August 4th, 2006
Bartender profile
With his custom-made Ray-Ban eyeglasses, artfully mussed hair, and vintage, “daddy-o” shirts, Max Toste (“toasty”) looks like a guy you’d as soon see on stage at T.T. the Bears as behind the bar. Like a fair number of bartenders in Boston, Max actually is a musician. But I’m glad he’s dedicated to his day job as co-owner of Deep Ellum, the only combination beer bar-cocktail lounge in Boston. Back when he tended bar at Bukowski Tavern-Cambridge, and now at Deep Ellum, Max treats me like the Lady of Beer Manor. He will proffer a beverage or two he thinks will interest me; he knows my taste is all over the map, so he might offer me a Moylan’s Hopsickle (ridiculously hoppy double IPA), a mellow stout, or a German lager that happens to come in a can. He knows I rarely come in with my beer order on the tip of my tongue, that I always peruse the specials blackboard, and that I like a little banter — call it beer foreplay — before I commit myself to a selection. I’m no bartender’s pet, though. Max waits on all the ladies — and the gents — with similar attention to their tastes and personalities.
Believe it or not, this is only his second gig behind a bar. “Before Bukowski, I was not very interested in bartending. I worked in fancy places [e.g. Locke-Ober] where being table-side guiding people through wine lists was much more interesting than cranking out apple-tinis and Cosmos. I was terrified of being trapped behind a bar, stuck talking to some golf enthusiast.” But, he has found that his “customers, for the most part, are very receptive to trying new things and maybe hearing a story about what they’re drinking.”
And since he’s been at Deep Ellum, Max has developed an ambitious repertoire of classic cocktails, including four different Manhattans.
Hometown
Tiverton, Rhode Island, a very small rural coastal New England town. Lots of farmers and fishermen. My grandparents on both sides were farmers from Portuguese heritage. The love of food and drink is a big part of my family’s personality.
First drink you ever had
A glass of Seagrams VO whiskey my grandfather had stashed in the door of his MG. My second was stealing a Bud can from same grandfather’s garage fridge. He knew how to live! And I can thank him for my love of whiskey and beer.
Favorite bar in Boston other than your own
The DeLux. The other is the bar in my house.
The drink you most like to serve
I like to try to figure out just the right beer or drink for every customer at my bar. What I like doesn’t really matter. It’s their mood or taste at that moment that I try to cater to. I like turning people on to their new favorite thing.
The drink you least like to serve
Something people order because they think it makes them cool.
What you drink at the end of your shift
At the end of the night I like a whiskey and a cold beer.
If I weren’t a bartender I’d be…
A cook.
A bartender’s best friend is…
The customer who wants to have a good time. A bartender’s worst enemy is the other guy who doesn’t!
People drink too much…
Fucking diet soda. Have a beer with your lunch like a civilized person!
People don’t drink enough…
Local craft beer.
Drink for a hot summer day
Pacifico Clara or Smuttynose IPA out of the bottle.
Drink to ward off the cold
Unibroue Trois Pistoles [Quebecois strong ale], Sam Smith Imperial Stout, or three fingers of an Islay scotch.
The best thing about beer in Boston is…
The presence of more craft (and local craft) beers in your average bar and liquor stores every year.
The worst thing about beer in Boston is…
That drinking good beer is a status symbol, and not just natural!
Permalink | 9 Comments | Filed under Bartenders |
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.
Permalink | 1 Comment | Filed under Boston bars, Cocktails |
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).
Permalink | 1 Comment | Filed under Boston bars, Cocktails, Vodka |
July 26th, 2006
Web sites don’t get any more useful than this. Beer drinkers, add beermapping.com to your bookmarks. This clean-looking blog uses Google Mapping API (that’s “application programming interface” if you’re wondering) to pinpoint every brewery, brewpub, beer bar and beer store in 23 (and counting) U.S. cities. Here’s the Boston Beer Map.
Permalink | No Comments | Filed under Beer, Boston bars |
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?
Permalink | No Comments | Filed under Booze in the news, Boston bars, Cocktails, Vodka |
