Dale DeGroff
Known industry-wide as King Cocktail, Dale DeGroff is the single most important figure in the modern American craft-cocktail revival. His Rainbow Room program (1987–1999) restored the classic-cocktail tradition that Prohibition and mid-century laziness had nearly killed, and trained the generation of bartenders who now run American cocktail culture.
The man who started it all.
Dale DeGroff was born in Rhode Island in 1948 and grew up in a working-class family with no particular connection to the cocktail world. He moved to New York in the 1970s, drifted through restaurant jobs, and eventually found himself bartending at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles and then at various New York rooms through the 1980s. By the mid-1980s he was making fresh-squeezed-citrus cocktails at a time when virtually no other American bar bothered, working from old recipe books he’d hunted down at used bookstores and applying the techniques he was discovering to a bar program that hadn’t asked him to.
In 1987, the legendary restaurateur Joe Baum hired DeGroff to design and run the cocktail program at the Rainbow Room—the 65th-floor restaurant atop 30 Rockefeller Center that Baum was rebuilding into a 1930s-era supper-club revival. DeGroff’s mandate, as he later described it, was simple: make the cocktail program as serious as the rest of the restaurant. He spent twelve years doing exactly that.
The Rainbow Room
The Rainbow Room program under DeGroff was the proof of concept the modern craft-cocktail revival needed. The bar served Manhattans and Old Fashioneds and Sidecars made with fresh juice, quality spirits, real bitters, and historically researched proportions. It treated the cocktail menu as a curated document with named originals, classics restored to original spec, and a clear distinction between the two. Bartenders were trained on cocktail history. Customers got cocktails that didn’t taste like anything else available in New York at the time.
By the early 1990s the Rainbow Room had become a destination for cocktail-curious tourists and for the small handful of younger American bartenders who had begun to notice that DeGroff was doing something interesting. By the late 1990s it had trained the next generation directly: Audrey Saunders, Tony Abou-Ganim, Julie Reiner, and a long list of others passed through the program in apprentice roles and went on to build the bars and the books that defined the next twenty years.
The Rainbow Room closed in 1999 (the building’s lease arrangements changed; not DeGroff’s fault). By then the revival was already underway, and the Rainbow Room had been its proving ground.
The books
DeGroff has written or co-written three of the most influential modern cocktail books:
- The Craft of the Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2002)—the book that introduced craft-cocktail technique to a generation of American home bartenders. Detailed, illustrated, technically rigorous. Still in print.
- The Essential Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2008)—a follow-up reference focused on classic-cocktail recipes and modern interpretations.
- The New Craft of the Cocktail (Clarkson Potter, 2020)—an updated and expanded edition of the 2002 book, reflecting twenty additional years of revival progress.
The first book in particular is one of the foundational texts of the modern American cocktail revival. It propagated the techniques DeGroff had developed at the Rainbow Room to a mass audience and gave the next generation of American bartenders—both professional and amateur—a working manual.
The Museum
In 2005, DeGroff co-founded the Museum of the American Cocktail in New Orleans with Robert Hess, Anistatia Miller, Jared Brown, Ted Haigh, and others. The Museum has operated continuously since and serves as both a public-education institution and an industry gathering place. DeGroff’s involvement has continued throughout.
What he made
The single most consequential person in the modern American cocktail revival. Other people wrote more books (Berry), opened more famous bars (the Cates), trained more bartenders per square foot (Saunders), and built more digital infrastructure (Hess). But the Rainbow Room program in the late 1980s and 1990s was the moment American cocktails started taking themselves seriously again, and DeGroff was the bartender who ran that program. Without him, the timeline of the revival is twenty years later. Maybe never.
He’s still working. He consults, he teaches, he speaks at industry events, he plays piano (he’s also a musician). He earned the King Cocktail nickname; he wears it with the appropriate amount of bemused self-mockery.
To go deeper
- Books The Craft of the Cocktail (2002), The Essential Cocktail (2008), The New Craft of the Cocktail (2020).
- Institution The Museum of the American Cocktail, now part of the Southern Food and Beverage Museum in New Orleans.
- Events DeGroff is a recurring presence at Tales of the Cocktail and various industry events. Has done extensive guest-bartending and teaching engagements over the years.