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!

The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards

I handed out a lot of recognition to Boston restaurants and bars in 2009: the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards; a Boston-centric “Ten Worst Dining Trends of the Decade” essay; and "2009: The Year in Cheap Eats", a year-end best-of list from my "On the Cheap" column for The Boston Phoenix. Seems like there's never enough room to shower kudos on every restaurant that deserves it: ditto the loud raspberries that ought to be sprayed at the crass, the ridiculous, the fraudulent and the shameless. But my blog has no space constraints or gentler-minded editors, so herewith I present a few more citations at year's end: call them the Devil's Dining Awards.

• Best new cocktail trend. Authentic Tiki drinks. Forget about Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong and Mai Tais at suburban Polynesian restaurants: craft cocktail bars like Drink and Eastern Standard are reviving the authentic, 30s-vintage Tiki-bar mixology of Don the Beachcomber and his heirs. This is not a trivial endeavor, requiring house-made infused syrups, fresh juices, and many obscure spirits and non-alcoholic ingredients, including a battery of unusual rums, pimiento dram, Cherry Heering, Velvet Falernum, etc. But the results are breathtakingly complex, beautiful, and potent. Kitsch plus craft equals serious fun.

• Worst new cocktail trend. Bars aping the trappings of craft cocktail bars and speakeasies but forgetting to bring the craft. Golden Age cocktails on your drinks menu, Prohibition era décor, and passwords at the door aren't enough. Building a real craft cocktail program demands training, hard work, study, and commitment, much like a fine-dining kitchen. Here's a hint: if you don't know how to consistently make a decent Sazerac, what glass it should be served in, why you might use Cognac instead of rye, and why the hospitality with which you serve it is as important as how well you make it, you're a faker with a very short shelf life. Here's another hint: if local cocktail maven Lauren Clark of the inestimable drinkboston.com isn't writing favorably about you, you probably suck.
  

• Saddest budget-restaurant closings. Oran Café, a homestyle Moroccan restaurant in East Boston that only lasted for an eyeblink; Uncle Pete’s, a fine little purveyor of barbecue in Revere that could not survive its owner/pitmaster's passing this year; Rangoli, the Allston restaurant that introduced dosas and other South Indian specialties to Boston; Reef Café, a fantastic Syrian joint in Allston that was the definition of family restaurant: mom in the kitchen, son out front; and Poppa B’s, the Mattapan soul food standout that served Boston's best fried chicken (and by extension its best chicken & waffles) – but at least will survive as a Codman Square takeout place.

• Worst trend for occasion diners. The death of the restaurant dress code. Nowhere in Boston does this hurt worse than at L'Espalier, whose new landlord, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, nixed a longstanding jackets-required rule. You can now spend $400 commemorating your silver wedding anniversary while staring at a table full of louts bedecked in Ed Hardy ballcaps, t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. One hopeful counter-trend, as recently reported in a New York Times feature, is that a younger generation, taking cues from pop-culture touchstones like Mad Men, is finding that a slightly nattier style distinguishes them favorably from older schlubs who can't be bothered to don a jacket. Here's hoping that inclination gains momentum: no one needs to see tracksuits and hoodies when they're dropping a bundle on a big-number birthday dinner.

• Local restaurant blog of the year. The tandem of Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants, a trove of restaurant reviews, discussion boards, and news of Boston-area restaurant openings and closings. Required reading for anyone obsessed with finding (and writing about) hidden gems in Greater Boston. Marc also does a great job of covering restaurants in lesser-known stretches of New England beyond the 128 beltway.

• Proof that the South End is over. The March arrival of Stephi’s on Tremont, an injection of bleached-blond Newbury Street faux-glamour into a once-colorful ‘hood already overrun with white-bread Chads and Muffys. Meanwhile, atmospheric inky-hipster hangout Pho Republique, an original trailblazer on now-restaurant-lined Washington Street, closed after eleven years of upholding the neighborhood's artier, funkier, more multi-culti heritage. Sic transit gloria.

• Best replacement for a departed star. Trina’s Starlite Lounge. Cambridge and Somerville heshers and hipsters alike lamented the death of the Abbey Lounge, a unique hybrid of townie dive and live indie-rock club. Then an all-star lineup from renowned neighborhood-bars-with-great-food (like Silvertone, Highland Kitchen, and Audubon Circle) stepped in to create a retro-cool haven of lawnmower beers and casual Southern-inflected cuisine. Manny, I mean, Abbey Who?

• Nose Cut Off, Face Spited Award. To the former landlord of Bella Luna, the Milky Way Lounge & Lanes, and Zon’s, whose 85% rent increase convinced Bella Luna and the Milky Way to relocate (sans tenpin lanes) to a splendid new space in The Brewery complex, and forced Zon’s out of business. Cunning revenue-enhancement plan there, fella.

• Best use of a potato (tie). Tater tots at Garden at the Cellar and potato pancakes at Café Polonia. The lowly kiddie-meal croquette and the usually-soggy hash brown get exalted treatment at these two underpraised spots. In both cases, the result is ungreasy, crunchy outside, creamy inside -- tasty enough to mitigate a thousand freezer-case insults. Spuds got respect.

• Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial “Hell is Other People” Award. To Lord Hobo, for the licensing tribulations it endured from its abutting neighbors and the City of Cambridge, who apparently believe that all bars should close at 10pm and only serve food. We presume these folks have forgotten the Windsor Tap, the frightening drug bar that used to occupy the spot where Lord Hobo now serves fine food, classy cocktails, and what may be Greater Boston's best lineup of craft beers. Ingrates.

• Foie Gras Poutine Award for Extraordinary Food in an Unlikely Setting. To Pupuseria Mama Blanca, a superb little Salvadoran joint in a remote residential corner of Eastie, further camouflaged by operating in a space that looks like someone's house. Easy to miss it, but don't.

• Best actual poutine. The so-called “mix grill sausages” at Pops Restaurant in the South End, which tops beautiful hand-cut fries with cheese curds, short ribs, and sausages of rabbit, duck and wild boar. With too much quality in the ingredients and refinement in the preparation to be mistaken for the classic cheapie Québécois drunk food, it still hits all the requisite animal-fat-laden, guilty-pleasure notes. Fernet-Branca, please!

• Most Biblical disaster. The January fire that destroyed an entire block of beloved independent restaurants: Thornton’s Fenway Grill, Umi Japanese Cuisine, Sorento’s Italian Gourmet, The Greek Isles, Rod Dee Thai II, and El Pelón Taqueria. The fact that no one was hurt is small comfort to devastated owners and bereft locals. If there is a God, he’s an angry God, one who probably dines at Applebee’s. (Some faith-restoring news: a long-delayed rebuilding program for the block is apparently back on track.)

• Most lopsided hotness-to-skills ratio. The bar staff at Whiskey Park: undeniably fetching, but seemingly hired with mixology experience optional. With luck, your stylin’ barmaiden’s $300 hairdo, bewitching décolletage, and almost hoohoo-level hemline will distract you from the fact that your $14 Manhattan is as warm as bathwater, and possibly made with gin.

• Tom Brady Award for Best Upgrade at a Position. To Coppa Enoteca, the Italian small-plates spot that just opened in the South End in the former home of The Dish. The latter was a lovable but uneven little neighborhood joint that eked out an existence from its great patio and spillover trade from the Franklin Café across the street. Judging from the consistently amazing food (with house-made salumi and pastas a highlight), terrific cocktails (making the most of a beer/wine/cordial license), and early patronage by seemingly every chef in town, it's hard to imagine how Coppa's team of Ken Oringer (owner), Jamie Bissonnette (chef), and Courtney Bissonnette (GM) doesn’t repeat its flaming success at Toro.

• Most deserving of a wake-up call. Any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website. If you have a slow-loading video for a top-level landing page, your web designer has sold you a bill of goods: Web surfers have hated that hokum for ten years now. If diners can't access it on an iPhone or Blackberry, your whizzy, music-playing, over-animated website is putting you behind the times – and deflecting potential customers.

• Smartest decision by a big local chain. Legal Sea Foods' hiring of Patrick Sullivan, former owner of The B-Side Lounge and a major progenitor of Boston's craft cocktail revival, as its beverage program manager. That's good for Legal, and good for anyone who wants to see serious cocktails brought to a wider audience.

• Wrong Place, Wrong Time Award. To Guillaume Schmitt, food/beverage manager at Sensing Restaurant, the Fairmont Battery Wharf's pricey, pedigreed French restaurant, who greeted a guest wandering around the bar looking for help with a snarling “Go wait back at the front door!” That guest turned out to be Mat Schaffer, the Boston Herald's lead restaurant critic, who duly name-checked Schmitt to lead his review of Sensing. Oopsie.

• Most wished-for return. Copley Square's charming food stand Jack & the Bean Bowl, which brought some much-needed al fresco deliciousness to the stodgy and street-food-averse Back Bay. Their summertime run of serving up fresh, tasty, cheap bowls of vegetarian and vegan beans, rice and fixings was way too brief. Come back, Jack!

• Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy Award. To the Brothers Andelman of Phantom Gourmet fame (Dan, Dave and Mike, a/k/a Smarmy, Greasy, and Bobbleheady), for their lucrative whoring on behalf of their TV show’s advertisers. This kind of naked money-grubbing ineptly fig-leafed as unbiased reviewing might be easier to take if the boys could authoritatively discuss anything that wasn’t “ooey-gooey, smothered with cheese”.

• Best doubling of menu options. The new charcoal-grilled pastrami sub at Speed's Famous Hot Dog Wagon, which before served only a hot dog, albeit Boston's best hot dog. Grilling makes this sandwich a bit lean for deli purists' tastes, but terrific pastrami from Newmarket Square neighbor Boston Brisket Company helps. We'll be keeping our ear on the rumor that Speed's may seek a permanent home in a South End storefront, which would make its fabled street food accessible to many more Bostonians.

