Green Street in Cambridge, MA: Sterling Cocktail Craft in a Plain Brown Wrapper

[This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for Serious Eats, originally published on May 23, 2011. All photos by MC Slim JB.]

Acolytes of Boston's craft cocktail revival periodically bow in the direction of Cambridge's bygone B-Side Lounge, which in 1998 debuted the area's first modern bar program focused on lovingly-made pre-Prohibition cocktails and modern drinks inspired by them. Equally significant, the B-Side trained a generation of bartenders that have since fanned out to evangelize the craft cocktail movement at bars all over the city. One of its first true progeny was Green Street, a venerable old haunt in Cambridge's Central Square that B-Side alumnus Dylan Black bought in 2006 and thoroughly reinvented. Green Street still attracts a local crowd that reflects the remarkable diversity of its Cambridgeport neighborhood, but also now ranks as one of Boston's foremost places to get a serious drink.

Green Street's weathered brick façade nestles between an ancient Greek-American club and a featureless parking garage on a nondescript block just off Mass Ave. Nothing about its exterior suggests it might compete with swank Boston craft-cocktail kingpins like Drink and Eastern Standard. Granted, its current interior is handsome compared to its prior incarnations: the funkily run-down bar / live-music venue / tropical-food joint Green Street Grill, or the gritty workingman's tavern Charlie's Tap. But it still has the casual, inviting feel of a local hang: a long, narrow, dimly-lit bar that leads to a bustling open kitchen at the back, with a quieter, more spacious dining room a few steps up and to the left. At its face, you'd never guess its bar program might be remarkable. Ask the barman for a bourbon cocktail, watch him stir up a beauty like The Hague ($8.50: W.L. Weller Special Reserve, green Chartreuse, French vermouth), and you might start to wonder otherwise.

Another reason that Green Street flies under the radar is that craft cocktails aren't its only draw. The kitchen turns out a popular menu of mid-priced, updated New England cuisine with plenty of local seafood ($8-13 starters, a terrific $11 burger, $17-24 mains.) There are also fine simple bar snacks like housemade potato chips and dip ($4). The geeky beer list favors small artisanal producers: ten on tap ($5.50-$7) and another couple dozen in bottles and cans (mostly $4-$6), including some large-format and high-ABV entries ($10-$21). Wines are well-suited to the straightforward food: four whites and four reds by the glass ($8-$10), a dozen whites and another two dozen reds by the bottle ($31-$56), plus a few sparklers and dessert wines. Green Street wants all comers, not just the cocktail nerds.

But cocktail aficionados will quickly notice the presence of craft touchstones like the 30s-vintage Zombie, an authentic Tiki drink, and the Golden-Age classic Monkey Gland ($8.50: gin, absinthe, fresh orange juice, house-made grenadine). Cognoscenti know to ask for the "Big List", which features 100 entries. (Changed a few times a year, it's actually a subset of an even-larger master cocktail list.) The range here is staggering, covering the length of the quality-spirits waterfront, showcasing Black's globetrotting interest in rum but also touching every of-the-moment craft-bartending staple.

There's pure-agave tequila and single-village mezcal; American straight rye, bourbon and applejack; British gin and blended Canadian whisky; monastery cordials and bracing bitters; interesting aromatized and fortified wines. There are hot drinks, Champagne-topped drinks, and drinks with raw eggs, like the refreshing fizz that is the Taxco ($7.50: silver tequila, fresh lime juice, agave nectar, orange bitters, egg white and seltzer). The Big List runs the gamut from the Colonial period through the Golden Age right up to the modern moment. It's a wonderland, an imbiber's amusement park with too many rides to explore in a month, let alone a weekend.

In addition to simpler snacks, the bar menu reflects the old-time kitchen craft of the gastropub, as evidenced by nightly-changing $5 plates of offal (like one evening's Buffalo-style fried chicken livers) and charcuterie (like gorgeous pork rillettes with rhubarb chutney). As important as quality drinks and food, Green Street embodies a humble hospitality ethos that makes it an excellent venue for introducing the uninitiated into the sometimes daunting world of craft cocktails. For example, it carries a decent selection of vodka, a hugely popular spirit that many craft bartenders sneer at as too featureless to merit shelf space. You can peruse Green Street's short cocktail list in a couple of minutes, finding plenty of accessible if not familiar choices, like the Bohemian (gin, St. Germain, fresh grapefruit, Peychaud's bitters), Stone Fence (bourbon, cider, Angostura bitters), and Aqueduct (vodka, apricot liqueur, Cointreau, fresh lime juice). Non-beer-geeks can comfortably order $3 Buds and High Lifes.

Even the most pedestrian cocktail order is filled with precision, quality spirits and fresh ingredients, as in the Margarita Bermejo ($8) of pure-agave silver tequila, Cointreau, and fresh lemon and lime juices. Green Street's bartenders are serious and scholarly, but they won't try to shame you out of your regular tipple, or regale you with an unsolicited lesson in cocktail history. This is first and foremost a neighborhood bar; it just happens to select and pour its drinks with extraordinary care and creativity, as in Avery's Arrack-Ari ($8.50: Batavia arrack, fresh lime juice, simple syrup, and a rinse of Talisker 10-Year-Old single-malt Scotch.)

