Customer Reviews

The Savoy Cocktail Book

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I highly recommend the book along with the Boston Museum of Fine Art hand tooled martini shaker. (on web) Take yourself back to the thirties with a couple of cool ones. Great drinks and the illustrations will suit the serious vintage buff. Fun to look at even if you are not drinking.....even better when you are.

I bought this book to share with my adult children over Thanksgiving 2010. We tried a number of the cocktails that we had heard about from older family members or from old movies... and they were fabulous! So many different ingredients to explore with easy instructions to follow. This book is very complete from an era gone bye... great way to bring that era into the 21st Century.

This is a classic for a reason, good recipes and well written. There are hundreds of bartending books out there, competing for space in your shelf or on the coffee table - for myself, this one and Colin Field's Ritz book are the go to books and they look quite nice as well. There is another review in here slamming the Savoy book on the font used or something like that, it isn't very clear. Writing in 2012, the one I received is bound well, nice paper, well laid out and overall is a step above most books these days. Is it comparable to productions from Easton press or the Folio Society? No, but so what. This is a book meant to be used and spilled on.

Got this for research, not really intending to make anything from it, but this is the best source for Thirties drink research.

This is a facsimile copy of a classic vintage book. I thought that would be cool. However, if you remove the dust cover, the book have a Times New Roman font on the back. How cool is that if you want vintage? The very least the publisher could have done was to make the book look totally vintage by using some kind of art deco font. So if you want a facsimile I would recommend you to buy second hand even if it would me pricey.

The drink recipes are good, but quite hard to mess them up. I would have loved footnotes regarding certain ingredients that are not common today. I know it is kind of geeky, but I think people in the market for vintage cocktail books are kind of geeky anyway. I don't belong to this group, but I don't mind a bit of geekiness.

The index is very weak. The drinks are organised alpabetically and it would be nice to have an ingredients index at the back. If I want to do something with Bourbon I have to flip through the whole book for Bourbon recipes.

Have a look at Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails: From the Alamagoozlum to the Zombie 100 Rediscovered Recipes and the Stories Behind Them instead if you want to drink history together with your cocktails or if you just want the cocktails without the history The Craft of the Cocktail: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Master Bartender, with 500 Recipes.

The book (if you are able to find one) is great, but the seller is even better. I purchased my book from Lucky Seven Books. Always check with them first!