Duffy, Patrick Gavin (1868–ca. 1955), born Patrick Joseph Duffy, is best remembered today as the author of the widely influential 1933 Official Mixer’s Manual, which he wrote under the Patrick Gavin Duffy pseudonym, for whatever reason. Born in Ireland, he started his career at New York’s Ashland House, one block from Madison Square, in 1884, at age sixteen, eventually becoming head bartender. His clientele included actors, boxers, circus folk, and horse traders, along with some of the biggest celebrities of his day: Oscar Wilde, John L. Sullivan, J. P. Morgan, Richard Croker, and Maurice Barrymore. An advocate of fastidious service and white-jacket formality, he was described by a contemporary as “a natty little fellow with waxed moustache and vandyke, always wearing a carnation bud in his coat lapel.” In 1893, he hopped across Fourth Avenue to open the Lyceum Cafe, adjoining Daniel Frohman’s Lyceum Theater. From that establishment, he provided E. H. Sothern’s next-door rehearsals with two-gallon bowls of his original Brandy Punch, as described in his Manual. Other original recipes include the Blinker, DF, Janet Howard, Montauk Riding Club, and W. Johnson Quinn cocktails; the Hotel Empire Peach Cup; the popular Herald Punch; and, of course, the Patrick Gavin Duffy Punch. He famously claimed to have served the first Scotch Highball ever mixed in America, at the request of British actors frequenting his cafe in 1894 (see, however, Highball). In 1901, he headed uptown to run the bar at the Hotel Empire, near Columbus Circle and in 1904 opened his second cafe, at the current location of Alice Tully Hall. Then, in 1907, he returned to Ireland, coming back to New York in 1921 to run rooming houses in Brooklyn and work on his magnum opus. The Official Mixer’s Manual was one of the most important works for re-establishing the American art of the bar after Prohibition, remaining in continuous publication in various formats for forty years—apropos for a work whose author claimed to have been “forty years behind the bar.”
Duffy, Patrick Gavin. The Official Mixer’s Manual. New York: Long & Smith, 1933.
Duffy, Patrick J. “Dear Old New York!” Unpublished hand-typed 110-page monograph.
Duffy, Patrick J. Letter to the editor. New York Times, October 25, 1927.
Interview with Patrick Gavin Duffy, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 1, 1933.
Richardson, Matthew Darrin. “‘Round Town …” Elmira Star-Gazette, Thursday, May 31, 1934.
By: Doug Stailey
Patrick Gavin Duffy meets the great tragedian Edwin Booth (1833–1893): a paragraph from Dear Old New York, Patrick Gavin Duffy’s unpublished, hand-corrected (and much xeroxed) autobiography, ca. 1935. Public Domain.
