What a Swell Party It Was! ─ Rediscovering Food & Drink from the Golden Age of the American Nightclub

Chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud once explained: “The future of cooking is about how we can rewrite the history of it—it’s important to keep the memory and be entertained by it and inspired by it.” What A Swell Party It Was! entertains and inspires with a delicious slice of nearly forgotten culinary history—an era that followed the Great Depression and prohibition’s repeal, where America boomed and the nightclub scene flourished.

Opening this book is like swinging open the doors to another time and place, when big city life was a unique mixture of innocence and sophistication, romance and formality. It spotlights twenty-five legendary clubs that thrived in the 1930s and ’40s, just as Jazz exploded into mainstream popularity and alcohol was no longer illegal to serve. Through these pages and recipes, enter past the proverbial velvet rope into establishments forever-immortalized, such as Chez Paree in Chicago, Café Trocadero in Hollywood, The Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles, The Blue Room in New Orleans, and New York City’s Cotton Club.

In addition to including entrée, appetizer, dessert, and cocktail recipes from their original menus, each featured venue will be introduced with vivid anecdotes and history, narrated in a breezy style and illustrated with reproductions of vintage menu covers, beverage napkins, matchbooks, postcards, and rare photos.

An unabashedly joyful journey and a deeply authentic perspective on American culture in a rich, tumultuous age, What a Swell Party It Was! promises a cookbook/cocktail guide with a tip of the hat to history, crammed with details that bring life again to a fascinating American era.

Michael Turback not only created and nurtured one of Upstate New York’s first destination restaurants, he built a reputation around his ability to stalk, procure, and support the best of local food and wine. The Los Angeles Times called Turback’s “the first Finger Lakes restaurant to really devote itself to New York’s culinary and enological bounty.” A true culinary pioneer, his efforts sparked trends that are seen throughout the hospitality industry today. He is the author of a culinary trilogy (Hot Chocolate, Mocha, and Coffee Drinks), and has taken on, in print, such topics as the ice cream sundae, the banana split, artisan cocktails, food and cocktail pairings, and the pleasures of Finger Lakes Wine Country. He lives in Ithaca, New York.