I'm thrilled to announce my first contribution to Serious Eats as a writer covering the Boston cocktail scene. It's a review of one of my favorite craft cocktail bars of the moment: the bar at Clio Restaurant and Uni Sashimi Bar in the Eliot Hotel in Boston's Back Bay. I chose it for my Serious Eats debut because as wonderful as it is, the bar and its gifted manager Todd Maul tend to get overlooked even by serious cocktail aficionados who follow more celebrated local bartenders at better-known venues like Drink, Eastern Standard and Green Street.
Writing for Serious Eats is seriously exciting for me: it's the single biggest, most influential blog in North America focused on the enjoyment of food and drink, both out on the town and at home. Based in New York, with great content on the New York scene, it's the home of one of my favorite food writers, the food scientist, gifted chef, recipe maven, Boston ex-pat and MIT alumnus J. Kenji Alt-Lopez. Plus it dives deeply and nerdily into specialty areas like hamburgers, pizza, and recipes for home cooks.
I'm honored that they asked me to make the first Boston contribution to their new Drinks section dedicated to beverages of all stripes, including coffee, tea, beer, wine, spirits, soft drinks, drink-making techniques, books and equipment, food/drink pairings -- and of course, quality cocktails and the bars and bartenders that serve them.
Here's an example of how influential this site is: a year ago, Serious Eats picked up "27 Really Terrible Boston Restaurant Names", a piece I wrote on this blog that satirizes Boston restaurants with less-than-great names. On a typical day, my blog gets a few hundred hits. After Serious Eats linked to it, it got thousands of visits a day for a week, and the essay inspired similar pieces in several cities around the US. Their readership is huge and loyal.
I expect this will be the first in a series of reviews of my favorite places for a well-made drink in Greater Boston. I hope you like it, and I look forward to writing more!
