Audrey Saunders

The most influential bartender of the modern cocktail revival you’ve never heard of.

Audrey Saunders grew up on Long Island in the 1960s and ’70s, worked her way through hospitality jobs in her twenties, and discovered serious cocktails in the early 1990s when she found her way to Dale DeGroff’s bar at the Rainbow Room in Rockefeller Center. DeGroff is widely credited with launching the American craft-cocktail revival; Saunders became one of his most consequential students. She trained with him through the mid-1990s, absorbed his rigorous approach to spec, technique, and historical research, and began developing her own bar program.

Pegu Club

In 2005, Saunders opened Pegu Club on West Houston Street in SoHo. The name came from a British colonial officer’s club in Burma; the bar’s aesthetic referenced the same colonial-era cocktail world that produced the Singapore Sling and the Pink Gin. Pegu Club’s bar program was, by widespread industry consensus, the single most influential bar program of the 2000s. It treated bartending as a serious craft, trained its staff in cocktail history, and applied rigorous attention to spec across a menu that ranged from classic-era reconstructions to modern originals.

Pegu Club opened the same year Death & Co opened in the East Village. Together those two bars—and a small cluster of others, including Milk & Honey and Employees Only—defined what the modern New York cocktail era would look like.

Pegu Club closed in 2020, a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic and the long-term economics of high-rent Manhattan retail. Its closure was widely mourned; the bar had run for fifteen years and produced an alumni network that includes many of the most prominent American bartenders working today.

The Old Cuban

Saunders’s most famous cocktail is the Old Cuban, created in 2001 and refined at Pegu Club: aged rum, mint, lime, simple syrup, Angostura bitters, topped with Champagne. The drink is, in structural terms, a Mojito recast as a Champagne cocktail—but the specific build (Bacardi 8 was the original spec, the proportions are precise, the mint is muddled gently) is unmistakably hers.

The Old Cuban’s larger contribution was strategic. In 2001, American cocktail bars treated rum largely as a Daiquiri-or-Mojito ingredient—pleasant, tropical, not particularly serious. Saunders’s drink argued that aged rum belonged in the same conversation as gin, rye, and bourbon, and that a rum cocktail could be as elegant and sophisticated as anything coming out of the craft-cocktail world. The argument landed. Within a decade, every serious craft bar in America had a meaningful rum program, and many of them included an Old Cuban or its descendants on the menu.

Other inventions

Saunders also created the Earl Grey MarTEAni (gin infused with Earl Grey tea, lemon, simple syrup, egg white)—one of the most-copied modern cocktails of the era—and the Gin Gin Mule, a gin-and-ginger-beer build that has become a craft-cocktail standard. Her menu philosophy emphasized seasonal fresh ingredients, accurate citation of source recipes, and a strong educational current: Pegu Club’s menu explicitly noted which drinks were originals, which were classics restored to original spec, and which were riffs on older formats.

The mentor

Pegu Club’s most lasting legacy may be its alumni. Bartenders who worked under Saunders include Brian Miller (Death & Co, then various Manhattan rooms), Phil Ward (Mayahuel, Death & Co), Jim Meehan (PDT, The PDT Cocktail Book), and dozens of others who went on to define the next wave of American cocktail bars. The Pegu Club training program was rigorous, often described by alumni as boot camp in interviews, and the bartenders it produced have largely been the people writing the books, opening the bars, and teaching the seminars of the past fifteen years.

What she made

Two things, with broader implications than either may have seemed at the time. First: she helped make rum serious in the New York cocktail establishment, which is to say in the bar establishment that set the national taste. The exotic-cocktail revival’s broader success owes something to Saunders’s specific argument that aged rum belongs in elegant cocktails. Second: she trained a generation. The structural strength of American bartending today—the density of well-trained bartenders, the consistency of program quality, the seriousness of recipe research—is partly a Pegu Club inheritance.

She’s still working. Her current ventures include consulting, brand education, and occasional event bartending. Pegu Club is closed; Saunders is not.

To go deeper

• Reading Pegu Club’s printed menus are collectors’ items; copies surface at industry auctions. The Pegu Club chapter in Death & Co: Modern Classic Cocktails (2014) is the best secondary treatment of the era and Saunders’s role in it.
• Bars Saunders does not currently have a permanent venue. Her consulting work occasionally surfaces on bar menus in unexpected places.