Overview: Published November 14, 2026 by Jason O’Bryan for Robb Report, this piece focuses on the recipe and historical influence of the Pegu Club cocktail. Described as an old-school gin drink central to the modern cocktail revolution, the article details its origins in Rangoon and revival in Manhattan.
The Full Story
It is 1871, and the Pegu Club is a private gentleman’s club, founded in Rangoon, in British-controlled Lower Burma. Today the city is called Yangon and the country is called Myanmar, but it was, to put it mildly, the habit of 19th century British colonialism to do things their own way, no matter where in the world they happened to be. The club had extensive manicured lawns, tennis courts, billiards, and card rooms to say nothing of a handsome banquet hall and impressive bar, a two-story palace of teak that was meticulously maintained by the same “natives” who would’ve been denied membership on account of their skin-color. It functioned as the private social headquarters for the British colonial establishment.
It is 1923, and the Pegu Club is a cocktail. The drink is first published (as far as we can tell) in Harry of Ciro’s ABCs of Mixing Cocktails, as a combination of gin, orange curaçao, and sweetened lime juice, with Angostura and orange bitters. Who created this, and when, and how? No one knows. Cocktails exist in drinkable form before they’re ever written about, so we can’t say—does it actually take 52 years for this gentleman’s club to come up with an eponymous cocktail? One tends to doubt it.
It is 1948, and the Pegu Club is fading fast. Two things happen that year. First, David Embury publishes his influential The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks featuring several hundred cocktails, and while it includes similar drinks (like the White Lady and the Gimlet), the Pegu Club is conspicuously absent. Also, and far more significantly, Burma declares its independence. The Pegu Club (the club) would limp on for another 14 years, the staff polishing the brass on this titanic monument to British colonialism, but its days were numbered. Following the military coup in 1962, the building was seized by the army, and the club ceased to be.
Production & Profile
The Pegu Club cocktail is bracing and sophisticated, tart and strong, with a balance that evokes an earlier time; the Pegu Club from the first sip announces that it is a serious drink. It is a White Lady but more seductive, a gin Sidecar with a side of spice, and is always there to be revisited, whenever you wish to pull up a chair.
To prepare the drink, add 2 oz. London dry gin, 0.75 oz. lime juice, 0.75 oz. orange curaçao, 0.25 oz. simple syrup, 1 dash Angostura Bitters, and 1 dash orange bitters to a cocktail shaker. Add ice, and shake good and hard for eight to 10 seconds. Strain up into a cocktail glass, and garnish with a lime peel or perhaps nothing at all.
Brand & Industry History
It is 2005, and the Pegu Club is a dream, specifically the dream of a talented young bartender named Audrey Saunders. Saunders saw the future of mixology as clearly as anyone, but at the time the cocktail world was still stuck in an abusive relationship with vodka. She planned to open her own cocktail bar on the edge of SoHo in Manhattan, one that was devoted to gin (vodka’s more flavorful cousin, which makes boundlessly better cocktails), and one where she’d buck the current conventional wisdom by barely carrying any vodkas at all. As for a name, she chose something that embodied this bold and fresh turn, naming her bar after an old forgotten drink that was, she’d say much later, “bracing [and] sophisticated… everything that I wanted in a gin cocktail:” The Pegu Club.
What This Means
It is impossible to overstate the influence that Pegu Club (the bar) had on the drinking world it would help to create. Many of the great bartenders of our time got their first real foothold there, as did many modern classics, like the Old Cuban, the Earl Grey MarTEAni, the Little Italy, the Intro to Aperol, I mean it goes on and on. It thrived for 15 years but was killed, like so many others, by the COVID pandemic, an unsurvivable blow amid the other myriad challenges of operating a bar in New York. It shut its doors in March 2020 and never re-opened them.
Consumer Takeaway
The cocktail—the Pegu Club survived its namesake club and the bar that revived and rehabilitated it, and remains an aged and noble cocktail. As for the drink, it is a White Lady but more seductive, a gin Sidecar with a side of spice, and is always there to be revisited, whenever you wish to pull up a chair.
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