Pegu Club

Pegu Club was an influential New York craft cocktail bar that opened in 2005 in a second-floor space at the border of SoHo and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. See craft cocktail. The bar was named after, and loosely inspired by, the club of the same name in the old British colonial outpost of Rangoon (now Yangon, Myanmar), and its signature cocktail. See Pegu Club Cocktail. Founded in 1871 and named after the province in which it was located, the original club moved to new, expanded quarters in 1882 in order to receive the prince of Wales, quarters it occupied until the British left the country in 1948; subsequently, it was used by the Myanmar Army before lying vacant for many years. At the time of this writing, plans have been announced to renovate the club’s original teak building and incorporate it into a new luxury housing development.

New York’s Pegu Club captured some of the exotic, steamship-age glamour associated with the original club without falling into kitsch. Opened by the same team that previously founded the pioneering Flatiron Lounge, with Julie Reiner and the critical addition of beverage director Audrey Saunders, it was the first large bar to fully embrace the craft cocktail esthetic and helped to publicize the movement and ensure its expansion. Saunders, a protégé of Dale DeGroff, brought an exacting drink-building standard to the cocktail list, which featured both pre-Prohibition classics, many of them gin-based (including its namesake cocktail), and notable Saunders originals such as the Gin-Gin Mule and Old Cuban. See DeGroff, Dale. The opening bartending staff included Phil Ward, Toby Maloney, Chad Solomon, and Jim Meehan, all of whom eventually opened their own, equally influential cocktail bars. Other significant bartenders to have worked there include Brian Miller, Del Pedro, and Kenta Goto. Pegu Club closed its doors in 2020, as much a victim of New York real estate prices as of the coronavirus pandemic.

See also Gin-Gin Mule; Reiner, Julie; and Saunders, Audrey.

Simonson, Robert. The Modern Classics. Berkeley, CA: Ten Speed, 2016.

By: Robert Simonson