Author Archive
February 6th, 2008
By Scott N. Howe
Chinese New Year is almost here. For some of us, that means a trip to Chinatown to check out the pageants and dodge the firecrackers. For the rest of us, that means a better-than-average excuse to order some Chinese take-out and throw down a few cold bottles of Tsingtao lager.
As the retro beer trend has taught us, context can trump taste. Grill me a hot dog at a backyard barbeque, and I want a PBR. Order me some greasy fried rice and a carton of crab rangoons at 2:00 a.m. after the bars have closed, and pour me a Tsingtao.
The nice thing about Tsingtao is that it gives you context and taste. It is the number-one imported beer from China, and you can find it in virtually every Chinese restaurant — and for good reason. As the nice folks at Tsingtao assert, “Tsingtao complements spicy or flavorful Asian cuisine.” They’re right. The beer is light, but not bland, malty, but not bready. From my experience, it goes great with high-end, authentically prepared Chinese cuisine, low-end, indifferently prepared take-out, and everything in between.
Crisp, tasty and hard to pronounce, it’s the beer you should be drinking as you celebrate 2008 — the Year of the Rat.
Posted in Beer | 7 Comments »
February 3rd, 2008
OK, that title’s a bit of an exaggeration. But it’s based on fact. The Beehive, which bills itself as a “neighborhood café des artistes,” is a new and very popular nightclub in the South End. Like all new and very popular nightclubs, it has its detractors: People who had to wait in a long line. People who think the food and cocktails are overpriced. People who were treated rudely by the staff. “Obnoxious crowd, unnecessarily obnoxious bouncers, mediocre music and food, cool look downstairs,” begins one critique on yelp.com. I have heard some people say that the owners are jerks. Other people I know have gone expecting the bar staff to be knowledgeable about vintage cocktails and have been sorely disappointed. Most of my acquaintances who have tried the food have been unimpressed at best.
But most people, even detractors, agree on one thing: the Beehive is a cool-looking place. (On yelp.com, by the way, the Beehive currently gets three-and-a-half out of five stars based on 90 reviews. Not bad.) The first time I visited, I thought to myself, ‘They did it. Someone created a really original hangout in Boston that’s not a rock club or a dance club or a trying-too-hard-to-be-chic martini bar.’ The cavernous brick interior, the red velvet drapery, the intimate little cabaret tables, the vintage chandeliers and, especially, the bold and witty contemporary art — all make for an impressive space. And the clientele illustrates the apparently revolutionary truth that people over 30 go out at night.
I have only been to the Beehive a few times, always on off-nights (i.e. not Thursday through Saturday), so I’ve never had to wait in line. Is the place worth waiting in line for? For 10 minutes, maybe. For an hour? I don’t think anyplace is worth waiting in line for that long. The Beehive Julep (rum, Creole Shrubb liqueur and lime juice) I had on my first visit was sloppily thrown together and nothing to write home about. The champagne and Cointreau cocktails I had on another visit were tasty (and hard to screw up, admittedly). The server who brought those champagne cocktails to me was an absolute doll. I love the fact that for $10 a ticket, the Beehive recently hosted a show called Titler’s Oddville — a strange, naughty, highly entertaining vaudeville revue. I didn’t love the fact that the stage was barely visible because the audience was made to stand.
So, the Beehive is far from perfect. But they’re doing something different. For that reason it’s hard for me not to root for the place and make plans to go back.
Posted in Boston bars | 4 Comments »
January 29th, 2008
Canadian Club, that once-respected whiskey that got pushed out of drinkers’ consciousness by the vodka tidal wave on one hand and the emergence of boutique ryes and bourbons on the other, is trying to make a comeback. The brand, now owned by Jim Beam, is running a catchy ad campaign in magazines like Esquire and GQ. Naturally, I wanted to include here an example of one of the ads, but I couldn’t for reasons I’ll explain in a minute.
The ads are fun. They play on the same sensibility that fueled the comeback of old-school beer brands like PBR, Schlitz and Narragansett. Their images, which look like faded, creased photos from the ’60s and ’70s, show men of a bygone era doing “man” things like fishing, playing in a band and partying with babes in a shag-carpeted rec room. Oh, and drinking C.C. in heavy-bottomed rocks glasses, of course. The ad with the guys fishing reads, “Your dad was not a metrosexual. He didn’t do pilates. Moisturize. Or drink pink cocktails. Your dad drank whiskey cocktails. Made with Canadian Club. Served in a rocks glass. They tasted good. They were effortless. Damn right your dad drank it.”
Wow. Is that a bitch slap. To the modern man. Or what?
The thing I love about these ads, besides their authentically retro look and their towel-snapping text, is that they are nothing like other whiskey ads, whose warmly lit still-life-with-bottle aesthetic evokes heritage and taste. Yawn. The C.C. ads are saying, ‘Hey, remember when drinking whiskey wasn’t about drinking whiskey but about what was happening while you were drinking whiskey?’ Yeah!
Another reason these ads resonated with me is that, by coincidence, I recently tasted C.C. for the first time in ages. A couple we know had a small gathering at their house. There was nary a mixology book in sight. Just a big stone fireplace and a magically replenishing pitcher of Manhattans. Sitting in an armchair sipping my drink, I asked my host, “What kind of whiskey did you use?” With a little smirk and a shrug, he said, “Canadian Club,” and awaited the commentary of the Booze Snobs. Scott and I looked at each other, then back at our host. “It’s good!” Then we all went back to discussing the presidential election.
