Up From the Depths

The new Sunken Harbor Club is a cocktail bar with a mysterious past and a quasi-modernist future.

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IN THE REALM of pandemic origin stories, the Sunken Harbor Club has a doozy. Those who remember the joint as a weekly tiki night operating for nearly seven years in the original location of St. John Frizell’s Red Hook bar, Fort Defiance, only know the half of it. When the onetime pop-up resurfaces November 13 in a former hair salon above the resuscitated Gage & Tollner, it will have gained a brand-new centuries-old and completely fabricated identity: the headquarters of a Victorian-era explorers club, revealed during renovations of the landmark restaurant.

As Frizell—a writer before he became a bartender, which helps explain this elaborate yarn—tells the tale, the club’s members traveled the world, searching for the most mouthwatering, life-changing libations and bringing the recipes home. These formulas were recorded in secret code in a set of leather-bound volumes, the so-called Compendium Bibendium, that the new owners of Gage & Tollner unearthed and deciphered. Legend has it that an 1872 Brooklyn