Pre-Prohibition and classic cocktails offer drinkers a vital baseline for understanding flavour profiles. In today’s bar scene, where innovation and complex techniques are celebrated, these simple, time-tested recipes provide a necessary anchor for the palate and help ground the tasting experience. Recognising this, the newly reopened Bar Anima has chosen to feature these historic drinks as its signature offerings, each one acting as a time capsule that preserves the tastes and innovations of a bygone era.
“In the 19th century, people drank cocktails for socialisation and status,” says Pei Cheung, Anima’s assistant bar manager. “The spirits and equipment available at the time were generally of lower quality. People relied on sugar, spices and fruit juices to make drinks more palatable, so many old recipes are simpler, sweeter and designed to mask imperfections in the base spirit.”
One of Bar Anima’s current signatures, the Bamboo, is an icon of this era as mixology took off in Japan. Cheung recounts the cocktail as invented by German bartender Louis Eppinger, who was hired as head bartender at the Grand Hotel (built in 1887) in Yokohama, a port city that was the first point of contact for Western cultural ideas like jazz.
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