Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Cocktail of the Week: The Glamour Shot



The cocktail of the week for March 29th through April 3rd is the Glamour Shot. As we move away from the wintery weather of March in to the spring of April (hopefully), we start to move away from brown and bitter in to light clear spirited cocktails.

The Glamour Shot is the perfect cocktail to bridge the two seasons. Created by our excellent bartender Emily Evans, the Glamour Shot is a well balanced mix of Plymouth Gin, Domaine de Canton Ginger Liquor, Cynar, and lime. This is definitely a spiritous gin cocktail, but it has some of the bitter elements one expects in a well-crafted Manhattan.

Stop in this week during Old Fashioned Cocktail Hour and try a Glamour Shot for only $5. In addition, we will be offering this drink for $5 all night this Sunday, April 27th. A true bargain for such an exceptional cocktail!

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

A brand new old postcard.


We take our image pretty seriously here at Bryant's. Any ad, website, blog, or advertising has to fit our image as a historic cocktail lounge. Especially important are the take-aways for customers. The stickers, t-shirts, and postcards say a lot about us as a lounge and a piece of Milwaukee history. The most important of these takeaways are the postcards we give to our customers. We love our postcards for many reasons. We love that people mail them to their friends, fasten them to their refrigerator, and use them to jot down notes about their visit to Milwaukee.

For the last three years, the Whipped Cream Girl postcard has been the postcard of choice. We absolutely love this postcard, which is a recreation of Herb Alpert's "Whipped Cream and Other Delights", an iconic album cover from the 1960s. Our good friend and fabulous Milwaukee photographer Daniel Bishop created this postcard from scratch, including photographing our own Whipped Cream Girl in the Velvet Lounge, drawing the font, and recreating the feel of the original album cover. Truly an amazing piece of work!


Our original intention was to change the Bryant's postcard every year, but the Whipped Cream Girl postcard was so good, we decided not to replace it- until now.

Finally, we have a new postcard that is worthy of representing Bryant's. Based on the historic postcards that have advertised the classiest of restaurants and bars over the years, such as this historic postcard from the former Picadilly Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge on Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee:


These collage style postcards have a unique layout and "feeling" and generally include two to five drawings or photographs of the establishment and a prominent logo. One thing we have noticed is that there are rarely people in the pictures, instead treating the spaces almost like works of art that belong in a museum. Most modern marketers discourage this, but we like it for its historic value and, quite frankly, most of these spaces could be in museums.

Our new collage postcard features four photos of Bryant's (which were again taken by Dan Bishop), and the familiar Bryant's script in the lower left hand corner:


Similar to the historic postcards we used as models, there are no noticeable people in the images, instead focusing on the drinks and the spaces. The back of the postcard is simple and features a Bryant's description that should be familiar to customers of the past:

"Milwaukee's Oldest Cocktail Lounge, open since 1938. Everyone enjoys the two floors of atmosphere, swinging sounds, and unmatched cocktails at Bryant's Cocktail Lounge"

This was taken directly from the copy of one of Bryant's historic radio commercials from the 1960s and we think it is still relevant today! See/hear for yourself:



We hope you will love our new old postcard as much as we do. Next time you are at Bryant's, pick up a few and give them to your friends and family! And, we promise we will occasionally bring back the Whipped Cream Girl postcards- they are just too good to retire altogether!