New Orleans museum exalts the art of the cocktail

By Kathy Finn

NEW ORLEANS (Reuters Life!) - Ted Haigh was fascinated by Hollywood's portrayal of cocktail culture even when he was well shy of legal drinking age.

For Haigh, watching William Powell and his on-screen wife Myrna Loy sip from thin-stemmed glasses and exchange clever banter in the 1934 classic "The Thin Man" was intoxicating.

"I kept wondering, what are they drinking and what does it taste like?" said the 51-year-old.

Such images sparked a lifelong fascination with the history of drinking and brought Haigh to the opening of the Museum of the American Cocktail, where he is curator.

It's a clubby wood-and-glass space that pays tribute to one of America's favorite pastimes with displays of hundreds of cocktail artifacts that Haigh has amassed over several decades of collecting.

Vintage cocktail shakers, Prohibition-era newspapers, one-of-a-kind whiskey bottles and some of the oldest known bar tools and cocktail recipes in the country are among the exhibits.

"I used to want to just keep it all to myself, but then I realized I could do a lot more good by sharing it with the world," says Haigh, widely known by his online nickname, Dr. Cocktail.

Set inside the Riverwalk Marketplace retail center along the New Orleans riverfront, the cocktail museum is the brainchild of New York bartender Dale DeGroff and his wife, Jill.