The old cocktail bar does not die: how Madrid maintains and recovers its most legendary bars

It's one o'clock in the afternoon and Richelieu, in the heart of the Madrid neighborhood of Chamberí, works as well oiled as the Rolexes, Patek Philippe and Cartier that can be seen on the wrists of its regulars and regulars.

Ladies' cardigans alternate with Prince of Wales suits, Lacoste polo shirts and mint, bubblegum and caramel colored pants;

while the new generations also enjoy the appetizer as if there were no tomorrow.

The dance of the waiters, in front of and behind the bar, indicates that what was once the mainstay of the so-called Costa de los Cardenales continues as if the years had not passed by.

The sound of plates and cutlery mixes with the sound of ice, which is stirred in a mixing glass to the sound of a good splash of Gordon's and a dash of French dry vermouth.

The cocktail shaker waits, until at one point someone orders a margarita.

“What they serve the most here are margaritas and

,” confirms Juan José Cuenca, a waiter for 19 years at this institution of good drinking, stationed at number eleven Paseo de Eduardo Dato.

At his side, in the thirteenth, Mazarino does not lose camber either.

“We want people to feel at home.

For this we must continue as before, but with a slight renovation, ”says he, sitting on one of his reupholstered sofas, Pablo Caruncho, who has just reopened the bar.

The current appearance of Mazarino, the work of the young architecture studio Sierra + De la Higuera, is fabulous.

Interior of the renovated bar Mazarino.Sierra + De la Higuera

Exterior of the Mazarin bar.

The neon imitates the original. Sierra + De la Higuera

“We found ourselves in a dark room: the black carpentry, the black carpet and the original granite floor covered with black vinyl.

And the wooden paneling that decorated the entire premises was painted in a gray tone”, they explain from the studio.

“When starting all that, the remains of what Mazarin was one day appeared.

We recovered the original carpentry, the granite floor, the wooden paneling was made new, inspired by the only photo that we could recover from then and we traced the neon of the entrance freehand and reproduced it to scale”.

The premises, which opened in 1971, had passed from hand to hand and were in a moment of decline.

It seems that now it recovers the brightness of yesteryear.

His waiters, all with history and a background of many years, confirm this by recommending

and

with personality.

Following Eduardo Dato, crossing the Castellana and going up Juan Bravo, it ends in Milford, which originally had the name of another illustrious cardinal: Fleury.

“But no one has ever called it that.

We have always been the Milford, which was the name of the apartment building upstairs”, says Joaquín Megía, who remembers with a prodigious memory the day he started working in this modern seventies-style cocktail bar, with large windows to the outside, two well-differentiated floors, a bar lined with capitoné and nautical decoration: it was on March 15, 1995.

Megía is part of a lineage of waiters who base their work on the service and ways of the past, adjusting and perfecting everything that was known before.

“We have not invented anything.

We are part of a tradition that has inherited and improved what other colleagues were already doing”, she comments with great modesty, while listing many of the achievements in the almost thirty years that she has been serving clients in the Salamanca district.

From

infused

with Canadian whiskey or

with egg white.

The Cock daiquiri.

The

they serve, ice cold, with Barcelona gin, two shots of Noilly Prat, lemon

and two olives, is one of the best in Madrid.

Measures?

"All waiters have a formula," confesses Megía.

“I usually count, but it always depends on the bottle.

With one of Giró's, which we keep in the fridge and it's cold, I do a quick mental count of 22, which is usually about 12 seconds.

And, for example, in the past when we used Bacardi, which came out a lot, we couldn't count more than fourteen”.

The history and memory in the ways and forms of serving is something that Joaquín has wanted to recognize in the letter that they have today.

The quote that can be found as it opens reads as follows: "Dedicated to all those who showed us the way and left, with their mark, their wisdom and their good work".

For the journalist Jesús Terrés, author of

and

, a set of stories about the good life, Milford is “my home in Madrid.

Moral and aesthetic beacon of the most decadent Madrid.

Good people, pijerío with tradition and shoes with tassels.

to say enough.

Milford is the best."

It is these places that Alberto Gómez Font, cocktail shaker in the eighties at La Mala Fama, linguist and person in charge, together with Juan Luis Recio, of

, is also passionate about .

“I am attracted to timeless, imperishable, elegant, comfortable and friendly decoration.

The very fact of entering them makes one find oneself in one of the bars of all life", points out this traditional

born in 1955, who among his favorites has the English bar of the Wellington Hotel, where he asks to be serve the

with more vermouth than usual.

Gómez Font remembers cocktail bars that are no longer with us.

“Unfortunately there are too many missing bars in Madrid.

One of the ones I remember was the bar at the Embassy pastry shop, on Castellana, where they served a delicious cava cocktail.

Another classic cocktail bar, without pretensions, of the usual kind, was Eduardo's.

A great bar.

There was also Roma, on the corner of Ayala with Serrano or with Ramón de la Cruz, now I don't remember exactly.

And a very good one in Claudio Coello, near Hermosilla, which was called Gitanillos”, recalls the also writer of

, in tribute to his past as Director of the Cervantes Institute in Rabat.

