The 1906 Mural You Have to Show Up Early to Sit Under
The St. Regis hotel bar where the Bloody Mary was born in 1934, and where the way in is still to walk through the door at four.
A thirty-foot Maxfield Parrish mural of Old King Cole runs the length of the back bar, painted in 1906 for the Knickerbocker Hotel and moved here later. It is the reason to be in this room. Everything else — the leather bar stools, the tasseled chairs, the low light bouncing off dark wood — is arranged so that the mural does the work, and it does.
This is the ground-floor bar of The St. Regis, opened as a hotel in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV. In 1934 a Paris bartender named Fernand Petiot arrived with a vodka-and-tomato-juice drink he'd been mixing at Harry's New York Bar, the room renamed it the Red Snapper for the clientele, and the Bloody Mary took up permanent residence in Midtown East. The house has believed it is the best hotel bar in the country for a while.
Editorial Deep
Order the Red Snapper. Lightly spicy, smooth, boozy — a proper one, not the brunch version. The martini is the other confident order: cold, stiff, correct, exactly what a Midtown East hotel bar in the fifties should be doing at any hour.
At four, when the doors open, the room reads as a private study someone happens to be pouring drinks in. Late-afternoon light picks up the gilding on the Parrish, the leather bar stools are all yours, and a bartender has time to talk. This is the version of King Cole most people who love it are describing. Sit at the bar, dead centre under the mural if a seat is open, and take the truffled popcorn and beetroot chips when they arrive.
Hotel guests in from the elevator, Midtown lawyers and bankers on the way home, an older Upper East Side contingent who have been coming for decades, and tourists who have read that the Bloody Mary was invented here. It skews jacketed, older and moneyed, and it behaves — this is a room where people are conscious of the mural above them. The crowd is the product at seven and the cost at eight, when the density starts to eat the seats. Smart casual is the floor; shorts, sneakers, athletic wear and hats read wrong after five, and men frequently wear jackets in the evening, though how strictly that lands can vary night to night — worth a call to the hotel if you're unsure.
Against Bemelmans up at the Carlyle, the numbers land in similar territory for a comparable hotel-bar evening; against a serious downtown cocktail room where the programme is doing more layered work for less, this reads high. Order a second and you are paying the mural rent.
This is the best version of a New York hotel bar from 1904, and it should be judged as exactly that — not as a destination cocktail programme. Come back at four on a weekday with someone you want to impress without effort, sit at the bar under the Parrish, drink one Red Snapper and one martini, eat the popcorn, and leave before the seven o'clock rush turns the room into a scrum. Do not come back if you were hoping for inventive drinks, a bar seat after six without waiting, or a room where sneakers pass without comment. It is a walk-in, a dress code and a mural. Take it on those terms and it delivers.
Order this
Drink this.
Red Snapper and the martini
“A one-drink room with a mural worth the.”
Arrive at four, sit at the bar under the Parrish, drink a Red Snapper and a martini, and leave before the seven o'clock scrum. The programme is straightforward for the money and the room turns tight by evening, but the mural, the service and the martini are exactly what a 1904 New York hotel bar should be delivering. Skip if you want inventive cocktails or a bar seat after six without waiting.
The Verdict
