Author Archive
December 22nd, 2008
Friday night, Central Square, the first blizzard of the winter season. I’ve just finished having cocktails at Cambridge’s solid new bistro Craigie on Main with a few of the ladies of LUPEC Boston — Pink Lady, Fancy Brandy (our shutterbug) and Saucy Sureau — and we’re about to snow-boot it over to Green Street to grab a nightcap with those young bucks behind the stick, Andy and Bice.
But wait … Saucy, who reminds me of a girl in a Northern Renaissance painting, has an idea. The snow piling up on the sidewalk is so fluffy and fresh … it’s actually edible. And, seeing that Saucy peddles St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur for a living and always has a supply on hand, along with some little plastic tasting cups … well, how ’bout a St. Germain Sno-Cone, girls? We make one extra and offer it to the bartender who has been concocting little gems for us all evening, Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli. It’s delicious. Saucy announces, “I’m entering this in a cocktail contest.” “You win!” we say, and throw the unspiked slush in the bottom of our cups back into the snowbank.
Tags: holiday drinks, St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur
Posted in Liqueur | 7 Comments »
December 17th, 2008
Got a fever? Forget the Theraflu. Have a Baby Tylenoltini instead!
I am not kidding. This is an actual cocktail planned for the forthcoming (January 2009) winter drink menu at Tamo, the bar in the Seaport Hotel’s Aura Restaurant. I have never been to Tamo. For all I know, it’s a perfectly pleasant place to enjoy a drink in the Seaport district. But its cold-and-flu-themed cocktail menu? Bizarre. Some highlights from the press release:
“Baby Tylenoltini: Nothing stirs up nostalgia quite like the sweet tartness of Baby Tylenol — this adult reinterpretation combines Absolut pear, ginger, lemon, honey, Grenadine and pink lemonade … maybe growing up isn’t so bad after all!
“Cherry Cough Drop: Luden’s, everyone’s favorite excuse to pop cherry candy all day long, is reincarnated into liquid form with a mix of Stoli Raz, Chambord and Champagne.
“Asian Sniffle Snuffer: A gingerly mix of Canton ginger liqueur, Grey Goose vodka and soda with a splash of bitters and fresh ginger garnish — who needs Vicks Vaporub with the sinus clearing effects of bitters!”
You can’t make this stuff up. A cocktail formulated to taste like Baby Tylenol?! I can’t wait for the Gerber Banana Daiquiri on the summer menu. Let’s hope this isn’t the beginning of a disturbing new trend. The same goes for this invitation I received from the celebrated chef behind Pigalle, Marco and, more recently, Restaurant L (inside Louis Boston):
“Chef/owner/Mack Daddy Marc Orfaly and Restaurant L invites [sic] you to a night of industry debauchery you will never forget … Come dressed as a suave pimp or a slammin’ ho. 1st, 2nd and 3rd place prizes go to the best dressed!”
Wow, I’ve been invited to a party by one of Boston’s best chefs, but only if I come dressed as a sex worker. I know, I know, “pimp” and “ho” are just terms of endearment these days — they’re probably what first-graders call their teachers. But I’m going to have to go ahead and RSVP “Are you f-ing kidding me?”
Luckily, another recent communiqué has provided me a glimpse of civilization: two recipes for drinks using Dubonnet Rouge, which I grew up viewing as an old-lady drink and now know as an essential quinquina in classic cocktails like the Blackthorn. I’m going to admit I have not yet tried these cocktails, which were created by Jim Meehan of PDT in New York City. But they sound fantastic.
Royal Pomme Punch
Makes 12 servings
3/4 bottle Dubonnet Rouge
12 oz apple brandy (such as Laird’s bonded or calvados)
24 dashes of Angostura bitters (or 3 oz St. Elizabeth Allspice Dram)
3 oz fresh-squeezed orange juice
12 oz champagne
Add Dubonnet, apple brandy, orange juice and bitters to a pitcher filled with ice. Stir and strain into a chilled punch bowl. Garnish with a block of ice (use a small Tupperware container as the mold; pull the block out of the freezer 15 minutes before use to allow it to thaw sufficiently to remove it from the mold). Top with champagne and serve.
