Archive for the ‘Boston bars’ Category
March 20th, 2007
Established: 1985
Specialty: Cocktails, wine, beer
Prices: Moderate
Atmosphere: Serious food in an unserious setting, fresh-juice cocktails adorned with little plastic monkeys.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
For many years, one of my life’s great pleasures has been to sit at the bar at the East Coast Grill, grazing on raw shellfish and drinking margaritas made with fresh citrus juice. The food and drink at this Inman Square institution are so consistently fresh and satisfying that I find myself thanking my lucky stars for the place every time I manage to nab a stool at the always — always — crowded bar.
In the contemporary Boston bar scene, ECG pioneered using fresh-squeezed lemons and limes (instead of powdered sour mix) to make its margaritas, plus fresh pineapple and mango puree for other tropical cocktails. These bright-tasting, not-too-sweet drinks are the liquid counterpart to the kitchen’s equally bright-tasting, equatorial, often fiery dishes. Owner and cookbook author Chris Schlesinger, a member of the nation’s grilling & barbecuing elite, says that the fresh-grapefruit Greyhounds he used to drink at a Key West bar called Pedro’s inspired his own drink-mixing practices. Patrick Sullivan, a bartender at ECG in the mid-’90s, brought the fresh-squeezed philosophy with him when he opened his own pioneering bar, the B-Side Lounge, in 1998.
That’s the other thing about the ECG bar — it has always had cool bartenders. Schlesinger describes his staff’s service as “unpretentious, hardworking and relentlessly friendly.” OK, that’s true, but senior bartender Nick Weinstock pinpoints the crux of the matter: “It’s non-corporate. You’re not dealing with canned personalities here.” Weinstock is a perfect example of this. In addition to being a total professional, he’s brash in a lovable way and amusing without being a suck-up. He and his colleagues genuinely appear to be having a good time behind the bar, and they manage to get the customers in on the fun without monopolizing anyone’s night out. It’s a nifty trick.
Most cocktails here are in the $8 range, and there are always a couple of good New England beers on draught (Buzzard’s Bay, Cambridge Brewing Co., Allagash), not to mention PBR tallboys. A really good, reasonably priced sparkling wine is always available for your oyster-eating pursuits, and the wine list is well tailored to the cuisine.
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March 16th, 2007
The man was a saint, and this is how we celebrate him: Last year on St. Patrick’s Day, I went to Bukowski Tavern in Cambridge because I knew it wouldn’t be as crowded as an Irish pub and there would be no deedle-ee-dee music. I just wanted a few beers. As the place started to fill up, a line for the toilets formed. I took my place in the girls’ line, which was face to face with the boys’ line. At one point, the men’s room opened up, and the guy who was next turned to a damsel in drunken distress and made her an offer: “You take the toilet, I’ll take the sink?” In they both went, as the horrified and amused people who remained in line visualized the scenario. The peeing couple came out a minute later, and the men’s room door once again swung open invitingly. Having just witnessed a great new way to impress a lady, the next guy in line turned to the girl facing him and simply gestured as if to say, ‘Well, how ’bout it?’ With an ‘are you kidding’ expression, she answered, “I don’t think so,” thus mercifully nipping this custom in the bud.
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February 21st, 2007
David Wondrich, drinks writer for Esquire magazine and cocktail book author, was in Boston last Thursday night for a Martini and Rossi-sponsored cocktail party at Eastern Standard. Luckily, I and a group of local bartenders got to hang with the guy for the duration of the evening. Through his writing in Esquire and as a founding member of the Museum of the American Cocktail, Wondrich has done much on the national level to revive the classic cocktail. And you may not even realize it, but the drinks you enjoy at certain Boston bars may have been pulled from his books by any number of admiring bartenders. Example: the B2C2, a champagne cocktail featured at a recent drinkboston.com event at Green Street, comes from Wondrich’s Killer Cocktails: An Intoxicating Guide to Sophisticated Drinking.
Wondrich graduated from high school in Long Island, NY, in the same class as Manhattan’s “libation goddess” Audrey Sanders, owner of the SoHo cocktail shrine Pegu Club. Up until about nine years ago, he was an English professor at New York University who was experimenting with making his own absinthe and mixing vintage cocktails. He contacted Esquire’s editor one day proposing to revive the magazine’s cocktail and party guidebooks. (These books were essential tools of the American bon vivant’s trade before that breed of gentleman was unfairly branded a limp-wristed elitist by Bud Lite-swilling NASCAR Dads.) The editor liked the idea, and Wondrich eventually switched to a writing career that allowed him to fully pursue his hobby.
Our evening’s topics of conversation included
- unusual cocktail strainers (Beyond the Hawthorne and the Julep — ask bartender Ben Sandrof about these strange implements.)
- homemade bitters and defunct brands of bitters (Wondrich once made an unusual batch of bitters with Ardbeg single-malt scotch for a scotch-based cocktail event he presided over. For the record, he prefers Angostura and Fee Brothers over other kinds of aromatic bitters, including the old brands, like Boker’s and Abbott’s, that are often extolled by cocktail enthusiasts.)
- beer geeks vs. wine snobs (“Wine snobs are critics. Beer geeks are reverent,” summed up Portland, ME bartender and MOTAC board member John Myers.)
