drinkboston.com

Maine-based journalist Wayne Curtis is an understated and witty writer who can tell a solid yarn about a cocktail’s history. He wrote this article, about “tracking a lost Cuban cocktail to its lair,” for Lost magazine. Here’s the recipe for El Presidente, verbatim from the article:

Over ice in a tall mixing glass, pour:

1-1/2 oz. rum

3/4 oz. curacao

3/4 oz. dry vermouth

1/2 tsp of grenadine

Stir well with ice for three or four minutes, then strain into cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange peel twist.

Today’s New York Times features a great, quote-rich article on London’s cocktail scene, The Best Town to Make an Upper Lip Stiff. I want to point to an excerpt that encapsulates the philosophy and mission of drinkboston.com:

Of course, lemon grass and ginger syrup in the hands of the wrong bartender can lead to disaster. Few people understand this better than Robbie Bargh, the creative director of the Gorgeous Group, the consulting concern behind many of London’s splashiest new joints. An ebullient, opinionated former mixologist and bar manager with 16 years’ experience, Mr. Bargh said he has no time for “egotistical demigods” behind the bar who don’t bother with the fundamentals.

“We’re going through a big backlash to over-mixology,” he said. “I think like a chef. Like a chef, you can’t deliver innovation without renovation. You can’t modernize without a basic understanding of what it takes to make a great classic drink — why a Negroni is so different made with Aperol rather than Campari.”

In short, if you go to a bar where the bartender doesn’t know how to make a Negroni but instead offers you an Earl Grey-Chocolate-Chipotle Pepper-tini, pause and ask yourself: would I spend my money at a restaurant where the chef could whip up all manner of trendy foams and sculptural appetizers but couldn’t grill a steak to save his life? If your answer’s no, then move on to the next bar.

In a nice alignment of the stars, both drinkboston.com and one of Boston’s best bartenders, John Gertsen, are currently featured on Playboy.com. John, principal bartender at No. 9 Park, makes Playboy.com’s list of America’s Top 10 Bartenders. Congrats, John! Well deserved. You can see this guy in action at drinkboston.com’s upcoming champagne cocktail party at Green Street.

Another article, Brew Romance, describes 10 top American microbrews selected from votes by a panel of beer experts. That panel included drinkboston.com’s publisher, me. Yep, that’s right — it’s not all about cocktails for this imbiber. You can find a few of the Ms. Mug columns I write for the beer newspaper Ale Street News here.

Does this mean war? I hope so. In Boston Magazine’s November issue, Liquids columnist Anthony Giglio throws the glove down in “The Bitters Truth.” After a somewhat systematic evaluation of cocktails in Boston and Cambridge bars, he says, “I’ve come to realize that Cambridge is to cocktails what Berkeley, California, is to food — the little city in the big city’s shadow that’s the breeding ground for creativity, integrity, and dynamism. I’ve never met so many scholarly barkeeps in my life as I have in Cambridge. And after much scholarly research of my own, I can now say with absolute certainty that Cambridge makes better cocktails than Boston.”

Of course, this isn’t exactly news to us. Many of the bars and bartenders lauded on this site for their cocktail prowess are the same that Giglio cites in his article: Green Street (where drinkboston.com recently had its launch party), which boasts three of the Boston area’s best bartenders (Dylan Black, Misty Kalkofen and Joe McGuirk); B-Side Lounge, which, as a training ground for serious barmen and women, is to the local bar scene what Harvard Law is to the U.S. Government; plus Chez Henri, the Blue Room, etc. Giglio points out that “the great Boston exceptions — John Gertsen at No. 9 Park, Jackson Cannon at Eastern Standard, Nathan Bice at Beacon Street Tavern, and John Byrd at the Alchemist — all perfected their trade in Cambridge.”

So, what is it about Cambridge that nurtures a great cocktail culture? Cheaper rents and bar ownership by individuals rather than restaurant groups or hotels mean that bars can afford to make drinks with quality ingredients and take risks like not stocking Apple Pucker; a quirky, discerning population that appreciates variety and challenges to the palate; and the community of bartenders themselves, “a tight circle of avant-garde drink experts who pass down their expertise and help aspiring mixologists start out on their own,” writes Giglio.

What all this means, I hope, is that more Boston bars will get jealous of the praise being heaped on Cambridge drinking establishments and decide to rise to the challenge of making drinks that break out of the safe, chocolate-mint-martini mold. The prospect of a Mixologist War between Boston and Cambridge should have us all salivating.

On October 25, the Boston Herald’s “Food in Brief” section reported on a new website devoted to Boston bars and bartenders. Yeah, that would be this website, drinkboston.com. Note: the Herald’s recipe for the Marconi Wireless was a bit garbled in translation. Here’s a recipe that roughly follows the 2/3 applejack to 1/3 sweet vermouth ratio.

When a certain good friend of mine and I go out, we like to start the evening with a Manhattan. We can’t help but notice that we’re among the few women at any given bar who are drinking whiskey. That’s why a couple of recent articles got my attention. First, Alex Witchel wrote a story in the New York Times last month, “Strong Drink Is Not for Men Alone,” in which she voiced her perturbation and amusement over being treated too daintily by bartenders and cocktail servers. She starts with a typical scenario: “When I was in college and went out with my oversize football player boyfriend, we’d order drinks, and every time I’d be served the frosty piña colada with the pink paper umbrella that he’d ordered, and he’d be served the tough-guy Scotch-rocks.”