Single Malt Sangaree
1 oz Dubonnet Rouge
2 oz Paumanok Cabernet Franc
1 oz Oban 14-Year-Old (Highland malt or blended scotch can be substituted)
3/4 oz Grand Marnier
1 barspoon of demerara syrup (or teaspoon of sugar in the raw)
1 6-inch cinnamon stick
Add everything to a crock pot and heat until almost boiling. Pour into a heat-proof mug and twist an orange peel over the surface before serving. Garnish with a fresh cinnamon stick. Better as a cold remedy than a Baby Tylenoltini and more stimulating than a waitress dressed up as a slammin’ ho.
Tags: cocktail trends, cold remedies, Dubonnet, pimps & ho's, winter drinks
Posted in Cocktails, Vodka | 17 Comments »
December 12th, 2008
Being a drinking woman, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by a pair of recent articles: New York Magazine’s “Gender Bender,” about the rise in heavy drinking among women and possible reasons for it; and Salon’s response, “I’m sooo wasted off feminism,” which takes the NYM article to task for its premise that feminism is worthy of blame for all those messes in dresses running around town. Wow, is there some, um, drink for thought here.
The NYM article says, “The number of women who identify as moderate-to-heavy drinkers has risen in the last ten years, while the number of women who say they are light drinkers has declined.”
The reasons, according to NYM?
- Feminism: “For the bulk of history, women have skewed toward the teetotaler end of the spectrum; not until the middle of the last century did a burgeoning relationship with alcohol coincide with Second Wave feminism and a general impulse to close the gender gap across the board.”
- Marketing: “Dr. David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, believes that the real onslaught — and its effect on the beverages women consume — didn’t reach critical mass until the turn of this century. New alcopop flavors proliferated, Jell-O shooters showed up in grocery-store aisles, and companies rolled out vodkas in increasingly exotic flavors … ‘There’s a clear effort by the industry to create products for female drinkers. And it has had an effect.'” (A whole new argument against flavored vodka!)
- Higher education: “The transition from high school to college marks the greatest increase in substance abuse among women, and the more educated a woman is, the more likely she will be to drink throughout her life.”
- Third-wave feminism (a.k.a. “Do me” feminism or “Girls Gone Wild” feminism): “And if you choose to drink yourself unconscious in some random guy’s bed, that’s also your prerogative. To say that you shouldn’t would be paternalistic hand-wringing, implying that a woman needs to be protected from herself.”
The Salon response’s major beef is with NYM’s sub-headline asserting that “this is the kind of equality nobody was fighting for.”
Salon retorts, “Wait, it isn’t? Since when was feminism supposed to bring about selective equality, where women get to enjoy the benefits of being a man, but none of the liabilities? If you claim only the good and none of the bad — it isn’t really equality.” Agreed. Women today have every right to avail themselves of the freedom to be both successful investment bankers and drunken dickheads. Oh, and the connection between higher ed and alcoholism? I guess that means we should be celebrating the fact that, as NYM reports, men are both attending college in fewer numbers and “reining in their drinking.”
The thing that gets me is the way in which only the extreme ends of certain behaviors are portrayed in the media. The NYM piece begins with an anecdote about a twenty-something investment banker who downs as many as 24 drinks in 24 hours, and it ends with the director of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University advising women to stick with the “federally recommended maximum of one drink a day.”
As I wondered in my own take on such matters, “Is there any way a girl can occupy some median point on the scale between ‘drinks a little Chardonnay on the weekends’ and ‘brings a flask to the office?'”
