July 18th, 2006
Established: 1987
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Low to moderate
Atmosphere: The Sunset Grill & Tap is to beer as the DSW Shoe Warehouse is to footwear. Big place, huge beer selection, weekly deals, and a well lit, friendly but somewhat impersonal vibe.
See Best Boston bars (Honorable mention) for address and contact info.
If you’re the type of person who likes a mammoth beer menu — a multi-page tome with fine print that categorizes beers according to style and has separate sections for draught beers and specialties like mead and “beertails” — the Sunset Grill & Tap is calling your name.
This casual dining establishment in the heavily student-populated Boston neighborhood of Allston features 380 kinds of beer, including a whopping 112 taps, plus plenty of bar surface area at which to sample them. The Sunset doesn’t just stock a bunch of random beers from every two-bit microbrewery and global-conglomerate-owned brand in order to throw big numbers around. No, the 380 beers here are, in large part, quality offerings (don’t worry, your ignorant roommate can still get a Corona) that include the full spectrum of Belgian beers (Trappist ales, gueuze, etc.) and beers from geek-approved U.S. craft breweries like Allagash (ME), Avery (CO), Dogfish Head (DE), Founder’s (MI), Moylan’s (CA), and Victory (PA).
The food menu’s also huge, with all manner of Appeteasers, Dippers & Poppers, Nacho Mamas, Salada Salads, Meltdowns and, on Sundays, the Super Sunrise Sunday Brewers Brunch. The grub is decent, the service is competent, and there’s lots of colorful breweriana (real word) on the walls. Luckily, the staff is not required to wear pieces of flair, or the Sunset might come across as a little too Bennigan’s-esque. The beer is what it’s all about for us, and we’ll stop in whenever we’re in Allston.
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July 18th, 2006
Established: 1987
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Low to moderate
Atmosphere: A friendly combination of beer enthusiasts, neighborhood barflies, and hungry carnivores eat barbecue and drink beer in a setting that’s part down-home, part gritty-urban, and part artsy. Probably the Boston area’s best combination of really good food, great beer selection, and reasonable prices.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
Redbones gets it right, and that’s why it has been around for almost 20 years. Consistently good barbecue, a selection of craft beers that focuses as much on quality as quantity, efficient service, and fair prices draw us back there again and again. That and the fact that there are two bars: one upstairs, one down (known as Underbones).
In addition to being a barbecue restaurant, Redbones was also one of greater Boston’s first beer bars (a bar that specializes in a wide selection of craft beer), along with the Sunset Grill & Tap in Allston, which also opened in ’87. Owner Robert Gregory has supported craft brewers from day one. He was one of the founders of the New England Real Ale Exhibition held every year in Redbones’ neighborhood of Davis Square. He was the first bar owner in Boston to regularly bring in draught beer from the brewing mecca of the Northwest. And he regularly invites some of the country’s best craft brewers (Bill Covaleski of Victory in PA, Garrett Oliver of the Brooklyn Brewery in NY, Will Meyers of our own Cambridge Brewing Co., Tod Mott of the Portsmouth Brewery in NH) in to pour and talk about their beer. Bar manager Chris Bol does the crucial job of making sure that kegs are rotated and draught lines are clean — you don’t want to be in a beer bar where this doesn’t happen, because craft beer’s shelf life is way shorter than Bud’s.
On the flipside of the beer equation, Gregory deserves credit for putting Schlitz and PBR on the menu way before they became the favored brands of bike messengers and twenty-something hipsters. Redbones’ Dial-a-Beer wheel also started a trend picked up by another Boston beer bar, Bukowski Tavern, and its sibling in Cambridge. Finally, Redbones’ deserves special praise for keeping its beer prices lower than those of any other beer bar in greater Boston. Example: on a recent visit, a pint of Southern Tier IPA (NY) was $4.25 (compared to $4.50-$5.50 elsewhere for a small-batch U.S. craft beer), and a 10-oz draught of De Ranke XX Bitter from Belgium was a bargain-basement $5 (this would easily have been $7 elsewhere). Liquor and wine are available if beer’s not your thing. May Redbones be around for another 20 years.
