Q&A: Dr. Nicola Nice, Author of The Cocktail Parlor

Upon researching the many lauded tomes of the historic cocktail canon, Nicola Nice felt there was something missing—namely, the perspective of women. A doctor of sociology, Nice’s personal fascination with cocktail culture led her down a rabbit hole in search of women’s stories and contributions. She found them by the hundreds, and the research led to her own book, The Cocktail Parlor, released in 2024. We sat down with Nice to chat about the often unseen contributions of women to the evolution of the cocktail within the home, the impact this had on broader cocktail culture, and the stories of these female pioneers.

Imbibe: When you started collecting vintage hospitality guides and cookbooks, is that what inspired the idea for The Cocktail Parlor? 

Nicola Nice: I’ve always been very interested in cocktail rituals and hospitality. I’m a sociologist, so that’s what I study—people’s behaviors and traditions and the way we celebrate and gather. The cocktail and the whole ritual around the cocktail is something that’s always fascinated me, and in my professional life. I’ve worked with a lot of alcohol clients around cocktail trends and things like that. So when I first started really trying to immerse myself in cocktails, I did what any good researcher does and started looking for the books. 

This was about 10 or 12 years ago. And it became very quickly obvious to me that the books I was finding were all of a similar genre, primarily either about bartenders or bartending, or about the history of how certain cocktails emerged in certain bars. There are two obvious issues with that: The first is that, of course, almost all of them are going to be about men and the male experience with cocktails. Because it’s still really recent, in historical terms, that women have been able to go out and drink in bars, let alone by themselves or with other women. So I felt like there is a whole side to the story in terms of the female perspective that is not being captured here. 

The second thing is that, by only focusing on what happens in bars, we are assuming that anything we drink in the home is a trickle-down effect of what was first served in the bar. I think the problem with that kind of assumption is that you and I can go out into New York City tonight and try over a thousand different cocktails if we wanted. But I can guarantee that 99.9 percent of those we would never make again at home. So how do cocktails go from being something we enjoy as part of the hospitality experience to something we serve as part of the hosting experience? 

So that’s what triggered the idea initially. And I made a bet with myself—I bet that women also wrote about this. I bet there were household books that included cocktails, and I bet I can find one or two. That one or two turned into over 200 hundred. I collected books dating back 200 years. And as I put all the books in chronological order, I thought, there’s a story here. There’s a story of how we’ve served and written about and talked about drinks in the home from the female perspective, and how that’s evolved. 

In exploring this role of women in the home, women in domestic labor roles, and women in other ways behind the scenes, how did you see them impacting the evolution of cocktail culture? 

It sort of acted as a filter for the types of drinks that go from being drinks you can order in a bar to drinks that you comfortably feel you can make at home for other people. Of course, part of that is just going to be about popularity. When the Espresso Martini becomes a thing again, we’re all Googling how to make one, right? But before there was Google, we were looking to household management guides and recipe books and drinks books that were written for the same audience to find those recipes.

I sort of decoded what I feel are the main factors that influence whether a cocktail becomes something that will be popular in the home. First of all, it has to be really easy to make. I think most drinks that require ingredients that are obscure or you’re only ever going to use for that one drink and never again, those don’t tend to be drinks that really take off in the home. It has to be ingredients that we can easily find and would normally have available. 

The second thing is that they have to be kind of bomb-proof. A classic example is the Negroni, which has become very popular again over the last 10 years or so in particular. It’s a three-ingredient cocktail that, while yes, it is a Campari cocktail. If you make it with another amaro, or if you use different vermouths, or you use different gins, or you sub mezcal instead of gin, or use rye instead of gin and make a Boulevardier, it’s still going to be good. It’s fundamentally a good drink. And so I think any drink that is forgiving [will be more popular]. 

