Author Archive
September 19th, 2006
We bought this vintage booze suitcase for about $35 at the Cambridge Antique Market and brought it with us on vacation in Cape Cod. Not surprisingly, it’s called the Executair 101. It comes with four mixing cups, two jiggers, a mixing spoon, and a serving tray, all made of space-age aluminum. Since cocktails in most Cape bars are of the sweet, “island” variety, we made frequent use of the Executair in whipping up Manhattans and Martinis come five o’ clock.
I’m not exactly a youngster, but I don’t remember that Golden Age of Drinking when it was OK to bring your own bottles and mixing equipment around with you. The great thing about the Executair 101 (I’m dying to find the 201 model in hopes that it added a strainer) is that it really does look like something you could bring to the office. And if your boss was a very special man or woman, you could open this baby up in a meeting and be instantly promoted.
Posted in Cocktails, Drinking supplies | 6 Comments »
September 11th, 2006
Bartender Profile
If you want proof that tending bar isn’t an entirely lost profession — that it isn’t just a temporary gig for any aspiring musician or lawyer who can combine vodka and tonic and say they know how to mix drinks — go to the bar at No. 9 Park and watch the John Gertsen Show. You will see a boyishly handsome, kind-eyed man nimbly corral a barful of demanding Beacon Hill types while mixing drinks with the same level of care that a great chef takes in preparing dishes.
Almost every bartender that drinkboston.com has profiled has spoken admiringly of Gertsen’s expertise. “He makes me look stupid,” said one colleague, himself no slouch behind the bar. A scholar of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century cocktails, Gertsen says his favorite drink to mix is a Ramos Fizz, a concoction of gin, lemon, egg white, and cream that, properly made, takes 15 minutes of shaking and chilling, shaking and chilling. To make sure he’s gotten a cocktail just right, he’ll draw a small sample into a straw and have a taste before he places the drink on your bar napkin.
Before he became a bartender, Gertsen trained to be a biochemist. He much prefers his lab behind the bar to a real one without any booze or hustle and bustle. He relishes both experimentation and tradition: he’ll dispense almond-flavored foam atop a newly invented cocktail while top-shelf bourbon sits on ice in a silver-plated cup long enough to yield the perfect Mint Julep. The only complaint you can make about Gertsen is that he hasn’t opened his own bar yet. [Note: Gertsen opened Drink in the fall of 2008.]
Hometown
I grew up in Hanover, MA.
Past bartending jobs
I first started tending bar at Salamander Restaurant in Cambridge.
First drink you ever had
My first drink was a sip of scotch on the rocks that I stole from my grandfather while we were watching The Price is Right. An absolutely horrifying experience for a seven-year-old at 11 a.m.
Favorite bar in Boston other than your own
Eastern Standard.
The drink you most like to make
Ramos Fizzes.
The drink you least like to make
The last one of the night.
What you drink at the end of your shift
As much water as possible and a Brooklyn Lager.
If I weren’t a bartender, I’d be…
A herpetologist.
A bartender’s best friend is…
Ice.
A bartender’s worst enemy is…
Broken glass in your ice bin.
People drink too much…
Artificial sweetener.
People don’t drink enough…
Egg whites.
Drink for a hot summer day
Mint Julep.
Drink for a cold winter night
Tom and Jerry.
The best thing about drinking in Boston
Spending the $30 that you would have spent on the Fung Wah [bus to NYC] on a meal to go along with your great cocktail here in Boston.
The worst thing about drinking in Boston
The silly tradition of “last call.” I feel that last call encourages overindulgence and irresponsible drinking.
Posted in Bartenders | 1 Comment »
August 31st, 2006
If you’ve been to No. 9 Park (see Best Boston bars), you’re familiar with the restaurant’s cocktail “flights,” three mini-cocktails served at the same time and based on a particular theme. The current offering, Flight of Heraldry ($14), features three great Italian spirits: the bitter liqueurs Aperol and Campari and the vermouth-like Punt e Mes. Everybody’s heard of the bright red, astringently bitter Campari, and Punt e Mes is showing up in more and more bars lately, but Aperol is little known outside Italy. It’s sweeter than Campari, is a beautiful coral color, and has a mild bitterness and a pleasant orange note.
No. 9 Park bartenders Ryan McGrale and John Gertsen invented a delicious, Aperol-based cocktail for the Flight of Heraldry: equal parts Beefeater gin, Aperol, and Cinzano dry vermouth with a spray of lemon peel. They call it the Contessa — as in wife of Count Negroni. The Count may or may not have had a wife, but he did pour a shot of gin in his Americano (Campari, sweet vermouth, splash of soda, orange peel) about a century ago and thus gave birth to one of the great bitters-based drinks, the Negroni, which lost the splash of soda somewhere along the way and is the only previously established cocktail in the No. 9 flight. (According to the New York Times’ latest Style magazine, “Negroni is the new mojito.” If only.) The third drink in the flight is another McGrale-Gertsen invention, the Patrician, which they named after the Count’s imagined “bitter laborer.” It’s equal parts Beefeater, Cointreau, and Punt e Mes and is actually on the mellow side compared to the Negroni. The Contessa’s the more delicate of the three but has a definite bite. I drank these three exquisite cocktails before a delicious plate of truffled gnocchi and felt like a contessa myself.
