: About Me

STEPHEN VISAKAY

In 1996, avid collector and vintage bar ware scholar Stephen Visakay was hailed as one of America's Top 100 Collectors by Art & Antiques Magazine. The following year, Visakay's book Vintage Bar Ware, an identification and value guide, was published by Collector Books. It is still the most widely used and definitive reference material of its kind.

Visakay's touring exhibition, Shaken, Not Stirred; Cocktail Shakers and Design, traveled throughout the United States from 1993 to1998 with seven venues including The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Louisiana State Museum at Jackson Square and The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. His exhibition in The Museum at San Francisco International Airport was viewed by an estimated twelve thousand people every twenty four hours for eleven months. Visakay is quick to add "whether they wanted to or not," as visitors had to travel through the concourse to reach the terminals. Many travelers got off the people-moving walkways to view the long exhibit at a more leisurely pace.

The cocktail zeitgeist was now moving and shaking. One San Francisco viewer was Stephen Gordon, Restoration Hardware's founder and CEO, according to an interview with Southwest Airlines Spirit Magazine in 2000. "An old martini shaker caught his eye. It was functional, yet stylishhad a sense of history Besides, it was cool". A few months later Restoration issued a copy of a 1936 Penguin Cocktail Shaker, next a Rooster, then a Zeppelin. A whole line of bar ware followed.

Visakay displayed twenty cocktail shakers at the first cocktail dinner held in New York's Rainbow Room, February 23, 1995, at the invitation of good friend Dale de Groff. Instead of wine, Dale paired a cocktail with each course of the special menu. As the new millennium approached there was a trend of nostalgia toward retro music and culture. Classic cocktails epitomized the elegance of a bygone era. Visakay displayed vintage cocktail shakers at three more of Dale's cocktail dinners with each one gathering more and more media attention.

Recently, Visakay was sited as a catalyst in the rise of today's cocktail culture in the newly published book The Business of Spirits, by Noah Rothbaum, (Kaplan Publishing, 2007).

Visakay has made many great finds in his search for cocktail shakers and likes to tell the story of a treasure found at the Orangeburg N.Y. outdoor flea market. It was over twenty years ago on a cold June morning. Focused on a cobalt blue cocktail shaker on the seller's table, he never saw Nyack antique dealer Arlene Lederman also reaching for it. After a brief tug of war Arlene laughingly let him buy the shaker and treat her to breakfast. It was the start of an ongoing adventure that continues to this day. The couple live happily ever after in an Arts & Crafts cottage in Upper Grandview, New York. It's the one with the white picket fence and red roses out front. They have a nightly ritual of shaking a martini before dinner, sometimes a few. As for the cobalt blue cocktail shaker, it sits in a place of honor. Stephen never could sell it. After all, it helped him with the find and love of a life time: Arlene Lederman-Visakay.

Visakay serves as the bar ware advisor for Schroeder Publications.
His publishing credits include;
The Main Antique Digest
The Journal of the American Art Pottery Association
The Antique Trader
Spirits & Cocktail
Bartender
Art Deco Society Publications
Antiques & the Arts Weekly

The national and world-wide media attention gathered by his museum exhibition in print, television, radio & internet is too numerous to be listed here.

Food & Drink > Cocktails & Liquor Buyer's guide to cocktail shakers

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Tales of the Cocktail 2008 . THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM* OF COCKTAIL SHAKER COLLECTORS Ann Rogers Tuennerman, founder of Tales of the Cocktail, invites all vintage bar ware enthusiasts to the first International Symposium of Cocktail Shaker Collectors. All bar ware collectors, from beginner to advanced, including swizzle stick collectors, are invited to meet others and exchange information and knowledge in this first International Symposium held in conjunction with Tales of the Cocktail July 16 to July 20, 2008 HOTEL MONTELEONE, NEW ORLEANS LA Moderator Stephen Visakay, cocktail sha...

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