The Pegu Club (2005-2020)

The Pegu Club on Houston St. announced its closing today, a victim in part of insane rent increases and in part of Covid-19. The lease was up at the end of October, and considering the commercial real estate market — at least before March — it was unlikely that Audrey Saunders & crew would renew. But the lockdown, and the economics surrounding it, has denied us the chance to give the place a grand sendoff, and that’s a little heartbreaking.

When the Pegu Club opened, in August 2005, the craft cocktail movement in NYC was already pretty strong. Milk & Honey had been around for almost five years, and Employees Only and Julie Reiner’s Flatiron Room were pretty well established. But at the time, it felt like the Pegu Club, owned (in part) and run by Audrey Saunders — a disciple of the great Dale DeGroff and a veteran of Bemelmans Bar, still one of my favorite establishments in town — took what still felt a little like a secret and brought it into the consciousness of everyone in the city, if not the entire drinking world. Cocktails were something to be taken seriously, and the Pegu Club showed us how it was done.

I was still pretty new to the cocktail action in 2005, and I hadn’t started writing about it yet. But man oh man, I remember the buzz around the Pegu Club building to a pre-opening fever pitch . It opened while my wife and I were on our honeymoon, and as soon as we got back we started going there pretty regularly. It was always mobbed, but the staff was never overwhelmed, and Audrey Saunders herself always had time to stop by our table and say a quick hello. I was a besotted fan — little did I realize that so many of the staff there would themselves become icons in the New York drinks scene.

For a couple of years at least, the Pegu was the unquestioned headquarters of the New York cocktail scene, and with the passage of time it morphed into one of the “old guard” establishments. My wife and I had a baby, so we stopped going out as much. And when I did go out, it was usually to a work event. But we’d check in at the Pegu from time to time. The drinks that pushed the envelope in ‘05 were still on the menu, now beloved old favorites. The staff had changed, and Audrey herself had decamped to the Pacific Northwest. But I never had a bad drink there, nor do I know anyone who did. The room itself always looked as gorgeous as the day it opened — and it was one of the nicest rooms in the city to drink in.

I didn’t write too much about the Pegu Club, because by the time I started writing about drinks and the people behind them, the place was already well-established, and therefore not newsworthy. It was a place to go for pleasure, not for work. But I did get it into print a couple of times — once was on the occasion of a “cocktail safari” sponsored by Tanqueray, which you can read here.

The other time I wrote about the Pegu Club was when it celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015. I couldn’t convince my editor at Robb Report to run a stand-alone piece about it, but as a result I got to revisit the bars left standing from the “Class Of ‘05” and do a progress report of sorts. The article has since disappeared into Internet purgatory, but here’s the section on the Pegu Club:

If bars like Milk & Honey and Employees Only set the stage for New York City to become the cocktail mecca it is today, Pegu Club’s opening was the tipping point. Its owner, Audrey Saunders (who worked in cahoots with Julie Reiner and the Flatiron Lounge team), was the hot young bartender of the moment; she’d studied under Dale DeGroff, the godfather of the craft cocktail movement, and for three years she’d been head bartender at Bemelmans Bar. In the process, she turned a vintage hotel bar on the Upper East Side into one of the most exciting places to drink in the city. Her creations, the Gin-Gin Mule and the Old Cuban, are still on the Bemelmans menu today. At the Pegu Club, she took what she’d learned at Bemelmans and ran with it. The drinks, like the Fitty-Fitty Martini (half gin, half vermouth) or the tea-infused Earl Grey MarTEAni, were new and innovative but easy for cocktail novices to wrap their heads around. The airy room, with small tables and a long, graceful bar, was just the right mix of elegant and casual. Even the name, taken from an old drink long forgotten by all but the most studious cocktailians, sounded perfect —a little exotic, a little intimate. Today, Audrey Saunders is rarely found on the premises; in 2011 she married Robert Hess, whose Drinkboy chat room helped fuel the cocktail mania of the early 2000s, and moved to the Pacific Northwest. But the Pegu Club lives on, not just in its original location on Houston St. but in many of the best and most popular bars in the city. It seems like everyone who worked under Saunders at the Pegu Club went on to found his own bar, including Jim Meehan (PDT), Phil Ward (Death & Co., Mayahuel), Jim Kearns (The Happiest Hour), and Kenta Goto (Bar Goto), to name a few. As for the Pegu Club itself, it may be slightly easier to get a table there than it was a decade ago, but the drinks have held up. The drink menu is still anchored by some of the same cocktails that were there in 2005, but like the Pegu Club cocktail itself (gin, curaçao, fresh lime juice, bitters and orange bitters), it’s still delicious to return to.

To Audrey Saunders and all who helped make the Pegu Club such a magical place for 15 years, thanks for the memories, and all the delicious drinks.