Sip a cocktail served on the Titanic or indulge in a ’70s disco drink, all before summer’s end.
By Brian Reinhart | March 31, 2025|2:15 pm D Magazine
The Original Sin, one of the first drinks to appear on Apothecary’s new time-traveling menu, has roots dating to Harry Johnson’s New and Improved Bartenders’ Manual, published in 1900.Samantha Marie Photography / courtesy Apothecary
This spring and summer, Greenville Avenue cocktail bar Apothecary will reinvent itself every month, on a time-traveling quest through decades of drinking history.
Starting on April 1, the innovative cocktail den (a sister bar to Rye restaurant) will dedicate four months to four decades’ distinct drinking styles using ingredients trendy in those eras, techniques that were available at the time, and, in some cases, exact historical recipes. Some of the bar’s snacks will pay tribute to the past, too. April kicks off with a menu of 1920s drinks, with a handful of even older cocktails that were still served in that decade. (One drink comes straight from a recipe served on the Titanic in 1912.)
Each menu will include details on the origin of the cocktail. Drinks from the Hotel Ritz in Paris and Waldorf Astoria in Chicago make the 1920s list, as do inventions from that decade such as the Bloody Mary, then known as a Bucket of Blood.
If a drink is a new invention by one of Apothecary’s bartenders, the menu will explain the inspiration. All the bar’s employees dove into historical research, reading old books, reading through digitized archives of historical bar menus, and watching historical recipe YouTubers like Max Miller. After one bartender suggested a drink with flavors inspired by opium dens, the crew enlisted a friend with actual experience consuming opium tea, who confirmed that the cocktail tastes kinda-sorta like the real thing.
“As we looked up those old recipes, we wanted to push ourselves,” says Apothecary co-owner Tanner Agar. “Bee’s Knees, super classic 1920s cocktail. Gin, lemon, honey. Well, what if we preserve these lemons? Not like a jam. Can we preserve these lemons in such a way that you get a unique flavor out of them that you haven’t had before? That’s not what Jay Gatsby would have had. But it could have been.” (Plus, Jay Gatsby was fictional.)
The decades may not match your preconceived notions all the way through. The month of May is dedicated to the 1950s, but Apothecary wants to puncture the Don-Draper-drinking-old-fashioneds stereotype. That’s even more true of June’s menu, which will revisit the 1970s, long derided as the dark ages of cocktails due to the era’s emphasis on artificial flavorings.
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“I think the ’70s [menu] might be my favorite by the end, because the disco drink era is wild,” Agar says. “That’s really when you got away from fresh anything. It’s sweet, energizing, and fast, and you want it to be colorful. [But now] we don’t have the taste that people in the ’70s did. Are we going to have 12 authentic ’70s drinks? No. Will we make drinks that could have been made in that time, that are absolutely inspired by the time period, that are the way we like to make drinks? Yes. We’re going to tone down the sugars. We’re going to tone down the fake everything.”
In July, they’ll round things out with a visit to the 1990s, followed by an August spent recapping the crowd’s favorite drinks from the whole historical tour. Apothecary will offer a passport for frequent guests: try two drinks from each decade and you’ll receive a swag bag at the end.
Agar says that limiting his team to techniques and ingredients available in past eras was not a significant hurdle—but another challenge was more surprising. Historical recipes, especially from a century ago, tended to use a small number of ingredients, mixed to slightly different ratios, creating menus that might sound boring to today’s diners.
“What you find as you follow along up through the ’20s is, there’s not that many ingredients that are used in different proportions to make all the different drinks,” Agar explains. “While you can look up classic books, they can sometimes be disappointing to read. You think, ‘I’m going to find these gems,’ and then you go, ‘Well, that’s just a quarter more grenadine than this cocktail over here. That’s this cocktail, just one sweeter!’ That was one of the things we had to push ourselves on.”
This is far from the first themed menu at Apothecary. The bar is probably still most famous in Dallas for its long-running Alice in Wonderland theme, with drinks inspired by the Mad Hatter’s tea party. But the time-travel conceit is irresistible, and the rapid movement from one decade to another means we’ll have to visit often. The 1920s menu begins on April 1, but the decade only lasts a month.
Apothecary, 1922 Greenville Ave. 1920s menu in April; 1950s menu in May; 1970s menu in June; 1990s menu in July; encore presentation of favorites from all decades in August
Author
Brian Reinhart
Brian Reinhart became D Magazine’s dining critic in early 2022 after six years of writing about restaurants for the Dallas Observer and the Dallas Morning News.