Tags: alcohol, binge-drinking, feminism, women
Posted in Booze in the news | 5 Comments »
December 9th, 2008
Established: 2008
Specialty: Cocktails
Prices: Moderate to high
Atmosphere: World-class drinks and service with an approachable style in a minimalist but warm subterranean space.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
Imagine you’re John Gertsen. You work for several years behind what is probably the tiniest bar in Boston, at least in terms of workspace — the bar at No. 9 Park. And yet you manage to make a name for yourself by mixing some of the nation’s best cocktails. One day, your boss, chef Barbara Lynch, says, ‘John, I’m opening a new bar, and I want you to run it. You can help design it, too. Here’s a blank check.’
So, you take the exposed-brick-and-granite basement of a building in industrial Fort Point — the type of space a hot, new design firm might occupy — and arrange slabs of smooth oak into three distinct but connected U-shaped bars. You go minimalist by storing all liquor bottles out of sight so that, aside from careful lighting, the bar’s only decor consists of vintage glassware and punch-bowl sets lining the back bar, vases of fresh herbs (to be muddled into cocktails), and antique bar tools — including large iron tongs for gripping 50-lb blocks of ice and various picks and mallets for breaking those blocks apart to use in drinks. Finally, you hire some of the most talented bartenders in the country, whose mixological creativity renders printing a cocktail menu unnecessary.
Lynch and Gertsen’s bar, Drink, opened in early October to great fanfare. It is re-inventing the concept of a bar in this city. If visitations from such personages as Dave Kaplan and Phil Ward of Death & Co., Simon Ford of Plymouth Gin and Dale DeGroff are any indication, not to mention two (1, 2) citations already in the New York Times, Drink has assumed the position of world-class representative of the Renaissance of Cocktails and Bartending.
If this all sounds a bit much … it’s not. Drink works. It’s a cool-looking bar where you can get a great cocktail and either sit back and watch the show or mingle around the room, which is strategically designed for socializing. Gertsen is at pains to demonstrate that Drink is as much a friendly neighborhood bar as a shrine for cocktail geeks. “We don’t want to be snobs and dictate to people.” If a customer orders something as basic as a vodka and soda, it will be made with care — with sturdy Kold Draft ice and a nice spiral of fresh lemon peel. The next time that customer orders, he might be gently persuaded to try, say, a Collins. After all, he’s paying $10 for a simple highball. (All drinks at Drink are $10. There is also a cheekily limited beer and wine menu: one light beer, one dark beer; two kinds of red, two kinds of white).
Despite the “we cater to all tastes” philosophy, it is cocktail enthusiasts like me who are going to have the best time here. For me, Drink is about the adventure of simply naming my base spirit and seeing what the bartenders come up with, or ordering a bowl of flaming Chartreuse punch with a group of friends. I like that there is no dress code, but rather a strict bar code that emphasizes quality drinks over brands, and hospitality over attitude. I don’t have to ask, as one tarted-up nightclubber did after receiving a vodka and soda poured from a bottle not clearly marked Grey Goose, “What’s the point of this place?”
Posted in Boston bars | 39 Comments »
December 5th, 2008
When you get past the utter crappiness of this photo I took last night, and you look closely, you’ll notice seven bartenders standing atop the bar at Eastern Standard (there were eight, actually — Jackson Cannon was out of frame). This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a bar.
The bartenders are shaking Pisco Sours for the 100 or so guests who attended a six-course, six-cocktail dinner and all-night speakeasy to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. What more authentic way to mark this day than by drinking cocktails of the era — an Ampersand, a Waldorf-Astoria Perfect Martini, a Charles Lindbergh, a Blood & Sand, a Scofflaw and a Pisco Sour — and being thankful the next day for our constitutional right to give ourselves ripping hangovers?
The moment that felt most 1920s to me? Eating a course consisting of caviar on rye toast, scrambled eggs with white truffle, and deviled egg paired with that martini I mentioned: Beefeater, Martini & Rossi dry vermouth and Fee’s orange bitters in a small cocktail glass with a large olive. Heaven.
I don’t know how he did it, but Fred Yarm over at Cocktail Virgin Slut managed to post about the event in vivid detail well before noon today.
Tags: 1920s, eastern standard, Repeal party
Posted in Cocktails, Events | 3 Comments »