• Most embarrassing bit of Bostonian provincialism. The pitiful hand-wringing accompanying the news that legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer might convert the Pink Palace, a shuttered Boston Common restroom, into a Shake Shack. Sample objections: “He's from, gasp, New York!” “We call them 'frappes', not 'shakes'.” “We need something 'Bostonian'” – never mind that the competing proposal is from a one-time operator of a failed New York restaurant whose theme-parky concept includes hawking “Freedom Trail ketchup”. Forget about doing actual research on Meyer's reputation for restaurant hospitality (on which he literally wrote the book), sustainable sourcing, and upstanding citizenship in the neighborhoods in which he operates – let alone actually sampling the food that his much-admired kitchens produce. How did we get our reputation as unworldly, navel-gazing bumpkins, again?

• Cleverest new street-food concept. Clover Food Lab, a vegan/vegetarian food truck for people who aren’t vegetarians or vegans. With the vivid flavors of Clover’s sandwiches and salads, nobody seems to miss the meat, and its fresh-baked popovers and hand-cut fries are shockingly good.

• Funniest unattributed restaurant criticism. Found in TV ads for Strega, in which owner Nick Varano continues a longstanding promotional campaign based on third-rate mobster-wannabe shtick that leans heavily on paid-for endorsements by bit players from kaput-in-2007 series The Sopranos. The hilarity stems from one TV spot in which Verano claims, “Shtrega serves what some people call da bes' Italian food in da city." This conveniently ignores the large body of professional and amateur critical opinion that calls Strega's décor hideously kitschy, its Italian-American fare thuddingly average, and its prices breathtaking, e.g., $43 for a veal chop. There's “some people”, and then there's “some other people”.

• Best tribute dish. Short-rib tacos at Myers + Chang, which accurately mimic the phenomenal flavor of Kogí truck tacos, the L.A. street-food sensation. Unlike many of its upmarket-taco competitors in Boston, M+C has memorized a crucial page from the taco-truck handbook, the one that specifies two tortillas per taco to avoid a drippy, disintegrating mess. And like Kogí, M+C tweets a lot, though arguably this seemed hipper before nine hundred other Boston restaurants got on Twitter, too.

• Gigantic Balls Award. To Barbara Lynch, for moving forward with plans for a springtime opening of Menton, her empire's new flagship restaurant in Fort Point. This luxury establishment will feature Italian cuisine, French rigor in the preparation and service, and eye-goggling prices: $85 for a 4-course tasting, $145 for a 7-course tasting. The online kibitzers seem evenly split between “That's insane in this economy” and “If anyone can make a success of it, Lynch can.” Me, I'd welcome another occasion-dining venue in Boston that isn't a steakhouse and maybe asks guys to wear a jacket. Whichever camp you fall into, you have to admit: gigantic balls.

• Little Guy Triumphs Award. To South Street Diner, for successfully defending its right to operate 24 hours a day, something it has done since 1947. Rich-jerk owners of nearby luxury condos, newcomers to the diner's Leather District neighborhood, tried to crimp its hours to 2am but couldn't turn back the tide of popular support. Moral: folks that crave perfect silence shouldn't move to dense urban neighborhoods.
  

Here's hoping 2010 finds you not believing the hype, supporting local establishments, getting out to Chinatown, Eastie, Allston and Dorchester to sample authentic traditional cooking, treating servers with respect (as documented in Patrick Maguire's fascinating new blog Server Not Servant), and tipping large. Na zdraví!

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.

An original cocktail: the Wisteria

This cocktail, a fairly simple sour, was inspired by the Stardust, a drink which Boston hospitality legend Brother Cleve created for the opening specialty cocktail menu of the late, lamented B-Side Lounge in Cambridge, MA. (Cleve in turn describes his cocktail as a variation on Don the Beachcomber's Royal Daiquiri, a Tiki drink of early 1940s vintage.)

The Wisteria's name references its pale lavender tinge, which is imparted by Parfait Amour, a curaçao-like cordial with subtle vanilla and almond notes, the vivid purple color of which probably no longer derives from violet petals as it once did. (I have found the Marie Brizard bottling of Parfait Amour the easiest to find in the Boston area.)

It uses shaved ice, which serves two purposes: a) it alludes to the Trader Vic's Mai Tai, of which the flavor of this drink is faintly reminiscent, and b) it gives me another excuse to use my Hawaiice ice shaver.

These go down easy, so be careful. The shaved ice left in the glass is like a delicious Sno-Cone for grownups.

WISTERIA COCKTAIL
MC Slim JB, Boston, MA

2 oz Flor de Caña Extra Dry rum (from Nicaragua)
1/2 oz Marie Brizard Parfait Amour liqueur
1 oz fresh lime juice
1/2 oz simple syrup

Shake all ingredients vigorously over ice.
Strain into a rocks glass packed with shaved ice.
Garnish with a short, normal-bore drinking straw (not a cocktail straw -- I snip a bendy straw in half) and a wide shaving of lime peel.