You don't have to be a connoisseur to appreciate this place, but there's a reason you'll spot many of the city's best bartenders drinking here on their own time. In creating a bar program that is at once ambitious and highly accessible, Black had done both the neighborhood he grew up in and his B-Side roots proud. Cloaking its reverence for cocktail craft in unpretentious conviviality, Green Street is slyly advancing the movement, reaching a cross-section of customers that might never patronize its tonier peers across the river. It's a lively tent-revival meeting, not a grand cathedral—a welcoming place to bring your cocktail-skeptical pals, where Green Street's gifted staff can work their understated, friendly proselytizing. Say amen, somebody.

Green Street
280 Green Street, Cambridge, MA 02139- (near Pearl Street; map)
617-876-1655; greenstreetgrill.com

The Bar at Clio (Boston, MA): Todd Maul's Cannonball in the Craft Cocktail Pool

[This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for Serious Eats, originally published on February 28, 2011. All photos by MC Slim JB.]

For over ten years, I'd been dropping by the small, handsomely modern bar at Clio Restaurant in the Back Bay and thinking, "What a waste! Here's celeb-chef Ken Oringer's flagship restaurant, serving some of the most beautiful New French food in the city. There's Uni Sashimi Bar downstairs, one of the great joints of its type in town. So why does the bar feature these horrible Sex and the City flavored-vodka cocktails?" Mercifully, change finally came last year, in the form of a largely unheard-of, self-effacing, enormously talented new bar manager by the name of Todd Maul.

Maybe Oringer got tired of customers asking why Clio's bar was so feeble while Toro and Coppa, his terrific mid-priced South End restaurants, had strong cocktail programs. Whatever the reason, he lured Maul away from Harvard Square's Rialto, another fancy hotel restaurant. Maul had certainly flown under my craft-bartender radar. Unlike many of his more-celebrated peers, he hadn't passed through Boston's No. 9 Park or Cambridge's bygone B-Side Lounge. So when he debuted a mammoth, ambitious new menu of pre-Prohibition classics, Tiki cocktails, and high-craft originals accented with fillips of molecular gastronomy, it was like a cannonball in Clio's sleepy pool, and I didn't see the splash coming.

American rye, gin, applejack, cognac? Interesting vermouths, bitters, monastery cordials and housemade Swedish punsch? Smoked ice? Hallelujah! Essaying the ten-chapter list is initially daunting, but a good springboard for the evening is the Tiki Drinks and Daiquiris section. This honors the recent revival of traditional Tiki cocktails pioneered in 1930s Hollywood by Donn Beach at his seminal Don the Beachcomber.

Dr. Funk's Cousin ($13) mixes Gosling's dark rum, fresh lemon and lime juices, housemade grenadine, simple syrup, soda, and fresh ground cinnamon. Stirred over ice and served in a retro moai ceramic mug, it embodies the classic rum/lime/sugar combination central to the authentic Tiki canon. Aside from its potency and the kitschy serving vessel, this drink is impossible to confuse with the fake-Tiki dreck served at suburban Polynesian restaurants and student hellholes like Cambridge's Hong Kong.

Having a second cocktail without some food would be a mistake. Now might be a good moment to order some of Clio's exquisite bar nibbles, like salt cod croquettes ($11) with black-garlic aioli, and from Uni's menu, a sashimi of Maine lobster tail ($16): gorgeous, delicately rich in flavor, a bargain.

While awaiting these snacks, you might scan the Aperitif section and land on the New Amsterdam ($13): Bols Genever, Averna (a bitter yet sweetly syrupy Sicilian amaro), fresh lemon juice, Bitter Truth celery bitters, and salt. Shaken over ice, strained into a coupe, it impresses with the clear, malty flavors of genever, not unlike an unaged whiskey, with restrained sour and savory elements. It's beautifully balanced: a proper aperitif.

Moving on to the Non-Thirteen Dollar Drinks section, you might note how Maul takes liberties with a Great War vintage classic like the gin-based French 75 ($10). Says Maul, "I've never seen a Frenchman drink gin", so he switches in Cognac alongside the traditional mix of Luxardo Triplum triple sec, fresh lemon juice and Champagne. The result falls somewhere between Sidecar and a Champagne cocktail—a refreshing and attractive update.

Beyond cocktails, there's an extensive list of wines by the glass ($10-$28) and a shorter sake list. The globetrotting bottled beer selection surprises with three Southeast Asian lagers—Lao, Chang and Saigon—at the sweet, sweet price of $3 a pop. A long list of whiskeys favors pricey single-malt Scotches and boutique bourbons. As Clio and Uni are among Boston's costliest restaurants, the crowd runs older, conservatively well-dressed and prosperous. Rest rooms are hidden downstairs off the hotel lobby; you might want to map out the twisting route to them before your third round.

Throughout, Maul works more cleverly with cane spirits than many bars that boast about them, studiously avoids cliché, and trains his lieutenants so well you don't need to skip his nights off. He still has room to grow: hardcore cocktail geeks could wish for more whole-egg drinks, hand-carved ice, and larger-format punches (though he pours some fine two-handers, like a swinging Singapore Sling for $25) Regardless, he merits a fat gold star for lifting the bar at Clio out of that deep, sorry trough of upscale Boston watering holes with three yards of glittering vodkas and zero precision, cocktail scholarship or passion. In short, he has utterly remade it into something worthy of Clio and Uni's extraordinary food and service. With gratitude, all I can say is, "It's about bloody time."

Clio Restaurant
Eliot Hotel, 370A Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215-2801 (Near Massachusetts Avenue; map)
617-536-7200

My Debut as Boston Cocktail Writer for Serious Eats

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!