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Carthusian Cocktail Enthusiasm

(Carthusian Monks, Marseille, France, 1930)

This is what happens when you set out to do one thing and get sidetracked by a bar book. I started to look up the true definition of a “mist”, which turns out to be any shot of straight liquor poured over crushed ice sometimes garnished with a lemon peel. It [...]

St. Germain, Germane to the Champagne Cocktail

(Image of The Underground’s Table Kit via: Cheeky Chicago.)

Was it at Les Deux Magots or the Café de Flore that you overheard them? At any rate it was somewhere in the 6eme, and so it must have been Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

“I’m so bored,” she said.

“Hell is other people,” he quoted back to her.

They were obviously drinking the [...]

The End of an Error

May I suggest a Perfect Manhattan?

1 1/2 oz whisky (Canadian Club was the preferred)
1/4 oz. dry Vermouth
1/4 oz Vermouth rosso
dashes of Angostura bitters
stemmed cherry
opt: twist of orange

Despite what Nick Charles would have you believe, don’t shake this to a foxtrot, instead stir in a mixing glass filled with ice cubes. Serve neat in a chille [...]

Luxe, calme et volupté.* That sounds wonderful. In today’s world, I find that there is a disturbing lack of all of the above. Maybe it’s the speed at which we live our daily lives, multitasking during each measured moment of the day and well into our nights. Whatever the reason, I think that we’ve lost something that our parents and grandparents took for granted. Not just an ease in society or how to throw an intimate dinner for six or write a thank you note, but an everyday elegance. Easy and Elegant Life is my attempt to define what makes up an elegant existence and to pass along a few easy (and inexpensive) ideas for bringing back a little elegance to our everyday lives. Here you will find ideas for living, decorating, entertaining and dressing with an easy elegance. Not just my ideas. To help point the way, I intend to seek out all sorts of people -- professional lifestyle experts and those who seem to have been born elegant -- asking them what they believe constitutes elegance and how we can best achieve it. So to those whom Honore de Balzac called “elegantologists” I dedicate this site and the good fight. * From “L’Invitation au voyage” by Charles Baudelaire. The whole line reads: “Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté/ Luxe, calme et volupté.”

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Carthusian Cocktail Enthusiasm

St. Germain, Germane to the Champagne Cocktail

The End of an Error

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