Posted in Bitters, Boston bars, Cocktails, Gin | No Comments »
August 29th, 2006
Remember how it was cool in the 1980s to be seen with a bottle of Corona in hand and, a little later, a bottle of Red Stripe? Now that those imports from Mexico and Jamaica, respectively, have gone mainstream with TV advertising, a new brand of tropical swill is poised to accessorize the hand of the bargoing hipster: Prestige lager, the national brew of Haiti.
Other than being unknown, Prestige has several features that lend it cred in the eyes of the beer-drinking vanguard. First, the bottle: like Corona and Red Stripe, the label is painted right onto the glass, which lends a kind of retro cachet. Prestige’s simple, two-color banner and brown, short-necked bottle — similar to Red Stripe’s packaging — also place it high on the retro-meter.
Second, while Corona and Red Stripe evoke images of kicking back in a friendly, quasi-primitive paradise, Prestige only makes you wonder: could I drink this on a beach in Haiti without getting robbed or shot? In other words, while Corona and Red Stripe have slid into the frat-boy, middle-manager demographic, Prestige is for those who live on the edge.
Third, it doesn’t hurt that Prestige is actually a decent light lager whose drinkability doesn’t depend on a wedge of lime. Named Best American Lager in the 2000 World Beer Cup, it is dry and balanced and doesn’t have that adjunct (corn or rice) starchiness found in a lot of macro lagers (though it is brewed with a substantial amount of another adjunct, sugar). Like other beers in this style, it’s good for washing down bold foods. I first tried it with a hot, curried goat stew at Green Street. Next, I brought a six-pack to a feast of takeout barbecue from Soul Fire in Allston. I’ll be the first to admit that a Michelob would’ve done the trick on either of these occasions. But it sure wouldn’t have made me look as cool.
Check out the Brasserie Nationale d’Haiti website for another reason that Prestige has hipster cred: its way politically incorrect advertising image of a healthy-butted woman in a white thong.
Posted in Beer | No Comments »
August 24th, 2006
Continued from part 1.
It’s not that I shun vodka entirely. What else am I going to put in my Bloody Marys? I don’t get all huffy when I order a Martini and the bartender asks, “Vodka or gin?” Vodka’s a fact of life. I’m cool with it. Hell, I stock it in my bar at home and serve it at cocktail parties.
What I’m not cool with is that eight out of 10 drinks on most cocktail menus around Boston are vodka-based. These menus offer what appears to be a great variety of options, which is true if you’re looking for one-dimensional fruit and candy flavors. Where are the more complex, more adult mixed drinks? Where is the whiskey, the gin, the vermouth, the Benedictine? They’re behind the bar alright, but few bartenders know how to make cocktails with them (the few who do are among Boston’s best bartenders, of course).
Vodka’s dominance reminds me of the beer market 25 years ago. The only beer style available was light lager, be it Bud or Heineken. Classic styles like India pale ale and stout were relics of pre-Prohibition days or the Old World. The emergence of craft beer and the growth of imports changed that. Now, when you go out drinking in Boston, any two-bit bar has, at the very least, Harpoon, Guinness, or Sam Adams on tap. Bud is still king (and still really good ice cold out of the can), but it and its pale, fizzy brethren are no longer our only options, thank god.
How did vodka come to drown out other spirits? When a new “cocktail culture” emerged in the early to mid-nineties (Remember? You bought a few of those lounge compilations Rhino Records put out?), it might have seemed to cocktail connoisseurs that everyone would soon rediscover vintage mixtures like Sazeracs and Hemingway Daiquiris. No such luck. In Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails (2004) Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh offers a colorful scenario of what went down:
“A food and beverage manager (hypothetically) says: ‘This new generation of drinkers…are nostalgic for their vision of the 1950s martini parties they’ve seen in old movies…Only problem is, it’s likely none of this crowd has actually ever had a real martini, and I bet if they did, it would knock ’em on their ass. WAY too strong. They’d run away screaming. So I say this: let’s mix a little vodka and some liqueur, shaken and strained in a stemmed cocktail glass, and call it a fill-in-the-blank Martini.'”
Enter the Cosmopolitan, the poster child of the modern cocktail. Thanks to Sex and the City, this insipid pink drink (vodka, orange liqueur, splash of cran) reached an undeserved level of fame and inspired many spinoffs. It was like Paris Hilton in a glass.
Finally, there was the explosion of vodka brands on the market. There are, like, 92 varieties of vodka on the shelf of a typical liquor store. Their sleek, frosted bottles evoke purity and sophistication, which appeals to a lot of people who a) had a bad experience with tequila in college and believe that vodka’s somehow better for them, and b) think that ordering a “Goose, rocks,” in a bar makes them look cool.
It’s inescapable: vodka is everywhere, and its popularity isn’t going to die down anytime soon. But there are rumblings that drinkers are looking for something new. And just as microbrews came to the rescue of beer drinkers looking for bolder flavors 25 years ago, some bartenders are rebelling against the blandness of “fill-in-the-blank Martinis” by reviving forgotten recipes for truly sophisticated drinks — call them craft cocktails — and people aren’t running away screaming.
Stay tuned for part 3.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails, Vodka | No Comments »
