“A bar with no sign out front? How do I find one of these things?”
Secret speakeasys have become a not-so-secret trend. San Francisco, Boston, New York City and Charleston each have at least one. Want to know something even better for us Minneapolis folk? We have one right in our neighborhood….you ask where it is? Well, based on my experience…all I can say is, “good luck”.
For those of you who DO NOT know what speakeasies are, it is time to get a little educated. We will excuse you if your history classes are blurring together right now and you can’t actually recall what the prohibition is. Ponder no more. The first thing you need to know is that during the prohibition (January 1920 to December 1933) bartenders had to get creative in their drink-making due to the lack of "legal" alcohol and they started using ingredients that masked poor tasting liquors like, ginger ale and rye. During the prohibition, rediscovering (and reinventing) premium, hand-made cocktails was highly valued. Patrons crowded around the bar for a show in the art of making drinks. And a show they got- flipping bottles, adding fruits, sugars turning to flames atop the glasses, quite the spectacle. Second thing you need to know is that this circus of a drink-making all happened in hidden bars; behind restaurants, under buildings in cellars, unmarked doors, password protected. In lower-class versions of these bars, the term blind-pig was given to them, as these places would charge $.25 for patrons to enter and see a blind pig, then get a gin drink gratuitously, as evading the laws of the time. In upper-class speakeasies, men wore sport coats and women wore fancy dresses and paid quite the small fortune to enjoy these bootlegged drinks (provided by gangsters like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone).
"This ‘speakeasy’ business was one of the most independent and prosperous businesses in the world, especially in New York, for no other industry in the world could afford to kill its customers off like that,” Will Rogers wrote in a letter to The New York Times in 1928.
Recently in the US there have been bars like this popping up all over the place. You might ask, “Why?” They were replicated perhaps out of nostalgia, but more out of an obsession with the days of the prohibition. Whether it is Nashville, Seattle, New York or Minneapolis, everywhere it seems that fancy cocktails are being created in their dark, shadowy and secret surroundings. Most of them are now modeled after the Mayflower Club, by far the swankiest of the speakeasies during prohibition, located in Washington D.C., close to the place where alcohol was banned! Sure, we can call them, “speakeasies” today, but technically thats an unfitting term, considering the business is now legal. And highly discussed!
We will leave you with one tip. (The one we went to is located in a basement… without a sign… in the Warehouse District) Good luck, and hopefully you aren't left lost and frustrated on a chilly march night looking for this place like we were. Trust us, once you get inside the secret door and past the bouncer, it's well worth it.
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