Then, I saw a small piece in the Boston Globe by Liza Weisstuch, “Bourbon Takes a Bow,” touting the Whiskey Smash, a bracing mixture of bourbon, crushed ice, and muddled lemon and mint. The article starts with B-Side Lounge owner/bartender Patrick Sullivan, who put the drink on his fall menu, saying this: “When women are sitting around the bar drinking bourbon, you know something’s going on.” I’ll say! Are more women really discovering the pleasures of bourbon, scotch and rye? I’m going to keep an eye out for a trend and report back.

Imagine if the only type of meat you could get in a restaurant was chicken. You could get it cooked in innumerable ways: roasted with herbs, boneless and sauteed in a Saltimbocca, stewed with Moroccan spices, shredded in a rillette, smoked and smothered in barbecue sauce. Nothing wrong with any of these preparations. Except that none of them taste like beef, pork or lamb. Nope, sorry — in this new chicken-centric cuisine, the rich, distinctive flavors of a rib-eye steak, pork spareribs, and lamb shank are deemed too frighteningly, um, meat-like for the sophisticated modern palate.

Just substitute “chicken” with “vodka,” and you’ll get an idea of what going out for cocktails is like these days. Vodka has seemingly taken hostage the imagination of all who serve or drink liquor. It is a blank canvas onto which any of-the-moment ingredient, be it basil or blueberries, can be painted, so that people who don’t like the taste of spirits can pretend they’re drinking a sophisticated, adult beverage. Bourbon, gin, brandy, rum … they taste too much like, um, booze. They’re nowhere to be found on the modern cocktail menu, except in token old-school offerings like the Manhattan (whiskey) and the Sidecar (brandy), and in the ubiquitous Mojito (rum), a.k.a. “the new Margarita.”

It seems that every hot new restaurant that opens up in Boston touts its “innovative cocktail menu.” Generally, that’s code for a bunch of drinks based on plain or flavored vodka and containing various combinations of fruits, herbs, essences and liqueurs.

A perfect example of the state of the art can be found at the Living Room on Atlantic Ave. in Boston. According to stuff@night’s recent Summer Cocktail issue, the Living Room is mixing three usual suspects — Skyy Berry Vodka, Apple Pucker and sour mix — with acai berry juice, which apparently has “more antioxidants than blueberries and pomegranates.” Too bad any cancer-fighting properties this drink might have are negated by the green dye in the Apple Pucker. Another Living Room special, the Bubble Tea Martini, comes from the “adapt the latest soft-drink craze into an alcoholic drink” school of mixology. If you have a hangover right now, stop reading, because you might hurl when I list the ingredients in this one: strawberry soy milk, pearl tapioca (i.e. the glutinous “bubbles” in bubble tea) and Absolut Vanilla. God. This makes Jell-o shots seem cool.

Next - Vodka R.I.P., part 2: How did it come to this?

Fast Company’s May cover story is on food, which the magazine says “has become the great American art form — and a wildly innovative business.” There’s a thoughtful, thorough and positive article on Homaro Cantu, chef of Moto restaurant in Chicago, who cooks with liquid nitrogen and lasers and who “wants to use his strange brew of self-taught rocket science and professional culinary training to change the way the world thinks about food.” Cantu’s take on the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is pictured; the sandwich filling sits atop a small rectangle of bread and consists of peanut butter encased in a “hemisphere” of frozen jelly. His restaurant features a grand tasting menu for $160 a head.

In the same issue is a funny, snarky one-page article called “Mix Mastery - The cult of the cocktail runs amok.” It pokes fun at the seriousness with which some have come to view the art of mixing a drink. “Handcrafted cocktails, once a lost art, have resurfaced as absurdist comedy, with top-shelf bartenders — ‘cocktail consultants’ in this brave new world — making thousands of dollars a day peddling the likes of the Earl Grey MarTEAni (tea-infused gin, egg white, lemon juice, and simple syrup) or the ’sake martini with lychee puree and muddled cucumbers.’ The things fetch up to $20 apiece…”

I’ll be the first to agree that a $20 Earl Grey MarTEAni is a sucker’s drink. And I still have a hard time keeping a straight face when someone refers to a bartender as a mixologist. But then I got to thinking: why is it OK to get all gee-whiz over a celebrity chef and his “wildly innovative menu” but snicker at a “cocktail consultant” who’s doing something similar with booze — that is, inventing new and unusual drinks and earning fame and fortune in the process? Is a $20 cocktail any more “absurdist comedy” than a $160 tasting menu featuring liquid nitrogen-cooled PB&J?

“Diamond-studded martini runs a cool $3,000″ is the headline of an Associated Press article that ran in the Boston Globe on April 15. Foxwoods casino’s new “signature” cocktail is called the Sapphire Martini and costs three grand. It’s an icky-sounding concoction — blue curacao, Bombay Sapphire gin, and a splash of dry vermouth in a martini glass whose rim is coated with blue sugar (what “signature” cocktail doesn’t come with a sugared rim these days?) — but that’s beside the point. You presumably won’t think about how this drink tastes when your Hummer-driving sugardaddy orders it for you. That’s because it’s garnished with a pair of custom-made blue sapphire and diamond earrings, set in a sterling silver pick.

The article explains, “With the unveiling of the four-digit cocktail, the casino’s new Mezz Ultra Lounge joins a growing list of bars and restaurants around the world offering pure decadence in a glass. Luxury trade experts attribute the rising popularity of premium cocktails to a greater number of educated drinkers of all ages and a wider variety of spirits and liqueurs.”

“Educated” isn’t the word I’d use to describe someone who goes to Foxwoods and spends $3,000 on a pair of earrings because they’re soaked in blue gin.