And then the third factor is drinks that we can put our own spin on, the way I’ve seen women do over the ages, going from the Sherry Cobbler to the Sour to the ‘tini cocktails to the spritz, right? If we think about that as a very broad evolution of popular drinks that women have been making at home, these are drinks that we can put our own spin on quite easily. We could infuse a syrup, or add a splash of juice, or change up the garnish. And that can either be just to our own taste or with the seasons or to pair with what we’re serving for food. I think that really comes into play in how drinks become popular at home.

Can you tell us a little about some of the women you learned about? Were there specific stories that stood out to you?

Absolutely. The Cocktail Parlor leans on about a hundred different women, so obviously I researched every single one of them. And there does seem to be a correlation that people, and women in particular, who are doing interesting things in the world of booze tend to be interesting people in general. So I often found that these women, once I started investigating their stories, were doing really cool things even outside of what they had to say about cocktails and drinks. One who I recently wrote about in a lot more detail on my blog, The Hostess Diaries, is Amy Lyman Phillips who wrote A Bachelor’s Cupboard in 1906.

Amy Lyman Phillips and Blanche Stuart Scott on their road trip from New York to San Francisco in 1910. | Photo courtesy of Detroit Public Library.

The book was a lifestyle guide to men living single lives. And her name as the author was initialized as A. Lyman Phillips. She herself was young and single when she wrote the book, which was not at all common in 1906. And what’s interesting is that she’s not just taking recipes from old household management guides or even just copying them from bartending guides. She was a hospitality journalist. She went all around the country and up and down the northeast interviewing bartenders and interviewing famous drinkers about what they were drinking and where and what the scene was, and bringing some of those recipes into the book. So there are a couple of recipes in that book that I think were in her book before they were in any bartending guides because they were so new and fresh at the time.

But outside of all of that, she was also doing really pioneering things. In 1904 she was the fastest woman to ride shotgun in a race car on Daytona Beach. Then in 1910, she and Blanche Stuart Scott [one of the first female aviators] were the second women in history to drive a motor car solo from coast to coast, and the first to go from east to west. And if you look back on all of these things—living a single life, writing about drinks, going out in restaurants, driving cars—this was just not something that young women did in 1906. And there are so many women’s stories that are still to be told, which is why I started the blog as a place to put all of those stories. 

Juxtaposed with that history, how do you see the impact of women continuing to shape the modern industry? 

I think there is still a perception that it’s a male-dominated industry and that the bartending profession is male dominated. And while I think that the narrative might be male dominated, in terms of actual numbers, there’s data that shows there are as many female bartenders as there are male bartenders today. And I think what’s important is recognizing the different dynamic that diversity in general can bring to the service and hospitality experience.

I’m not someone who has ever run a bar, but I have certainly interviewed a lot of people who do. One of the things they consistently tell me is that more women behind the bar attracts and encourages more female customers who also tend to be more adventurous than male customers. They’re more likely to ask about what’s good, what do you like, what should I try? And then behind the bar, there are women coming in from different industries. I’ve met incredible bartenders who were former pastry chefs or former florists or just coming from all different backgrounds and bringing that skill set into bartending. It brings even more innovation into what we’re drinking. 

When we look at historic cocktail books, the recipes don’t always align with our current taste in drinks. Have you come across a cocktail in your research that you feel really holds up or has turned into a favorite for you?

Definitely! It’s funny because I actually wrote about this recently—it’s the Perfect Cocktail. It was a drink that I thought I had come up with, and my husband and I have been making it forever. I love a reverse Martini. I love the taste of the vermouth, I like lower ABV cocktails, and like to feel like I can comfortably have two, you know?

So I love the Perfect Cocktail. But as with any great drink, you often find they existed a long time before you thought of it. So it was really fun to find that cocktail, but more importantly, to find it in one of the books by one of the women who turned out to be the most interesting that I came across in my research—Amy Lyman Phillips. And back in 1906, it was one of the first drinks that women could actually order in a restaurant before dinner and have it be somewhat socially acceptable to do so. Not only do I love this cocktail now, but it’s a cocktail that was a really important symbol of female empowerment.

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