The Campbell

In Jack Finney’s 1970 novel, Time and Again, a man travels from current day New York City to the winter of 1882, NYC. He does so via a combination of extensive training of the manners, history and attitudes of the past, finding a common unchanged location of both periods, and finally performs self-hypnosis. He catapults himself into the past on several occasions using this method.

I felt catapulted into the past a few years ago when I sat tableside at The Campbell bar & restaurant located at the corner of Vanderbilt & 42nd Street, Grand Central Station. The cocktail waitress brought me an old-world drink, a Scottish Highlander. That’s when I had an A-HA moment. Maybe it was the orange bitters and Scotch, maybe the classic glassware, maybe even the polite formal manners of the waitress. But the moment now became the moment of yesterday. The histrionics of cocktails, and what they say about the humans who partake, tell quite the story.

I’m from a family of history buffs. So apparently the Campbell experience engaged that aspect of my inherited mindset. I saw the beautifully lit bottles behind the bar shine in a new light. Everybody loves a good drink; but to imagine people from the past ordering the same cocktail in the same city years ago, or maybe in a different city, or even a different country and what those conditions might have been at the time, provides much to ponder while sipping. If only those discarded bottles of yesteryear could talk!

We all probably have favorite such places that provide some theater beyond the basic large-screen TV’s and bartenders. I’m a sucker for bars/restaurants having an old mahogany library, church or fireplace feel. I’m probably a danger to myself if I frequent the London pubs or old-town Stockholm bars very often. And how ’bout those floating Tiki bars?

If you’re ever at The Campbell, tell them Keet’s Cocktails sent you.