From the Archives: Squeegee Your Anomie with Rye Whiskey

Max Toste of Deep Ellum decants a Rye Manhattan
(photo courtesy of The Boston Herald)

As I rarely have time to create original essays for this blog, I occasionally reprint ancient pieces of mine, including articles I wrote long ago for alt-weekly Boston’s Weekly Dig (now known as Dig Boston), many of which became unavailable online after its mid-2007 website makeover.

Here’s one of a series of cocktail pieces I did for The Dig focusing on little-known and underappreciated spirits, in this case, American straight rye whiskey. Rye was just making its comeback in Boston bars with the help of the scene’s best craft cocktail purveyors; few local food writers seemed to have noticed. I also suspect this is a very early mention in the Boston press of a raw-egg cocktail.

SQUEEGEE YOUR ANOMIE WITH RYE WHISKEY
It’s a film noir world: drop that Technicolor cocktail
First published in Boston’s Weekly Dig, February 21, 2007

Rye commands reverence among booze historians as America’s oldest whiskey, the original base of ancient cocktails like the Manhattan. Yet despite cultish adherents and growing press attention, rye cruises in the blind spot of most Boston bartenders. Order it and you’re liable to get a blank stare, or an unassuming blended Canadian whisky like Crown Royal, a substitute that Americans had to settle for during Prohibition. Repeal came too late to restore American rye’s fortunes: bourbon had usurped the American whiskey throne, relegating the impoverished surviving ryes to the plebian front-end of Boilermakers.

Philip Marlowe, the archetypal private detective of 1940s hardboiled crime fiction, slugged rye from bottles stashed in his desk and glove box. Preferring brash rye to sweeter, mellower bourbon flagged Raymond Chandler’s protagonist as an old-school hard guy. The assertive bite Marlowe favored is distilled from a mash of at least 51% rye grain (where bourbon uses sugar-rich corn) and aged in charred-oak barrels. Respectable ryes under $40 are still produced by venerable brands like Van Winkle and Sazerac, but this roughneck is also getting the super-premium makeover: you can now drop $100 or more on 21-year-old ryes from boutique producers like The Classic Cask.

As for cocktails, rye’s emphatic character is ill-suited to the sickly-sweet concoctions that rookies order when they graduate from Goldschläger shots. Crafting a well-balanced rye cocktail demands a certain scholarly, 19th-century rigor and inventiveness. Such precise bartending chops are cultivated at only a handful of local bars, like Cambridge’s B-Side Lounge, which spearheaded Boston's vintage-cocktail revival and has trained some of our best mixologists. At these elite establishments, rye is one tool in the campaign to hoist Boston drinkers out of the dark age of chocolate “martinis”. When you’re ready for a grown-up drink with some grizzled authenticity, try curling your lip like Bogart and ordering a rye cocktail from one of these expert purveyors.

Green Street. Dylan Black, proprietor of this recently-remade Central Square restaurant that serves robust New England fare, is an accomplished barman and savant of American imbibing history. His long cocktail list prominently features rye. The Daisy Black ($7.50) – named for his great-grandfather, himself a bartender in rye’s original heyday – softens the burred edges of Old Overholt rye with fresh lemon juice and honey syrup. More adventurous tipplers might try the Toronto ($8), a prize fight in a cocktail glass: jangly rye duking it out with blackish, poisonously-bitter Fernet Branca, with simple syrup trodden underfoot. You might flirt with the cross-dressing weirdness of the Double Standard ($8), which drapes rye in fruity, Cosmo-pink togs of Plymouth gin, lime juice, and raspberry syrup. Or you could just savor some Michter’s rye ($6) plain with a bit of water, a better match for this gastro-tavern’s bluff, unaffected charm.

Green Street, 280 Green St, Cambridge. 617.876.1655 www.greenstreetgrill.com/

Deep Ellum. This Allston newcomer serves a creative pub-food menu, but is foremost a connoisseur’s beer bar with 22 drafts, 90+ bottles, a cask unit, and lots of brew-specific glassware. Fortunately, co-owner Max Toste is also a devotee of old-time cocktails like the Sazerac ($7): Old Overholt rye, Peychaud’s bitters and simple syrup stirred with ice, decanted into a cocktail glass rinsed with anise-scented Absente pastis, finished with a lemon twist. After just one, I feel like an honored guest at a particularly well-appointed French Quarter brothel. Less complicated but also delightful is the Rye Sour ($7), rye and a house-made sour mix of fresh citrus juices and sugar. With several brands to choose from, including Old Potrero, a 100%-malt-rye straight whiskey from San Francisco that Max declares “better for sipping”, we’ll return to explore obscure corners of Deep Ellum’s vintage bar guides. Maybe that beer list, too.

