ice carving in a bar context is not the art of chainsawing and chiseling swans and salmon-fishing bears out of large blocks of ice, but rather the craft of breaking those blocks down into pieces small enough and uniform enough to be used for chilling drinks for service. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this was part of every American bartender’s competence, at least if he or she was working in a bar that served mixed drinks. For something so central to American bartending, however, there is very little detailed information to be found on the topic in bartender’s guides or in the many newspaper articles from the time devoted to bartenders and their craft. See ice, history of its use.
According to the 1887 posthumous edition of Jerry Thomas’s The Bar-Tender’s Guide, the bartender should always have shaved ice ready for drinks that are mostly spirits, and “small lumps of ice” for the others. To these one can add the larger blocks that would be needed for punches and cups. Some bars went beyond that: as described in a widely reprinted 1899 article in the Chicago Chronicle, not “content to break up ice in irregular shapes, making pieces about as big as a toy rubber ball” (this was for an Old-Fashioned), they carefully carved ice “into perfect cubes about two inches [5 cm] on a side, so that every cocktail gets just as much ice as every other one.” If bartenders were doing this in Chicago, they were no doubt doing it elsewhere as well (although it is a Chicago bartender, John Applegreen, who specified that “lump ice” for drinks should be “about the size of an egg, but cut square or diamond shape”). See Old-Fashioned Cocktail.
By the 1840s, at any rate, the bartender’s kit included ice saws, axes, and chisels for reducing the large blocks to more manageable size, plus ice picks, mallets, and knives for the finer work of producing pieces that will fit in a glass and the kind of finely cracked ice that went into a Mint Julep. See
After Prohibition, bars quickly moved to making their own ice, which came pre-cubed for service. It would be a long time before some bartenders went back to breaking down blocks. But when Milan’s elegant and popular Bar Basso was reimagined under new ownership in 1967, Mirko Stocchetto (the bar’s proprietor and longtime head barman) opted to source large blocks of ice from a local factory to execute and cool his cocktails. Although this may not appear to have been an entirely unprecedented maneuver from the perspective of the modern bartender, it must be understood that these events were transpiring at a time when the techniques and protocol of the European “American bar” that had flourished from the late nineteenth century until the Second World War were altogether waning in lieu of contrived faux-Polynesian antics and careless entertaining with commercially bottled mixers at the home bar.
Even more astounding were the ways in which the bar staff at Bar Basso chose to cut down their factory ice by hand, using various saws and other sharp implements, in order to fit their custom “bicchieroni” (large cocktail glasses). When necessity became the mother of invention yet again after their local ice factory shut down, Stocchetto and his staff began freezing their own ice at the bar in plastic molds to suit the needs of their burgeoning cocktail program.
Legend has it that one fateful evening at Bar Basso back in 1967, Stocchetto reached for a bottle of gin to complete a Negroni (commonly equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin), yet he inexplicably found a bottle of prosecco in his hand. Thankfully he did not resist the urge to defy tradition, and the joyous outcome of his now-infamous “mistake” was the Negroni Sbagliato (sbagliato translates from Italian as “erroneous,” “wrong,” or “mistaken”), which Stocchetto has been faithfully serving over large cubes of ice at Bar Basso for half a century. See Ciro’s; Italy; and Negroni.
Another place that ice carving continued unabated was in Japan. However, it took a trip through New York City for this painstakingly maintained skill to edge back into the spotlight. Some thirty-three years after Stocchetto instituted his idiosyncratic ice program and several thousand miles away, the concept of “big ice” in bars would arrive at the forefront of the cocktail world when Sasha Petraske and Toby Maloney of New York City’s Milk & Honey first embraced the idea of freezing large blocks of ice in-house, which they also cut by hand into various shapes and forms—each intended for specific drinks within the wide scope of their largely classic cocktail repertoire. See Milk & Honey; and Petraske, Sasha.
Petraske admitted that he drew much of his inspiration for the ice program at Milk & Honey from his observations and experiences at New York City’s Angel’s Share, a well-hidden East Village cocktail haunt whose entrance is easily overlooked within the Japanese restaurant in which it is housed: “We got the idea from Angel’s Share. Although some American bars never stopped using the big ice, I believe that the Japanese can be credited for the current craze for large format ice. Even if Angel’s Share hadn’t been around, eventually we would have bumped into Tokyo bartenders.”
For in the Tokyo cocktail bar scene, where Angel’s Share’s bartenders had trained, a meticulous understanding of the importance of ice as it contributes to a drink has been a fundamental aspect of many heralded bar programs—most notably that of Kazuo Uyeda at his bar, simply known as Tender. His unwavering attention to detail in every facet of cocktail preparation has always included a particular focus on the effects of varying gradations of ice as they relate to specific drink-making techniques. Uyeda’s principles regarding the contributions and effects of hand-cut ice upon the modern interpretation of the classic cocktail is quite possibly the indirect foundation for the Western bartender’s current appreciation of large-format frozen water in our drinks. See Tender Bar and Uyeda, Kazuo.
With Milk & Honey setting the example, many modern bars instituted block ice programs, even going so far as installing massive Clinebell ice machines, capable of making it one large block at a time. Today, it is once again expected of a top-level bartender that he or she will be able to take one of those blocks and deftly reduce it to usable parts, each sized and shaped according to the glass in which it will do its work. That is progress. See
Applegreen, John. Applegreen’s Barkeeper’s Guide, 2nd ed. Chicago: Hotel Monthly, 1904.
Gosnell, Mariana. Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Marling, Karal Ann. Ice: Great Moments in the History of Hard, Cold Water. St. Paul, Minnesota: Borealis, 2008.
Uyeda, Kazuo. Cocktail Techniques. New York: Mud Puddle, 2010.
Wondrich, David, Imbibe!, 2nd ed. New York: Perigee, 2015.
By: Richard Boccato and David Wondrich