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July 17th, 2006
Bartender Profile
One of the best things about bargoing in Boston is that your favorite bartender is less likely to be a struggling actor than an ivy league graduate student. Misty (yes, that’s the name her parents gave her) Kalkofen started tending bar while earning her master’s at the Harvard Divinity School. Her plan was to go for the PhD and teach, but student loans of Biblical proportions — and the prospect of professorial earnings too meager to pay them off — pushed her into pouring drinks full-time.
The thing is, she got to liking her new career. “I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she says while sipping an iced coffee with Patron XO Cafe (tequila with coffee essence) at B-Side, a bar where she used to work and still frequently hangs out. Before landing at Drink, she was bar manager at another beloved Cambridge bar, Green Street, which her friend Dylan Black (also a B-Side alum) opened in 2006. These establishments are cool but genuine hangouts that happen to serve consistently well-executed and interesting food and drink. Misty’s a perfect fit for both. Her non-showy mastery of mixing drinks, her comfort behind the bar, and her full-throated laugh make you forget about all the sullen waifs who’ve ever served you a glass of underchilled Ketel One and called it a martini.
Hometown
Born in Mexico, Missouri. Grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Past bartending jobs
Lizard Lounge, West Side Lounge, Tremont 647.
First drink you ever had
I was always a “Can I have a sip” kind of kid… Probably don’t really remember the first one, but I would regularly sip from my father’s post-work blended Scotch on the rocks.
Favorite bar in Boston other than your own
Any bar where John Gertsen [currently of No. 9 Park] is behind the stick.
The drink you most like to make
The one that I’m going to drink!
The drink you least like to make
If there is a drink out there that is a version of a Long Island Iced Tea that has Blue Curacao and Pucker Schnapps in it, that is my least favorite drink.
What you drink at the end of your shift
Although there are nights when I’m craving something involving the use of a shaker, the truth is that after 10+ hours on the bar there is nothing finer than cracking open an ice cold Budweiser.
If I weren’t a bartender, I’d be…
Homeless… just kidding, but barely. Reading the New Testament in Greek, teaching young impressionable people to do the same, and barely scraping by in the process.
A bartender’s best friend is…
Competent co-workers and good regulars.
A bartender’s worst enemy is…
Bar rot. And that guy who said to me, “You know what I like about you, your boobs… and your ass ain’t half bad either.” (True story.)
People drink too much…
Vodka.
People don’t drink enough…
Gin, vermouth, bitters.
Drink for a hot summer day
Gin with lillet, mint, and lemon juice. YUM!
Drink for a cold winter night
Bourbon, rye, scotch… alone or in a toddy.
The best thing about drinking in Boston is…
There is now more than one bar you can go to and ask for (and receive) a well-made, well-balanced cocktail.
The worst thing about drinking in Boston is…
The bars close early and the T stops running even earlier…
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July 2nd, 2006
Established: 2003
Specialty: Beer
Prices: Moderate to high for beer, low for food
Atmosphere: Pierced and tattooed modern literature-loving ironists meet beer geeks in this multi-tap shrine to the late Beat poet and legendary boozehound Charles Bukowski.
See Best Boston bars – honorable mention for address and contact info.
Bukowski opened up in the Inman Square neighborhood of Cambridge to the delight of people who yearned for more than one choice of a neighborhood bar, that choice being the decent enough, non-cartoonish but small Irish pub the Druid. Bukowski took over the fairly spacious, dark, rectangular room once occupied by the Korean restaurant Jae’s. A large mural of Bukowski and his drunken jottings on one wall, red vinyl booths, glass doors that open onto the sidewalk in summer, and a nice, long bar with round swivel stools invite you to stop in whenever you’re hit with the urge to eat a cheeseburger and drink a double IPA.
The tavern features 130 beers (15 on draught), very few of which are mere menu dressing. And there’s always some interesting item on tap or in the cooler, be it a Belgian-influenced ale from some little boutique brewery like Hair of the Dog in Portland, OR, or the surplus of Lion Stout that one manager shrewdly stockpiled just after the ’04 tsunami temporarily shut down the Sri Lankan brewery that makes the beer.
Brisk beer turnover is also aided by the fact that most of the tavern’s selection appears on the Dead Author’s Club card — a list of over 100 beers that you have to work your way through in six months in order to earn a 25-ounce mug (priced the same as a pint) etched with the name of your favorite dead author, provided he or she doesn’t already appear on someone else’s mug. (Note: the term “author” is treated loosely here, as mugs etched with the names Johnny Cash and Tupac attest.) And if you’re stumped by the sheer number of beers available, ask your server to spin the “dial-a-beer” wheel for you. Just remember: you spin it, you own it.
