Archive for the ‘Cocktails’ Category
October 7th, 2006
I love gin, especially Bombay Sapphire gin, especially when it’s free. That’s why I decided to don my club clothes and go to the Bombay Sapphire “Perfect Pairings” night at District this week. The event, co-sponsored by GQ magazine, involved an Iron Chef-style cookoff between chefs Andy Husbands (Tremont 647, Sister Sorrell) and Marc Orfaly (Pigalle, Marco). Teaming up with the two chefs were two bartenders — Candace Smith of Excelsior was paired with Husbands, while Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard was paired with Orfaly — who concocted Bombay Sapphire-based cocktails to accompany each dish. The chefs had a weird array of ingredients to work with, including cucumbers, steamed clams, Frosted Flakes and Minute Rice, and 20 minutes to whip up three dishes. Truth be told, the dishes smelled wonderful, and the cocktails Jackson and Candace mixed looked cool and mouthwatering. If only I could have been the judge!
Instead, I stood amid the crowd, sampling little phyllo-and-goat cheese thingies and drinking “Inspired Cocktails” that were being liberally distributed by attractive waitresses in short, strapless dresses the color of the Sapphire gin bottle. The girls were nice, but the drinks were warm. Was there an ice shortage? The bartender who made my first drink, a Martini, stirred the mixture over about five cubes for 10 seconds. The temperature of the resulting cocktail was perfect … if I had been drinking red wine. I also tried a Strawberry Basil cocktail. The flavors were nice, but again, the drink was tepid. Bombay’s official mixologist, Jamie Walker, was there. But he didn’t seem horrified by District’s lackadaisical production of his creations as, say, chefs Husbands and Orfaly would be if their dishes languished under a heat lamp before being served.
Look, I’m not an idiot. I understand the persuasive powers of plentiful free booze. And Bombay certainly doesn’t need to convince me to drink their gin. I already do. It’s really good stuff. But if they’re going to promote their brand of gin as a worthy complement to top-notch cuisine, shouldn’t they bother to show their potential customers the beauty of a properly made cocktail?
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails, Events, Gin | No Comments »
September 25th, 2006
I ordered Mai Tais at two different places this week: first at Eastern Standard (Kenmore Sq.), then at Peking Tom’s (Chauncy St. near Downtown Crossing). A Mai Tai would be just another sweet rum punch if not for two mysterious ingredients: Orgeat and falernum. What and what? you ask. Read on.
The milky-colored orgeat (pronounced OR-zha) is a “generic syrup of almonds, orange flower water and sometimes barley water often used in tropical and other cocktails,” according to the Cocktail Database. You may have seen orgeat at one of those coffee houses where they mix flavored syrups with soda water. The database describes falernum as a non- or lightly alcoholic sugar syrup with a “subtle sweet/tart/spicy character” and “used almost exclusively in rum-based tropical drinks.” These ingredients elevate the Mai Tai — otherwise made of light and dark rum, lime juice, orange curacao and grenadine — from a drink for girly-girls to a drink you’d buy for the Girl from Ipanema.
Both bars serve the Sweet Tart-pink cocktail on ice in the traditional double rocks glass. The Peking Tom’s Mai Tai ($7) was yummy, but Eastern Standard’s ($10) was better. I suspect that the former omits the falernum, as that ingredient is hard to find and usually must be mail-ordered. Eastern Standard mail-orders several hard-to-find ingredients, like orange bitters. Its Mai Tai wasn’t as sweet as Peking Tom’s, but it had more going on, including a candy note that reminded me of Smarties.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails, Rum | No Comments »
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 »
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 »
