Meier, Frank (1884–1947), was born in 1884 at Kirchberg in Tirol, Austria. His family were innkeepers, and he grew up in the business, attending hotel school briefly before going to Paris and London, where he became a bar boy at the Hotel Cecil. In 1903, he went to New York and was able to get a job behind the bar at the Hoffman House hotel, one of the most famous in the world, where he worked for seven months before returning to the Cecil. See Hoffman House. He soon left London, though, working at bars throughout France and Belgium and as far afield as Cairo. In 1908, he returned to Paris and opened the Brunswick Bar on the Rue des Capucines, which he ran until the outbreak of war in 1914. He volunteered for the infantry and then transferred to the Foreign Legion, where he saw a good deal of fighting.
Soon after his discharge in 1920, Meier was asked to open a bar in the Ritz Hotel, Paris. Running the bar, one of the most popular and crowded in Paris, on commission, he rapidly became both respected and, if not wealthy, then close to it. By 1926 his reputation was already such that travel journalist Basil Woon could call him “the man whose friendship is more courted than that of a many a president.” Although Meier’s role was largely managerial, he also found time to mix and create drinks, including the first luxury cocktail. That came about in 1923, when, as reported by Lucius Beebe, he mixed—and sold—a Sidecar with lemon, Cointreau, and a vintage pre-phylloxera cognac from 1865.
The Artistry of Mixing Drinks (in English, although printed in Paris), an elegant volume that is one of the few that can stand next to The Savoy Cocktail Book in terms of design. The book contained classics and popular Parisian drinks, but also a large number created by Meier, which he marked with a neat “FM” logo. The most famous are the Bee’s Knees, the Olympic and his Corpse Reviver no. 2, which might have inspired Ernest Hemingway’s famous champagne-and-absinthe “Death in the Afternoon.” Along with the regular print run, Meier issued a lot of three hundred numbered copies for special guests; the full list has not survived, but no. 85 was Kermit Roosevelt, and one can only imagine the rest.During World War II, he stayed at the Ritz even under Nazi occupation, although he seems to have helped the French Resistance (the record is murky), but once the war was finished, he had troubles with the hotel’s management because he asked to some clients to pay their tabs to his private bank account in England. He died in 1947.
Beebe, Lucius. The Stork Club Bar Book. New York: Rinehart, 1946.
Graves, Charles. “More Celebrities in Cameo.” The Bystander, January 20, 1937, 89.
“Paris Barman Here on Holiday.” New York Sun, September 9, 1933, 6.
Préfecture de police de Paris, dossier no. 96951, Meier, Frank.
Woon, Basil. The Paris That’s Not in the Guide Books. New York: Brentano’s, 1926.
By: Fernando Castellon