The food here is casual, reasonably priced and consistently decent. Burgers and hotdogs (big, all-beef ones with chili or sauerkraut) rule the day, but vegetarian offerings are worth ordering, especially the White Trash Cheese Dip, a warm, gooey mixture of American cheese, jalapenos, onions and tomatoes served with fresh-fried tortilla chips.
The only drawback to the Cambridge Bukowski and its older sibling in Boston is that when it comes to beer, the good stuff ain’t cheap. Draft pints range from $5-$7, and bottles can cost, say, $7 for a standard import like Paulaner Hefe-Weizen, all the way up to $15 and beyond for specialty Belgian ales and rare, small-batch American craft beers. A can of Schlitz or Schaefer is a somewhat more economical $3. Commercial rent prices in Boston and Cambridge must be steep indeed.
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June 23rd, 2006
Ed. Note: The B-Side Lounge closed in 2008.
Established: 1998
Specialty: Cocktails
Prices: Moderate
Atmosphere: Hip but not painfully so. Retro but not kitschy. Crowded.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
B-Side opened at the tail end of the widespread, short-lived revival of cocktail culture, a la the Rat Pack, that the movie Swingers ushered in. Fortunately, the cocktails themselves stuck around, and so did B-Side. That’s because owner/bartender Patrick Sullivan did something revolutionary: he offered vintage cocktails. And he offered them right, with crushed ice, fresh citrus juice, and long-ignored ingredients like Benedictine liqueur and rye whiskey. The drink menu — probably the most comprehensive in greater Boston — categorizes cocktails by their base liquor, e.g. “Whiskey Base,” “Gin Base,” etc. It includes classy stuff like the Frisco (rye whiskey, Benedictine, lemon juice) and the Champs Elysees (brandy, yellow Chartreuse, lemon juice and Angostura bitters), plus drinks like the Double Wide (Coke syrup and Jack Daniels) and the Mullet (Bud Light and a shot of Sambuca) that clue you in to the fact that B-Side refuses to take itself too seriously. A cocktail can be a sublime thing, but it shouldn’t be a serious thing. This attitude comes through in the drink prices, which start at $8 (downright cheap for the Boston area). If you’re not into mixed drinks, B-Side’s got you covered with wine and a decent selection of (mostly) craft beers on tap, as well as macro and retro brews in bottles and cans.
Several of the Boston area’s best bartenders — including a few profiled on this site — either work or have worked at B-Side. It’s the perfect place to hone one’s knowledge of mixology, not to mention crowd-control skills. The place is frequently packed. The bar staff looks professional (they wear long, white aprons, and the guys wear ties) but far from stodgy (body art seems to be a requirement). B-Side bartenders who move on to other gigs take that “I’m a professional but I’m having a good time” attitude with them.
B-Side occupies the site of the former Windsor Tap (the building is located at the corner of Hampshire and Windsor streets), which was something of an East Cambridge institution. B-Side was initially resented by many WT regulars as one of those trendy, upstart establishments that signal the yuppie takeover of a working-class neighborhood. But its no-nonsense attitude ultimately endeared it to a wide range of drinking types. It helped that Sullivan fixed up some of the space’s best features: a large, U-shaped bar, pressed-tin ceiling, and thick glass tiles on the wall that let in light but mercifully shield customers from a view of the drab intersection outside. Vintage cocktail equipment and a plastic Bud Man (that’s a Budweiser spokes-character from the late 1960s/early 1970s, kids) share a perch above the back bar that houses the citrus juicer and the turntable. Yes, B-Side plays records when things aren’t too busy. Another big, big plus is that the food here is consistently good. I guess you’d call it “American-eclectic.” There are six or eight well executed entrees, most of which are around $20. People actually go to B-Side to have dinner! Don’t worry, if you’re saving all your money to pay the bar tab, look for the wire carousel and help yourself to a free hard-boiled egg.
B-Side’s only real drawbacks are a lack of parking (but you shouldn’t be driving after hanging out there anyway) and the noise level, which can escalate painfully when the place fills up.
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