If you are pondering what to drink with your perfectly cooked Philly Cheese Steak we have got the answer. As with pairing a wine with your meal, a Pinot Noir from Burgundy with your Boeuf Bourguignon or a Chianti with your Spaghetti Bolognese it just seems natural to pair your Philly Cheese Steak with a Clover Club cocktail.

The Clover Club was a pre-prohibition gentlemen’s club that held their meetings once a month at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia from the 1882 to the 1920s. The cocktail by the same name was probably first shaken up at the turn of the last century and was published in New York Press in 1901. It went from being a favorite among the club’s members to making it big in New York when the hotelier at the Bellevue-Stratford, George Boldt, was recruited as proprietor for the Waldorf Astoria on Manhattan.

After having had a good run the Clover Club fell out of favor. In 1939 it was even listed in Esquire Magazine as of the ten worst drinks of the decade and in the 1950s it started being viewed as a ladies drink. Maybe due to the pink color of the cocktail.

Interestingly pink was originally considered a masculine power color and as thus fitting perfectly at the gentlemen’s club. In The Great Gatsby from 1925, Gatsby himself naturally sported a pink suit. Little girls were dressed in light blue and little boys in pink, a color that was said to be “a more decided and stronger color”. This changed in the 1940s and suddenly macho cocktails like the Clover Club and the Pink Lady were giving way to Manhattans and Martinis.

It wasn’t until the early 2000s when craft cocktails came back in a big way that the Clover Club started reappearing. As a tribute, American mixologist Julie Reiner, opened the Clover Club in Brooklyn in 2008, complete with wooden paneling, leather couches, velvet curtains and a tin ceiling.

The motto of the original Clover Club went “Who enters here leaves care behind, leaves sorrow behind, leaves petty envies and jealousies behind.”

The glass called Fylgia was designed by Gerda Strömberg in 1930.

The Clover Club

2 parts Gin
1/2 part Lemon juice
1/2 part Raspberry syrup
1/2 Egg white
3 Raspberries

Shake gin, lemon juice, raspberry syrup and egg white without ice (dry shake). Add ice and shake until well chilled. Strain into chilled cocktail glass and garnish with 3 raspberries.

Enjoy with your Philly Cheese Steak.