#baltimore bars

The husband-and-wife team chase down recipes for such rye drinks as Virytas, a concoction made with caraway seeds and cinnamon sticks, and a favorite of Lithuanians, as well as Jack Raines’ Mr. Pim, mint juleps and the South River Club Punch that features rum, apples, lemons, cinnamon and cloves and is served at the club’s annual winter breakfast.

In addition to rye, there is the Old Line State Punch, which includes Chartreuse, apple brandy, Earl Grey tea infused with ginger and oleo-saccharum, which is a muddled concoction of lemon peels.

A mint julep. (George H. Cook, Baltimore Sun files, 1980)

The authors have also furnished a lively history of drinking in Maryland dating to Colonial days and continuing into the present which coincides with the resumption of making and imbibing classic cocktails from the Golden Age of drinking which vanished in the 1960s, with the rise in popularity of what is called in the trade, “white goods,” better known as white wine, vodka and gin.

“Many of the recipes in this book will demonstrate how Marylanders made use of what they had to get the libations they wanted,” wrote the authors.

They conjure up such grand drinking venues as Barnum’s City Hotel, the Rennert Hotel, and the Hawaiian Room in the Emerson Hotel, Baltimore’s version of Trader Vic’s tiki bar — all now demolished. The authors wrongly place the Emerson Hotel’s Hawaiian Room at 4 N. Charles St. The hotel and its fabled bar stood at the northwest corner of Calvert and Baltimore streets.

While on the campaign trail in Baltimore in 1960, then-Sen. John F. Kennedy talked to a small group in the lobby of the Emerson Hotel before returning to his room. The Emerson housed the popular Hawaiian Room, a tiki bar of sorts. (Ralph Robinson, Baltimore Sun files, Sept. 19, 1960)

Happily, the Owl Bar in the Hotel Belvedere and the LB Tavern at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, once home to the Diamondback Lounge, which closed in the 1970s, soldier on, as do new additions to the local cocktail scene, such as the B&O American Brasserie in the old B&O Building whose mixologist, Brendan Dorr, is one of the most celebrated in the city.