The Del Diego brothers behind the cocktail bar that bears their name.

In one of the funniest and most dedicated chapters of

, the compendium of notes on gastronomy, good spirits and love for English culture written by Ignacio Peyró, you can enjoy his particular tribute to another illustrious bar that left us, Balmoral , the legendary cocktail bar that disappeared from the Madrid street scene in 2006.

That place was the refuge not only for

,

but also for lovers of the regal bars of the past.

Those with dim lights, noble woods, wingback armchairs, padded bars, English-style stools, waiters with bow ties and impeccable service, where the

was not discussed.

“When the most prudent decision is a drink, there is the Martini, a friend that never fails”, warns Peyró from the London that currently welcomes him as Director of the Cervantes Institute.

“My own life has been favored many times by that abundance of happiness that the minute hand of the Martini has.

I don't think, like when I was young, that you have to take more than one: in everything you have to measure yourself, except, in this case, in praise: with the Martini, there is no praise that is exaggerated ".

old fashioned cocktails

At Castellana 113, time stood still in 1983. That was the year that Miguel Ángel Blanco bought this bar lined with fine wood and mirrors.

He, who came from places with a contrasting “personality” such as D'Angelo on Avenida del Brasil and Pigmalión, quickly found a place in the Madrid nightlife.

“These are years in which people socialized a lot.

I have seen traffic jams on a Monday at three in the morning.

It was a time when the Autonomies still did not have powers and everyone had to come to Madrid to do paperwork.

That gave Madrid a tremendous life”, explains Blanco, who will soon be 67 years old.

Paolo's signature Dry Martini.

There was a lot of whiskey in those days: Johnny Walker, Cutty Sark, Old Parr.

But also some of the cocktails that are still on the menu.

International classics, “the ones in the books”, as he likes to say:

daiquiri and the

.

"I do it the old-fashioned way, with the sugar cube, the Angostura and mashing the orange so that it releases all the essential oils," describes Blanco, who is also critical of current generations.

“People used to know what they asked of you and you had to do it well.

There was a synergy between the customer and the bartender.

The problem now is that many do not know what they are asking for.

As it is fashionable, people ask for things that they have not tried and then they see that they do not like them”.

The Paolo restaurant is another outstanding space on the Madrid street scene, it opened half a century ago, in 1972, in the Vallehermoso neighbourhood.

Its manager is Miguel Revuelta.

Here, among carpeted floors, bullfighting decoration, alpaca cocktail shakers and old Wild Turkey bottles, you can savor a

that allows you to travel back in time.

“I have several bottles of Gordons from the 80s and I always add a little to the cocktails I make.

They give it a special personality,” says Revuelta, who serves this drink in a much smaller conical glass than the usual martini ones.

Ice cream and with just the right amount of dilution, it is another of the great dry martinis that exist in the capital.

And Madrid-style cocktails

“These bars have been able to transform the clientele they had, they are lifelong places where, fortunately, more and more young people go.

They are in a wonderful moment”, highlights Luis Suarez de Lezo, president of the Madrid Academy of Gastronomy and a reference figure for understanding the future of eating and drinking in the capital.

One of their staples is the

that they prepare at Richelieu, “it also reminds me of David Gistau, a guy I've always held in high esteem and whose love of them seems fascinating to me”.

For François Monti, who has just published

, a guide to preparing cocktails at home the old-fashioned way without neglecting current references, Madrid has been able to maintain spaces where cocktails can be drunk as was done thirty, forty or fifty years ago.

“It is something unique in Europe, perhaps only in Italy it is similar.

But they are not the same either.

Spain is very particular in this”, points out this historian and consultant on drinking through

.

“In Madrid, old bars are out of the cocktail circuit and have remained as a

, they continue to have the same function they had in the past.

In addition, they keep the same decoration that you could find in the twenties, thirties, forties or fifties.

You can visit them and see what they were like in 1972, for example.

It is something that is very valuable to me.”

Monti alludes to the history of urban planning, interior design and the geography of the Madrid street scene to continue highlighting the importance of these spaces.

Old cocktail recipes written down on coasters by Fernando del Diego.

"Knowing that you can visit Richelieu and have a world-class

magazine

is one of the 100 most influential people in the world. the global bar industry.

Other places that continue to function as before in Madrid, rescuing old recipes and valuing formulas reminiscent of the 1980s and 1990s, are Cock and Del Diego.

Two references of the cocktail, moored in Calle de La Reina, where their bartenders, Javier Rufo and the Del Diego brothers, teach.

The former has been able to imprint personality on previous creations, perfecting and fine-tuning classics such as the

and the

.

The latter go about ordering old recipes from their father, written down on old coasters, and which show the modernity to which Fernando del Diego has always belonged.

Today, in the menu offered by their children, one can fly back to those 1990s in Madrid, where fluorine colors and neons ruled parallel to the Gran Vía. The

is a fantasy elaboration made with Habana 3, blue curaçao, sugar, lemon and lime Roses.

A drink from before that is still splendid and much in demand.

Madrid has not lost a public that still has the habit of going out to drink as before.

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