Deep Ellum, 477 Cambridge St, Allston. 617-787-2337, www.deepellum-boston.com/

No. 9 Park. The cocktail cheffery practiced at this luxury Italian/French restaurant near the State House may be the best in Boston, worth suffering the obnoxious company of its toffee-nosed Beacon Hill regulars. Occasional twee flourishes of molecular gastronomy, like toppings of nitrous-oxide foams, are forgivable: the bar staff executes the classics with integrity and impeccable ingredients. A Green Point ($11) takes Old Overholt rye and Punt e Mes, an intensely-aromatized Italian sweet vermouth, and adds Green Chartreuse liqueur for herbal complexity and a faint sweetness. The result is a multi-faceted, mahogany-hued riff on the Manhattan, gorgeously trimmed with a fresh cherry steeped in Maraschino liqueur (no horrific candied-clown-nose garnishes here). After dinner, I order a Rye Flip ($10). Heads swivel as Courtney [Hennessey] cracks a raw egg into a dry shaker, agitates it, adds ice, Rittenhouse rye and simple syrup, shakes it again long and hard, strains it into a claret glass, and grinds some fresh nutmeg on top. Half the bar watches my first swallow; the effete blueblood-wannabe on my left cringes with nausea. I grin. This is what real nog is supposed to taste like: rich, potent, just barely sweet. I feel virtuous, vigorous, like a star in my own black-and-white movie. While I agree with Chandler that “It is not a fragrant world,” the right rye cocktail can certainly refresh it for a moment.

No. 9 Park, 9 Park St, Boston. 617.742.9991 www.no9park.com

There’s a riot going on in the cocktail world

John Gertsen, Misty Kalkofen, and Jackson Cannon getting down.
Photo courtesy of Jackson Cannon

There’s a renaissance in bartending going on right now, and it’s the most exciting thing to happen to sophisticated drinkers in decades. As a sometime bartender and longtime cocktail nerd, I witnessed the beginnings of this movement in Boston with the 1998 opening of The B-Side Lounge in Cambridge, a venue that pioneered a kind of scholarly, high-craft mixology I'd never seen before. I’ve been gratified to see its influence expand, but for some reason, not everyone has followed along.

Consider the estimable Robert Nadeau, the lead restaurant critic at the Boston Phoenix for over 25 years. In my view, he's the best food writer in town, an éminence grise with nonpareil range, that rare character who can write authoritatively and evocatively about everything from fine dining to authentic Chinatown holes-in-the-wall, and wine and beer, too. But at dinner the other night, when I started gushing about the recent uptick in local craft bartending, Nadeau admitted this wasn't an area he'd been following closely; he'd thought that Boston bartending was still stuck in a pink-tinged, icky-sweet vodka cocktail moment.

I happily demurred on this point, convincing Nadeau to let me drag him to a nearby craft-cocktail bar, where over a couple of beautifully made drinks originally conceived during the late-19th century Golden Age -- a period when America's best bartenders garnered the same devotion and fame that our current Food Network celebrity chefs do -- I continued to sing the virtues of Boston’s cocktail revival. I'm pretty sure he caught some of my excitement, that sense of a wild frontier worth exploring. But afterward I thought, “Nobody's more plugged into Boston’s restaurant scene than Nadeau; if he's a half-step behind me on this craft cocktail thing, then the typical bar patron must have no idea.” So I decided to offer a few tips here for curious beginners on how best to enjoy what's happening at the leading edge of Boston bartending:

• Forget “Sex and the City”. Nadeau’s take isn’t entirely unfounded: many Boston bars are still hawking specialty cocktails built on flavored vodkas, sweet liqueurs, and cream-based cordials. The sloppily-made Cosmopolitan is emblematic: sugary, pretty, potent, and profitable. These are aimed at novices, often younger drinkers who want sweetness to mask the taste of alcohol. The cool triangular glass may make the imbiber feel sophisticated, but its contents shouldn’t: a key hallmark of serious cocktails is balance -- an interplay of sweet, sour, bitter, and/or savory flavors in which no single element dominates. If you’ve ever looked at those candy-colored and –flavored drinks with disdain, or found them cloying after one or two, you’re a good candidate for the genuine old-school article.

