Category: San Francisco
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Is the Anti-“Frisco” Movement Racist?
On one of my Bar and Cocktail History tours, a guest asked (or rather suggested) that the whole “Don’t Call it Frisco” thing is specifically anti-Black. I hadn’t thought about it, and decided to investigate. People have been trained on “Don’t Call it Frisco” much in the way that they’re trained to say that shaking…
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103 Things to Drink in San Francisco, 1855
I am reading the 1855 book Land of Gold, Reality Versus Fiction by Hinton Helper. You can find it online here. It talks a lot of smack about San Francisco and I love it. San Francisco was a brand new city in 1848 when gold was discovered in Sacramento, but by 1855 the population was…
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Speaking at the Museum of the Eye Dec 28
I’ll be giving a short talk at the event “Celebratory Bubbles, Not Eye Troubles” at the Museum of the Eye in San Francisco on December 28th. It’s an annual New Year event. My talk (probably a short one of 20ish minutes) is “Eye-Openers, Corpse Revivers, and Anti-Fogmatics: The Medicinal Morning Cocktail.” It’s based on stuff…
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Did the Original Cocktail Sauce Contain Angostura Bitters?
I am researching Prohibition and a search for “cocktails” in the San Francisco Chronicle turned up a story from 1920 on the origin of the “oyster cocktail” that I think is what today we call “cocktail sauce” that is used more on the shrimp cocktail. (I am a 30+ year vegetarian so I could be…