Nicol, Duncan (1852–1926), was the reserved Scottish-born bartender who ran the Bank Exchange saloon in San Francisco from 1887 until its closing in 1920 and made Pisco Punch famous in the process. Born in Glasgow, Nicol was apprenticed at sixteen as a merchant seaman aboard the three-masted barque Dunfillan. When the Dunfillan called at San Francisco in the summer of 1869, he promptly jumped ship, as so many had done there before him. See, for example, Johnson, Harry; and Thomas, Jeremiah P. “Jerry”. By 1871, he had secured employment as a porter—basically, a barback—at Alphonso Vaughan’s Crystal Palace saloon, in the heart of the city’s business district. He was working as a bartender by 1874, and by 1876 he was behind the bar at the famous Parker House on Portsmouth Square. In 1887, after briefly owning his own bar, he joined George Brown as a partner in the Bank Exchange, formerly the city’s finest saloon but then fading. See Bank Exchange.
Under Nicol’s administration, the Bank Exchange flourished, especially after he made Pisco Punch a specialty there in the mid-1890s. See Pisco Punch. But Nicol’s Bank Exchange wasn’t just a place to get a trendy drink. Nicol was a taciturn man with little tolerance for nonsense, and he ran the bar as a quiet, gentlemanly place where women could drink as well as men, a rarity at the time. He had his rules: no more than three drinks to a customer (there appear to have been exceptions for the regulars who had established they could handle more), and any unruly behavior would be greeted with instant expulsion. Nicol was not hidebound: he renovated the bar in 1903, installing state-of-the-art electric lighting, and in 1922, at age seventy, he learned to drive (“Young fellows like me can’t afford to get rusty” was his comment at the time). However, he was conservative. He insisted on working behind the bar until Prohibition forced it to close its doors, sent his customers off every night at ten o’clock, with an old-fashioned “doch-an-doris,” or one for the road, and insisted on mixing the Pisco Punches himself.
In 1912, the journalist Pauline Jacobson captured him at work, “obviously clad in a handsomely frogged, spotless white linen coat, his eyeglasses hung behind one ear like a bookkeeper his pen, his white hair cropped close, his smooth-shaven face pink with health and intent upon his work, with hands trembling with the years, yet measuring with the nicety of an apothecary.” Prohibition helped a good many people and hurt a good many. Among the latter were not only the Duncan Nicols, the men who had spent a lifetime mastering their craft, but also the customers and other bartenders who lost their example of how to make a rough business elegant.
Jacobson, Pauline. “A Fire-Defying Landmark,” San Francisco Bulletin, May 4, 1912.
McDonnell, Duggan. Drinking the Devil’s Acre. San Francisco: Chronicle, 2015.
UK National Archives. Registry of Shipping and Seamen: Index of Apprentices. December 1868.
Wondrich, David. Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: Paul Clarke and David Wondrich