cocktails and powerpoint

[by john]

all three of us here at the blog have strong opinions on what makes a good set of slides for a scientific talk. generally, they align (conciseness, high information-to-ink ratio, tell a story rather than read the slides, well labeled axes...), but sometimes our opinions clash and we find ourselves in a shouting match over the usefulness of outline slides. (yes, this happened. at drink.)

lately, i've come to develop similar strong opinions on bars' cocktail menus, which are, after all, the bartenders' method of presentation. in addition, as i prepare for my own big cocktail party, i'm thinking about what my menu should look like.

here, then, is a taxonomy of both presentation styles:

the screenshot

we've all (switching to scientist persona for a bit) suffered through a speaker who relied on screenshots of whole paragraphs from colleagues' (or their own!) papers instead of digesting the content into bulleted form. enraging.

the cocktail menu equivalents are the tomes that you can find, say, at new york's pdt. each cocktail gets half a page of rambling attention - some history, some flavor notes, some discussion of seasonality. distill it for me, already!

aphoristic

some presenters like to take the cutesy route to talks. they'll have quotes from einstein or barely related stock photos (usually of einstein as well). they might have good content, but you wouldn't know that if they were on mute.

i think of eastern standard's menu. original drink names (brock's buck) with inside-joke-sounding description (alliterative shout out). what the hell is in it?!

table

similar to the screenshotter, the table-user will lift a whole table of data into the presentation (including the unnecessary columns) and point out the important bits with a dim laster pointer.

i think beer lists are more guilty of this - especially a place like sunset tap which has about a million beers on tap and prints them all in small font, along with brewery location and abv.

maybe the old b-side menu gets close for cocktails:

succinct points

ah the elusive -good- use of bullet points. the basic information and hints of the deeper significance, without becoming a long sentence. there's enough there to understand it in itself, but the speaker fleshes out each point more fully.

craigie on main comes close to this style - the important bare ingredients or flavors, with a little color commentary. and tom is always willing to supply more information.

chalk talk

this speaker is a baller. they are probably old and well respected in several fields, partially for their skill in delivering arresting, note-free, slide-free presentations.

the bartenders at drink and milk & honey are ballers. there is no standing cocktail menu; only what they can hold in their mind. without the crutch of a menu, prolonged interaction between the bartender and customer leads to a better understanding for both.

New Wave Tiki

[by Mike]

I just returned from a trip to Craigie and perhaps the best show I've seen in years.

At the Eastern Standard tiki event last month, Jackson Cannon mentioned that his former protege Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli was creating his own orgeat and I had to take advantage of the opportunity at Craigie to ask for a drink featuring the homemade elixir.  The result started with the orgeat, lime juice, pineapple juice, an ounce of Angostura bitters, and a little bit of Galliano.  Into the drink Tom dropped a bowl of lime rind (end of a lime, cleaned and inverted) which he promptly filled with Chartreuse and ignited.  I had to patiently wait while the Chartreuse burned until after a few minutes Tom returned to spray the flame with clove essence.  After a few more minutes of hypnotically staring at the flame, the drink was finally ready with a swift clap to put out of the flame.

The flavors were incredible; a sophisticated array of sweet, sour, fruit, and spice with a creamy texture that easily defeated the oppressive heat.  Tom had no name for the drink, but referred to the style as "New Wave Tiki".   Is it too much to hope for the summer of New Wave Tiki?

to start

[by john]

the question comes, predictably, after the necessary rituals of hanging coats, tossing down napkins, and pouring water: 'what can i start you off with tonight?' no matter what current cravings are floating around my mind, i'm always paralyzed. order off the menu? revisit a classic? sample one of those top shelf bottles?

a couple weekends ago, i went down to craigie with my boyfriend. i had given a little pre-thought to the 'starting off' question, and had determined to try tom's vermouth. this hardly helped me decide on a first drink any quicker - tom informed me that he was making two vermouths in house, deflating my simple line of questioning. but he steered me towards the red vermouth, letting me try it as we parleyed back and forth, weighing options from a martinez to a negroni to a marconi wireless. after minutes of vacillation (my guy had already decided - 'something creamy'), i fell back on the touchstone of the manhattan. what better way to calibrate a sweet vermouth, after all?

and so i begin this blog with the same sorts of hesitations and false starts. i might as well start simply then. me: i'm john, a graduate student in physics, as are my cohorts, naveen and mike. intent: to write about drinking, drinking in boston, drinking on a grad student budget, and other things i haven't thought of yet. mike and naveen sits on the food end of the gourmand spectrum. we might even talk about science!

alright, those are enough ingredients for now; we'll see what literary equivalents of chartreuse, flaming orange peels, and absinthe drips come later...