- the continued, tragic popularity of Cosmopolitans and Grey Goose vodka
- the best bar in midtown Manhattan (Keen’s Steakhouse, a century-old establishment whose atmosphere, says Wondrich, makes up for your mediocre Canadian Club-based Manhattan)
- the disappearance of independent bookstores in downtown Boston (Wondrich planned to take the Red Line out to Davis Square in Somerville the next morning to shop for books at McIntyre and Moore’s.)
- the elegant simplicity of the gin-based Aviation cocktail (below).
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January 26th, 2007
You know that when a bar is willing to stick its neck out and make cocktails with egg white, it is serious about drink mixing. John Byrd, a bartender at the Alchemist Lounge (435 S. Huntington Ave. Jamaica Plain), wants to convince customers that egg white is a legit cocktail ingredient, and not some weird, gross thing that people in the olden days used to put in drinks because they didn’t know any better. It’s an uphill battle, but one worth fighting. That’s because anyone who tastes John’s Boston Sour will suddenly get it: egg white, shaken up hard with liquor and ice, lends a soft, fluffy texture that is really pleasant. Egg white does the same thing for drinks that it does for desserts like lemon meringue pie and tiramisu.
The Boston Sour, like most drinks on the Alchemist’s menu, is a variation on a classic, with Benedictine, fresh orange juice and bitters dressing up the whiskey, lemon juice and egg white in the bare-bones version. The Ginger Gimlet naturally consists of gin and lime, only the gin is infused with raw ginger and, instead of Rose’s, a house-made lime cordial is used. The Alchemist’s play on the Sidecar is the Cable Car: house-made spiced rum, triple sec and lemon juice with a cinnamon and sugar rim. You get the idea.
Like many of the city’s great bartenders, John Byrd is a former employee of the B-Side Lounge. He thrives on the combination of speed and craftsmanship he perfected there, and he has a demeanor that’s both upbeat and edgy. One of the Alchemist’s owners, Lyndon Fuller, remembered John from his days at the B-Side and convinced him to tend bar in Jamaica Plain even though he now lives in New York City. John seems unfazed about spending Wednesday through Saturday in Boston and the other half of the week in NYC.
When the Alchemist opened last year, lots of JP residents were up in arms about it replacing a beloved neighborhood bar called Triple D’s. This is a story played over and over in every gentrifying neighborhood in every city in America. Change is hard, and yes, sometimes good watering holes are elbowed aside by yuppie foolishness. But I’m going to be callous and admit I have no lament here because a) I never went to Triple D’s and b) the Alchemist is a good bar. It’s a spacious but warm place with brick walls and polished wood floors. The whole gothic, “alchemy” theme isn’t overly played up. The music is cool (musician, DJ and cocktail historian Brother Cleve walked in, and Lyndon cued up a track from Cleve’s old band Combustible Edison), and there are DJs and/or bands Thursday through Sunday. The food is good — get the wild mushroom flatbread — and pretty cheap (entrées from $8 to $18). And finally, the cocktails are a reasonable $8-$9, there’s a house pale ale on tap that comes from the nearby Boston Beer Co. (Samuel Adams), and the Boston Herald calls the wine list hip and affordable. Hey, not everybody wants hip, but you can’t go wrong with affordable.
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January 12th, 2007
Radius, which has been on the short list of Boston’s best restaurants since chef Michael Schlow opened it in 1999, specializes in the kind of contemporary cocktails found in most chic dining spots. That is, cocktails with up-to-the-minute ingredients that change with the seasons, much like the dishes on the menu. Example: the late-summer Family Heirloom, a chilled, straight-up mixture of heirloom tomato water (the colorless, pulpless, pure liquid from an heirloom tomato), Absolut Citron, Absolut Peppar, lemon and lime juice, a splash of simple syrup and a few drops of parsley oil, which form gem-green circles on the surface of the drink. I know: half of you are saying, “Mmmm, delicious,” and half of you are saying, “That’s preposterous.” You’re both right.
Walking into a swanky place like this, you are right to assume that there are professionals working behind the bar. But you also wonder, ‘Will they give me the time of day if I’m not carrying a Prada bag?’ Karen Olson puts those fears to rest. This barwoman has an easy, genuine laugh and readily admits to being a geek; she’s addicted to playing Who Wants to Be a Millionaire on her cell phone. And it doesn’t hurt that she looks like an Ivory girl. Karen moved to Boston from the Midwest several years back and developed her chops where all out-of-towners congregate when they first arrive in Boston — Legal Sea Foods. She eventually made her way to Radius as a bartender and server.
When I ordered a Pink Cashmere (Plymouth gin, Campari, Cointreau, lime, grapefruit soda and muddled black peppercorns over ice), Karen told me that she and her co-bartenders decreed that every Radius cocktail menu include a drink named after a Prince song (the Raspberry Beret preceded the Pink Cashmere, which I’m going to admit I didn’t know was a Prince song). Some of the most frou-frou-sounding drinks here have surprising backbone, like the Floating Cloud: Bacardi light and Myers dark rum, apple cider and Frangelico topped with almond-flavored whipped cream. Lurking underneath the frothy topping is a belt of rum worthy of a sailor.
The Rosemary Gimlet (pictured), an Olson creation, is my favorite drink at Radius: Hendrick’s gin, lime juice, simple syrup and muddled fresh rosemary topped with ginger beer. It’s the perfect balance of “classic” and “creative” mixology. Have one of these with the duck quesadilla, the frites with three dipping sauces … or anything on the menu, really. Radius gets its bar food right with comforting, familiar-sounding dishes that are kicked up to the level of great cuisine.
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