used fresh juices; that was unusual at the time). The Jasmine is often used as a drink to introduce people to gin or Campari, or both. See Schumann, Charles.
See also cocktail renaissance; Jasmine; and Pegu Club Cocktail.
Farrell, Shanna. “The West Coast Cocktail Revival Started in Emeryville Thanks to This Man.” Berkeleyside Nosh, September 15, 2017. https://www.berkeleyside.com/2017/09/15/west-coast-cocktail-revival-started-emeryville-thanks-man (accessed March 22, 2021).
Harrington, Paul, and Laura Moorhead. Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century. New York: Viking, 1998.
By: Robert Hess