Chronicle No. 72 · Innovations

A Loan of 10,000 Lire: How Harry's Bar Got Its Name

A Venetian barman lent his savings to a broke American customer. He got back a bar, a name over the door, and two of the most copied recipes of the century.

In the late 1920s Giuseppe Cipriani was tending bar at the Hotel Europa in Venice. One of his regulars was Harry Pickering, a young American whose family had stopped sending money. Pickering stopped coming in.

Cipriani asked why, heard the answer, and lent him 10,000 lire of his own savings — a barman's money, given to a customer.

Pickering left Venice. Months later he came back, repaid the loan, and put down a great deal more on top of it, with a suggestion: open a bar of your own.

Harry's Bar opened on 13 May 1931, in a former rope store at the end of Calle Vallaresso, a few steps from Piazza San Marco. Cipriani named it after the man who had been broke.

Two things were invented in that small room:

• The Bellini, around 1948 — white peach purée and Prosecco. Cipriani thought the colour matched a toga in a painting by Giovanni Bellini.
• Carpaccio, in 1950 — raw beef sliced thin for Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo, whose doctor had forbidden her cooked meat. He named it for the reds of a Vittore Carpaccio exhibition then showing in the city.

Hemingway had a table. Both recipes are now on menus on every continent.

In 2001 the Italian government declared Harry's Bar a national landmark.

Lesson: Cipriani’s return on 10,000 lire was not the repayment. It was ninety years of a name over the door — and the name was not his.