Archive for the ‘Boston bars’ Category
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 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 »
August 20th, 2006
Established: 2006 (1933)
Specialty: Cocktails
Prices: Moderate
Atmosphere: Gritty on the outside, cool on the inside. Restaurant workers hang out here on their night off — always a good sign — joining foodies, yuppies, and hipsters for consistently great food, top-notch bartending, and an unpretentious attitude. See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
You might think that ranking a merely eight-month-old bar among Boston’s best is jumping the gun a bit, but this Central Square gem has so much going for it — not least of which is that history is on its side. Green Street operates under Cambridge’s oldest continuing liquor license, issued in 1933.
No matter how much you loved the former Green Street Grill, with its red vinyl seating and tongue-searing, Caribbean food, you have to root for the new Green Street (yes, just Green Street). The cooking, recently taken over by Pete Sueltenfuss (formerly of Eat and Eastern Standard), still rocks, and the vibe is still that of a hopping neighborhood bar. Most important, some of the best bartenders in greater Boston work here. They handle a crowd like experienced circus trainers while deftly executing an ever-rotating menu of vintage cocktails. Green Street’s complete, “A to Z,” drink menu features lots of rum-and-fresh-fruit-juice concoctions, as well as classics like the Iceberg (Plymouth gin, Ricard, mint, shaved ice) and the Phipp’s Fizz (Old Overholt rye, fresh lemon juice, Angostura bitters, ginger beer). Prices average $7-$8. Compare that to $10-$12 for far inferior, flavored vodka ‘tinis in most Boston bars.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails | 1 Comment »
August 1st, 2006
Established: 1992
Specialty: basic cocktails and beer
Prices: cheap
Atmosphere: A wide array of types who appreciate a good value — twentysomethings paying off student loans, families, musicians, guys in beige Dockers — congregate here for the good, cheap food and drink and that “cool bar” vibe that vintage album covers, a 1950s-era “exotic” nude painting, and a year ’round plastic Santa provide.
See Best Boston bars (Honorable mention) for address and contact info.
Google the DeLux Cafe in the South End, and your search results will yield dozens of reviews that describe the place as an inexpensive, crowded, kitschy, hip, laid-back, neighborhood dive with a kickass kitchen.
On a recent Thursday night, we showed up at DeLux at cocktail hour, around 5:30. The bartender, a slender, take-no-shit brunette named Jenna, was chatting sassily with a customer she obviously knew fairly well. He was wearing office clothes and drinking a tall can of beer. She approached us after the standard delay that relative strangers to a neighborhood bar are made to sit through. I had seen a couple of references to “good drinks” in the online reviews, so I went out on a limb and asked if there was a cocktail menu. No? OK, are there any drinks the place is known for? I ventured. Jenna eyed me warily. “What do you want? Anything I make is good. I’ve been bartending for nine years.” I could see the wheels of her mind turning: Where does this flibbertigibbet think she is? I came to my senses and ordered a Maker’s Mark Manhattan. My companion, relieved that I had ended the Difficult Woman routine, ordered a Schlitz tallboy.
The Manhattan was perfectly chilled and didn’t come in some ridiculous Big Gulp glass. It was a solid drink, and it was, like, $6.50. The Martini my companion ordered was equally well made. We ended up with a tab of two cocktails, three beers, and two steak-tip entrees for roughly $48. My god, we normally pay that much for just drinks anywhere else. I don’t know how DeLux manages to get away with those prices, particularly since it’s in the heart of the pricey South End, and I don’t care, as long as they don’t have eight-year-old slaves washing dishes or something.
The food menu changes regularly, the taps pour Guinness and a few microbrews, and the music is pretty near ideal — Elvis Presley, George Jones, Dusty Springfield, the Germs, and Blondie soundtracked our visit. So the service has a bit of attitude; that’s only if you ask for a cocktail menu.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails | 1 Comment »
July 28th, 2006
This is a vodka drink I can get behind. That’s because there’s gin in it. And because James Bond invented it. (OK, Ian Fleming invented it.) In Casino Royale, the terrific first 007 novel, Bond demonstrates that he is both a man of taste and a man who knows exactly what he wants with this drink order: “in a deep champagne goblet … Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel.” He names the drink after his gorgeous, dark-haired, enigmatic colleague, Vesper Lynd, whom he discovers is a double agent after she commits suicide in despair over their doomed love. Not surprisingly, Bond never re-visits the drink in subsequent novels. But that doesn’t mean that non-fictional drinkers the world over can’t enjoy it. It’s so Bondian: cool, subtle, hard-edged. The Independent in Somerville’s Union Square is, as far as I know, the only place in greater Boston that lists the drink on its cocktail menu. Naturally, the bartenders use English dry gin (Beefeater) and Bond-approved Russian vodka (Stoli).
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails, Vodka | 1 Comment »