• Expect a different kind of bartender. The pros behind the stick at craft cocktail bars are a new breed: serious and formidable, a combination of fine-dining chef, lab chemist, and history geek. They go to extreme lengths to source high-quality ingredients from all over the world, uncovering exciting and original spirits, fortified and aromatized wines, exotic liqueurs and cordials, and aromatic bitters. They use fresh fruits, fresh-squeezed juices, fresh herbs. They make their own syrups, infusions, bitters, and cocktail cherries. They assemble drinks with great precision, measuring everything. They worry about the proper manufacture, shape, and size of ice for each drink, and fret over the right serving glass. They study cocktail history, collect vintage bartending guides and barware, learn the origin stories and recipes of hundreds of classic drinks, labor to create new ones that respect the history of the craft. And they take hospitality seriously, recognizing that the ability to make a superb drink means nothing if the customer doesn’t feel welcome, valued, well cared for.

• Be assured that there’s a craft cocktail for every taste. While it might seem abstruse at first, this game is like bocce: you can have no idea what you’re doing the first time you play and still have a blast, but it gets richer and more interesting the deeper you get into it. The quickest entrée? Visit a craft cocktail bar at a time when it isn’t particularly busy, when you can have a leisurely discussion with a bartender about your likes and dislikes. These folks will find ways to gently ease you out of your well-worn rut to explore new alleys. Maybe a Manhattan variant will hook you, or a recreation of an authentic Tiki drink, or a long drink based on some obscure Italian amaro -- maybe even a carefully-conceived Boilermaker. It’s a strange new world, but the right guide can swiftly open it up for you. Don't be surprised if they try to wean you from vodka, which most craft bartenders consider too featureless a spirit, too blank a canvas, to merit inclusion in interesting cocktails.

• Understand that the scene is nascent and dynamic. The bygone B-Side fired the opening salvo in the battle to bring back 19th-century verve, skill, and sophistication to cocktail making. Talent honed there fanned out to places like Green Street, the bar at No. 9 Park, and Eastern Standard Kitchen. Subsequent waves kept rippling outward, with Golden Age inspired programs emerging at Deep Ellum, Drink (perhaps Boston's foremost incarnation of the revival), Hungry Mother, Craigie on Main, and others. Now the friendly local competition, level of serious training, growing enthusiasm and awareness among consumers, and greater availability of interesting spirits and bitters are all combining to help the scene rapidly evolve and grow. It’s like the drinking equivalent of the advent of Dada or the Lost Generation: tremendous artistic ferment and technical accomplishment effected by idiosyncratic and unique characters -- a fascinating scene.

• Look to the Internets for help. If we’re at the dawn of a boozy Nouvelle Vague, our Cahiers du cinéma is drinkboston.com, Lauren Clark’s acclaimed blog that limns the Boston cocktail landscape (and to which I occasionally contribute). This is a swell starting point, a way to get to know the key venues, star players, events, and recipes before you venture out. (It's also great fun; don't miss the hilarious comments from local bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts.) LUPEC Boston's website is full of edifying entries by members of a local classic-cocktail appreciation society comprised of lady bartenders and other women connected to the scene; it regularly sponsors terrific craft cocktail events. Cocktail Virgin Slut is another eye-opening read, a log of craft drinks sampled all over Greater Boston by four local cocktail mavens, with recipes and photos.

Like jazz music and basketball, the cocktail is a thoroughly, proudly American invention, one with a tradition that dates back 150 years. Prohibition gave it a sucker punch that has taken nearly 70 years to recover from, but it is bouncing back with a vengeance. This is not your auntie’s Raspberry Mojito – it’s more like your great-great-grandfather’s Martinez Cocktail (the historical predecessor to the Martini, made with Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, Maraschino liqueur, and orange bitters, a drink you might love even if you profess to dislike gin.) Now just might be a great time to sneak a sip for yourself.