Archive for the ‘Cocktails’ Category
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 »
July 20th, 2006
Imagine if the only type of meat you could get in a restaurant was chicken. You could get it cooked in innumerable ways: roasted with herbs, boneless and sauteed in a Saltimbocca, stewed with Moroccan spices, shredded in a rillette, smoked and smothered in barbecue sauce. Nothing wrong with any of these preparations. Except that none of them taste like beef, pork or lamb. Nope, sorry — in this new chicken-centric cuisine, the rich, distinctive flavors of a rib-eye steak, pork spareribs, and lamb shank are deemed too frighteningly, um, meat-like for the sophisticated modern palate.
Just substitute “chicken” with “vodka,” and you’ll get an idea of what going out for cocktails is like these days. Vodka has seemingly taken hostage the imagination of all who serve or drink liquor. It is a blank canvas onto which any of-the-moment ingredient, be it basil or blueberries, can be painted, so that people who don’t like the taste of spirits can pretend they’re drinking a sophisticated, adult beverage. Bourbon, gin, brandy, rum … they taste too much like, um, booze. They’re nowhere to be found on the modern cocktail menu, except in token old-school offerings like the Manhattan (whiskey) and the Sidecar (brandy), and in the ubiquitous Mojito (rum), a.k.a. “the new Margarita.”
It seems that every hot new restaurant that opens up in Boston touts its “innovative cocktail menu.” Generally, that’s code for a bunch of drinks based on plain or flavored vodka and containing various combinations of fruits, herbs, essences and liqueurs.
A perfect example of the state of the art can be found at the Living Room on Atlantic Ave. in Boston. According to stuff@night‘s recent Summer Cocktail issue, the Living Room is mixing three usual suspects — Skyy Berry Vodka, Apple Pucker and sour mix — with acai berry juice, which apparently has “more antioxidants than blueberries and pomegranates.” Too bad any cancer-fighting properties this drink might have are negated by the green dye in the Apple Pucker. Another Living Room special, the Bubble Tea Martini, comes from the “adapt the latest soft-drink craze into an alcoholic drink” school of mixology. If you have a hangover right now, stop reading, because you might hurl when I list the ingredients in this one: strawberry soy milk, pearl tapioca (i.e. the glutinous “bubbles” in bubble tea) and Absolut Vanilla. God. This makes Jell-o shots seem cool.
Next – Vodka R.I.P., part 2: How did it come to this?
Posted in Booze in the news, Boston bars, Cocktails, Vodka | No Comments »
June 23rd, 2006
Ed. Note: The B-Side Lounge closed in 2008.
Established: 1998
Specialty: Cocktails
Prices: Moderate
Atmosphere: Hip but not painfully so. Retro but not kitschy. Crowded.
See Best Boston bars for address and contact info.
B-Side opened at the tail end of the widespread, short-lived revival of cocktail culture, a la the Rat Pack, that the movie Swingers ushered in. Fortunately, the cocktails themselves stuck around, and so did B-Side. That’s because owner/bartender Patrick Sullivan did something revolutionary: he offered vintage cocktails. And he offered them right, with crushed ice, fresh citrus juice, and long-ignored ingredients like Benedictine liqueur and rye whiskey. The drink menu — probably the most comprehensive in greater Boston — categorizes cocktails by their base liquor, e.g. “Whiskey Base,” “Gin Base,” etc. It includes classy stuff like the Frisco (rye whiskey, Benedictine, lemon juice) and the Champs Elysees (brandy, yellow Chartreuse, lemon juice and Angostura bitters), plus drinks like the Double Wide (Coke syrup and Jack Daniels) and the Mullet (Bud Light and a shot of Sambuca) that clue you in to the fact that B-Side refuses to take itself too seriously. A cocktail can be a sublime thing, but it shouldn’t be a serious thing. This attitude comes through in the drink prices, which start at $8 (downright cheap for the Boston area). If you’re not into mixed drinks, B-Side’s got you covered with wine and a decent selection of (mostly) craft beers on tap, as well as macro and retro brews in bottles and cans.
Several of the Boston area’s best bartenders — including a few profiled on this site — either work or have worked at B-Side. It’s the perfect place to hone one’s knowledge of mixology, not to mention crowd-control skills. The place is frequently packed. The bar staff looks professional (they wear long, white aprons, and the guys wear ties) but far from stodgy (body art seems to be a requirement). B-Side bartenders who move on to other gigs take that “I’m a professional but I’m having a good time” attitude with them.
B-Side occupies the site of the former Windsor Tap (the building is located at the corner of Hampshire and Windsor streets), which was something of an East Cambridge institution. B-Side was initially resented by many WT regulars as one of those trendy, upstart establishments that signal the yuppie takeover of a working-class neighborhood. But its no-nonsense attitude ultimately endeared it to a wide range of drinking types. It helped that Sullivan fixed up some of the space’s best features: a large, U-shaped bar, pressed-tin ceiling, and thick glass tiles on the wall that let in light but mercifully shield customers from a view of the drab intersection outside. Vintage cocktail equipment and a plastic Bud Man (that’s a Budweiser spokes-character from the late 1960s/early 1970s, kids) share a perch above the back bar that houses the citrus juicer and the turntable. Yes, B-Side plays records when things aren’t too busy. Another big, big plus is that the food here is consistently good. I guess you’d call it “American-eclectic.” There are six or eight well executed entrees, most of which are around $20. People actually go to B-Side to have dinner! Don’t worry, if you’re saving all your money to pay the bar tab, look for the wire carousel and help yourself to a free hard-boiled egg.
B-Side’s only real drawbacks are a lack of parking (but you shouldn’t be driving after hanging out there anyway) and the noise level, which can escalate painfully when the place fills up.
Posted in Boston bars, Cocktails | 3 Comments »