Unfortunately, my budding appreciation for C.C. soured when the Jim Beam legal department reared its ugly head. You see, I emailed the C.C. brand manager to ask for permission to use an ad image from the website for this post. Upon his request, I even described the post’s content, saying that it would be a commentary on the new ad campaign and favorable toward the product itself. But then things got stupid. “Sounds great!” he replied. “I just spoke with my legal team. They asked that we get to see the article before it’s run. Will this be ok with you? I will be able to have this approved within a matter of hours once you submit.”
Once I submit? Oh, that’s rich. Let me get this straight, buddy. I’m writing an article about your whiskey brand on a website frequented by the exact demographic you’re targeting, and your lawyers have to approve my use of your ad as an illustration? What, free advertising isn’t enough for you people? You have to have editorial control, too?
Yeah, I know. Maybe I should’ve behaved like every other blogger in the universe and simply grabbed a jpeg from the Canadian Club site without asking first. But my dad taught me to be conscientious. And he drinks Dewar’s.
Posted in Booze in the news, Whiskey | 18 Comments »
January 25th, 2008
Things I learned this week:
1. Jeff “Beachbum” Berry’s Grog Blog features a post titled “Monks + Drunks x Sisterhood = the Pago Pago Cocktail.” It seems Berry made the acquaintance of some of the ladies of LUPEC Boston (that’s the Boston chapter of Ladies United for the Preservation of Endangered Cocktails) a couple of months ago when he was in town for the Sippin’ Safari. He became intrigued by the cocktails that LUPEC Boston and drinkboston.com created for a Chartreuse event at Green Street back in August.
“Inspired by LUPEC Boston’s creations,” writes the tiki guru, “we combed through our cocktail library in search of vintage tropical drinks that call for Chartreuse. In a 1940 book entitled The How And When, we finally found a good one: the Pago Pago. To make it, place 1 ounce of diced fresh pineapple in your cocktail shaker, then muddle the pineapple in 1/2 ounce fresh lime juice. Add 1/4 ounce white creme de cacao, 3 teaspoons green Chartreuse, and 1 1/2 ounces gold Puerto Rican rum. Shake well with ice cubes and strain into a cocktail glass.”
I have only tasted this drink in my mind, but it’s one of the most delicious imaginary cocktails I’ve ever had. I vow to mix one up for myself soon.
2. Blackberrying me from the bar at KO Prime, a friend of mine made me aware of the steak house’s “Retro Sundays.” He said he and his wife were drinking Pink Squirrels (creme de noyaux, creme de cacao and cream). Apparently, the bartenders robe up like Hugh Hefner, Chef Jamie Bisonnette parades around in a cartoonish toque, and the dinner menu includes old-school steak house specialties like all-you-can-eat prime rib, Oysters Rockefeller and shrimp cocktail. Cool.
3. Meanwhile, speaking of old-school … over at the Independent, bartender Evan Harrison is dreaming up a special menu of “cheap scotch cocktails.” It seems the bar has a surplus of Cluny blended scotch on hand (in 1.5 liter plastic bottles of course), and, well, Evan’s going to do his own version of your grandfather’s night out. I took a sniff from the Cluny bottle during a recent visit, and it smelled like … it smelled like the first time I ever smelled whiskey: dangerous and slightly sickening. I’m anxiously awaiting that menu. (Oh, and by the way, Evan also re-did the Indo’s website, and I think it looks damn cool.)
Posted in Cocktails, Liqueur, Whiskey | 4 Comments »
January 18th, 2008
I love visiting bars. I hate visiting bar websites. One of the little-known drawbacks of being a drinks writer is the amount of time you spend searching for the Skip Intro button on restaurant, club and bar homepages. These sites are notorious for forcing on you a little Flash movie of the lounge area, or slide show of signature dishes and cocktails, complete with urbane musical accompaniment, before you are allowed to see the navigation. Then, when you finally get past the intro, you find yourself in a site that uses frames — those little windows, popular in 1998, that you have to scroll through — rather than separate web pages for each section. And don’t even get me started on menus in PDF. Nearly every bar and restaurant on the planet makes you download their menu to your desktop and view it in Acrobat. Is it asking too much to simply put the text on the actual web page? Oh, but wait, you’d need a web expert to hack into those damn frames…
I didn’t set out to pick on anyone in particular here. The examples above were easy to find, and there are dozens more like them. That’s my point. Bad websites are rampant in this industry.
Regarding what I said about frames — it’s not that these sites look out of date. Most of them are quite slick. It’s that they act out of date. Mr. or Ms. General Manager, that flash intro may have seemed awesome the first time your web developer played it for you, but after the ninth time, when all you’re trying to do is take a quick look at the wine list, it’s annoying as hell. And the shoddy navigation on some of these sites can be comical. On the Beehive’s website, for example, click on Special Events (after watching that cool intro, of course). Where does that take you? Not to a list of special events, as you might expect, but to a page that says, “Beehive Special Events. Click here for more information.” Click there, and yet a third page opens in a new window with the info you’re looking for. Incidentally, I will be at the Beehive on the 27th to see Titler, who has a completely hallucinogenic website.
I know, restaurant folks don’t tend to have their fingers on the pulse of web technology. That’s why they’re mixing cocktails, cooking food and serving dinner, not sitting in an office. But what they need to understand is that if a potential customer visits their restaurant’s website, he probably landed there only after Googling, say, “sushi, Boston,” reading a few reviews on Chowhound and local blogs, and asking around the office to see if anyone has been to the place. At that point, all he wants to do is check out the latest menu and find the T stop nearest the destination. My advice? Give him a clean, easy-to-navigate website where he can readily find that info, because he wants to be wowed by your food, drinks and service, not your homepage.
Posted in Books & resources, Boston bars | 7 Comments »
