City’s Oldest Bartender Has Served Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Duke of Windsor

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The New York Sun

Marilyn Monroe came Wednesdays for lunch and ordered a Beefeater martini, very dry. Danny Kaye pulled his jacket over his head to avoid being recognized. Judy Garland sat in a corner drinking Johnnie Walker Red.

“Judy Garland, very sad,” said Hoy Wong, or Mr. Hoy, as he is known at the Algonquin Hotel where he has worked for 27 years as a bartender.”She always had a cocktail glass in her hand.”

This week marked the occasion of Mr. Wong’s 90th birthday and unless another candidate steps forward, his bosses seem safe in calling him the city’s oldest bartender. He’s been working as a bartender for 58 years.

“He never misses a day,” said Bill Liles, the Algonquin’s general manager. “It’s just really an honor to work with someone like Mr. Hoy.”

Mr. Wong’s birthday party — which included some 350 of his friends and admirers —was held on Tuesday in the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room.

“I didn’t expect it,” Mr. Wong said during an interview earlier this week at the hotel, surrounded by Al Hirschfeld drawings of some of the same celebrities he used to mix drinks for.

Mr. Wong is not old enough to have been at the Algonquin during its Jazz Age heyday, but he is a link to New York’s past, when a martini cost a dollar and a shot of Scotch was 75 cents.

“With $10 I can take my girlfriend out, go to a movie,” he said, chuckling. “And have dinner. Still have change.”

In 1948, Mr. Wong got a job tending bar in New York at a now-defunct Chinese restaurant called Freeman Chum. It was there that he encountered Monroe, Garland and other notables including Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin and Bob Hope.

“They were all nice people,” he said.

There were more famous faces at the Algonquin, where Mr. Wong has worked since 1979. Once, he recalled, a woman sitting at the bar next to Anthony Quinn got so nervous she shook.

Up at 5:30 a.m., Mr. Wong goes for a walk around the block, then goes back to sleep until 12:30 p.m. After lunch and another nap it’s off to work at 3:15 p.m.

“He goes nonstop regardless of the business flow,” Mr. Liles said. “He never gets behind.”

He likes to mix classic drinks but if a customer orders a cocktail he’s not familiar with, he asks what’s in it and does his best to make one.

His proudest moment came in 1961 when he mixed a drink for the Duke of Windsor. “He said he wanted a House of Lords martini in and out on toast.”

The wait captain was prepared to send Mr. Wong into the kitchen for a piece of toast, but Mr. Wong knew the duke wanted a martini with a lemon twist ignited with a match.

“After he drink, he liked it,” he said. “And he had a second one.”


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