Johnson, Harry (1845–1930), was a Prussian-born American bartender and the author of one of the most important early bartender’s guides. Dubbed “Dean Emeritus” of his profession by the New York Sun in 1910, Johnson reached the height of his career in the late 1800s. A sailor, Johnson was left behind in San Francisco in 1862 to recover from injuries sustained in a shipboard accident. There, he worked his way through restaurant and hotel jobs before he moved to Chicago. He opened his first bar there in 1868 and a year later wrote his first book, the Bartenders’ Manual, which sold ten thousand copies—or so he claimed. Johnson was not always the most reliable chronicler of his own life, and no surviving book tallies perfectly with his description. (Some think this book might be the anonymous Steward and Barkeeper’s Manual published in 1869 by the Jesse Haney Co. of New York.) The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 put an end to Johnson’s business. He may have returned to San Francisco for a time, but he was back in Chicago by 1875, where he married and became an American citizen. He moved to Philadelphia in 1876, to manage a large bar staff at the Grand Exposition Hotel.
Two years later, Johnson moved to New York, where he worked behind the bar at Delmonico’s—the favorite haunt of Manhattan luminaries including Diamond Jim Brady, Lillian Russell, and William R. Grace, the city’s first Irish mayor—before taking over his own place on the Bowery, the first of several he ran in the city. In 1881 the International News Company asked Johnson to revise and enlarge his Bartenders’ Manual, printing fifty thousand copies the following year. The 1888 revised and expanded edition presented not only recipes but complete instructions for the operation of a bar. Johnson moved from bars to hotel ownership, opening the Pabst Grand Central Hotel at Columbus Circle in 1902, where he taught his nephew Paul Henckel Jr. the food and beverage business before returning to Germany. Henckel went on to become president of the New York Restaurant Association. Divorced and remarried, Johnson died in Berlin in 1930.
New and Improved Bartenders’ Manual, with twenty-four pages on how to manage and operate a bar, is the first work of its kind (by the 1900 edition, this section would swell to 157 pages). Johnson was also a talented mixologist, and several of his recipes are still in use today.Miller, Anistatia, and Jared Brown. The Deans of Drink Cheltenham, UK: Mixellany, 2013.
Sharp, R. S. Report on Harry Johnson passport application, April 5, 1920, United States Consular Records, New York.
By: Anistatia R. Miller and Jared M. Brown
Harry Johnson, from his 1888 Bartender’s Manual.
Courtesy of Cocktail Kingdom.
Harry Johnson, from his 1888 Bartender’s Manual. Source: Courtesy of Cocktail Kingdom.