McElhone, Henry “Harry” (1890–1958), a Scot who worked in France and catered largely to Americans, earned his reputation as one of the bar world’s defining figures behind the bar at Harry’s New York Bar in Paris, which he owned and operated from 1923 until his death. See Harry’s New York Bar. McElhone was a talented mixologist, inventing several drinks that enjoyed wide circulation, including the Monkey Gland, the Scofflaw, and an early version of the White Lady. His real importance, however, was as a pioneer of branding: through his tireless and clever use of, among other things, publicity stunts and paper ephemera (including menus and self-deprecating postcards, jocular items such as lapel tags requesting that intoxicated patrons be returned to the bar, and numerous updates to the vest-pocket cocktail book that he had published), he created an identity for his bar as not just one of the American bars in Paris but the American bar in Paris. Masters of branding such as Don the Beachcomber, Trader Vic, and Allan Stillman of TGI Friday’s followed a path that McElhone laid out. See
Born in the rough Hilltown section of Dundee, Scotland, McElhone left school at fourteen and after a brief stint as a mill clerk found work as a busboy and then a billiard “marker,” or attendant. In that job, he “met several Frenchmen who seemed to be well on the road to prosperity,” as he told a Dundee newspaper in 1922. They convinced him to seek his fortune in France. By 1908 his French was good enough for him to be made a bar boy. According to the detailed autobiography he sketched out to Town and Country magazine in 1947, that was at the Hotel Beau Séjour, in Cannes. For the next six years, McElhone would tend bar at various French resorts, ending at the Casino at Enghien-les-Bains, just outside of Paris.
When war broke out in 1914, McElhone’s first instinct was to join not the British but the French army (his wife was French). When he learned that he would instead be pressed into the dreaded Foreign Legion, he went instead to New York, where he briefly tended bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York and the Hotel Elton in Waterbury, Connecticut. He returned to Paris in early 1915 and was hired to reopen the shuttered New York Bar on Rue Daonou. Shortly afterward, however, McElhone was recruited to be head bartender at the new Ciro’s Club in London. There, he mixed Fourth Degrees, Tipperaries, Chorus Ladies, and thirty other Cocktails, along with thirty-four long drinks, for what was left of London’s high society. After a year, he joined the Royal Naval Air Service and served in Flanders as an observer for the duration of the war.
In 1919, McElhone returned to London and helped open several new bars, including the one at Buck’s Club, before returning to Ciro’s. His time there and at Ciro’s summer bar at the resort of Deauville, France, made him famous, and it was as “Harry of Ciro’s” that he published his ABC of Mixing Cocktails at the end of 1922. This guide would see ten editions during his lifetime.
In 1923, McElhone was able to buy the New York Bar in Paris and promptly attached his name to it. He continued to target Americans, advertising it in Paris’s American newspapers with a phonetic spelling of the address, cinq rue Daunou, as “Sank Roo Doe Noo,” so any American arriving in Paris could get directly there by taxi. Perhaps his greatest stunt was creating the IBF (International Bar Flies)—an organization for serious drinkers—with the New York journalist O. O. “Odd” McIntyre (1884–1938) in 1924. By 1927 there were over five thousand members with posts, or “traps,” all over the world, and the organization kept growing for years afterward.
In 1940, with German troops closing in on Paris, McElhone locked his important papers in a safe, buried it outside of Paris, and fled with his family, minus one son who was already a prisoner of war, to London. There, he was nearly killed in March 1941, when the Café de Paris, where he was tending bar, was destroyed by a German bomb with large loss of life.
McElhone returned to Paris after the war and picked up where he left off, running the bar until his death. He was succeeded by his son Andrew (1923–1996), his grandson Duncan (1954–1998), and now his great-grandson Franz-Arthur.
Archives Commerciales de la France, September 22, 1923, 1446.
Goodman, Eckert. “Harry’s Sank Roo Doe Noo.” Town and Country, July 1947, 56ff.
“‘Harry of Ciro’s’ Is a Dundee Man.” Dundee Evening Telegraph, December 26, 1922, 9.
Sir Affable [pseud.]. “Then-and Now.” Sporting Times, September 25, 1915, 2.
Woon, Basil. The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books. New York: Brentano’s, 1926.
By: Fernando Castellon and David Wondrich