your neighborhood fancy cocktail bar

[by john]

warmed by an almost uneatable quantity of soup dumplings, my birthday revelers and i ambled across the channel to drink, where an unexpected present awaited - john gertsen's gracious hospitality, undivided by other patrons. the bar manager lavished attention, stories, and enthusiasm over the eight of us for two long rounds.

at a later point in the night, john and some of us got onto the topic of drink styles by city. down to the quarter ounce differences between nyc-style and boston-style. but, being an obsessive consumer of cocktail blogoculture, i knew that boston's style would lose out to nyc's regardless, because nyc's bartenders get better press. (i had even suggested earlier that a friend might like the right hand, a milk & honey creation.) so i asked john why we didn't see drink putting out original recipes to get their name out there.

and he replied, thoughtfully, that he wants drink to last. not - he backpedaled - that he was slighting these nyc establishments, but, focusing on his own bar and staff, he considers a thorough knowledge of the classics a more enduring model than trying to keep abreast of trends and publicity. then, once the foundation has been set, they may try some crazy molecular mixology or the like.

his answer floored me. one, it was so frank. two, it was so heartening. three, it was so...unexpected. i have always thought of that bar as a trendy, idea-driven bar (no menus - genius). that idea has now been upended and replaced by drink as a classic bar for the generations to come, which just happened to prioritize the idea of bartender interaction. i had just assumed that it was designed to come, make money, and go, with patrons' interests or the wind, like a shaker-weilding mary poppins (rum punch!). that is the modus operandi in nyc, after all.

maybe i can give myself license to consider myself a regular now.

drink to haiti

[by john]

drink is the last place in the world i expect to be handed a cocktail menu. but extraordinary events can lead to extraordinary measures. they're now offering a menu of barbancourt (a haitian rum) based cocktails, proceeds of which will go to doctors without borders.

my guy and i stopped in for two drinks off that menu after 'in the heights'. we were ready for some rum cocktails anyway after all the caribbean themes running rampant through the musical. but of course, this being drink, we had to order off the menu - my guy got a milk & honey creation, a 'right hand' (rum, campari, italian vermouth, xocolatl mole bitters), and i got a yellow chartreuse rum swizzle.

our barkeep even had to laugh about how strange it was to be pushing menu creations. stranger things have happened, though - like a rap musical winning a tony.

a bad review

[by john]

a rather well respected cocktail blogger reviewed drink (i'd say my favorite bar in the world), and just excoriated the establishment. being a boston cocktail nut, i feel like the review attacks me personally, however ridiculous that notion is.

an apologia. the experience matt had there sounds plain terrible. it sounds like going out for cocktails at...legal seafood, or on boylston street. a cocky, bad bartender. pitchers of premixed drinks (side note - i noticed these getting prepped the last time i went to drink - 5pm on a saturday night. i was disappointed, but misty was adamant about their necessity for high throughput nights.). a four-deep bar. free pouring. shots?! ugh.

but, let me be clear - i have never been to the drink that matt went to.

i've always enjoyed drink on off hours, so that i can talk to the bartenders, let alone get a seat. i thought it was a rule among cocktail geeks to avoid bars on friday and saturday nights, unless you want a beer.

i've never seen someone shoot a shot there.

i've never seen free pouring (modulo champagne floats).

i've actually gotten a boothby manhattan no problem.

and yet, matt's experience exemplifies something i've been sensing - that the level of professionalism at drink is slipping... unlike the first generation of bartenders who started the place, not every new bartender (and there are lots of them, with drink's growing popularity) knows their shit, let alone their classic shit.

and i feel like the bartenders effectively are creating a menu - instead of listening to each patron - by pigeonholing tastes into the friday/saturday pre-mixed drinks. it takes the magic out of drink, and it saddens me to think that a no-menu kind of bar can't do big business.

as for his remaining critiques - no doorman, no menu, no liquor shelf - well, i'd rather sit down and have a drink to talk about them. i believe that an open (we're not speakeasy nyc), interactive (for minutes at a time during off hours), and unostentatious (bars are not liquor churches) bar is the new paradigm.

matt is clearly not one of those confused yelpers who can't get a bud. drink should listen up and get its shit together.

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.

Cougars

[by Mike]

While I missed out last night's adventure, I was able to convince John, Andy, and a few more friends to join me for a cocktail at Drink before a showing of Pixar's new pleasure "Up".

Having not been to Drink in months, I took advantage of the opportunity to partake in some of the tequila recipes developed recently.  I started with a spicy little number,

Hot Damn

1.75 oz Milagro Silver Tequila

0.25 oz Maguey Mezcal

0.25 oz Agave Nectar

?.?? oz Punt e Mes

Mexican Smoked Salt

Dash Chipotle Tabasco

Neither the heat nor the smoke overpowered the agave, instead complementing the flavors of the tequila and the mezcal.

While enjoying our drinks the conversation with our bartender, Scott, flowed swiftly and easily.  The most informative discussion focused on the standard procedure for syrups at Drink.  Instead of steeping any flavorings in the syrup itself, everything is steeped in water which is cooled before incorporating the sugar.  The reason?  Well common table sugar, or sucrose, is a disaccharide composed of two smaller sugars (glucose and fructose) bound together, and when heated that bond is quickly broken and the syrup breaks down into a myriad of smaller sugars and various by products.  Consistently reproducing the exact same by products, and hence same texture and flavor, is near impossible in a laboratory settings, let alone in a kitchen.  By keeping the sugar away from the heat, the clever bartenders at Drink are able to produce a consistent product each and every night.  It's an interesting concept, but I can't help wondering on what textures and deeper flavors they might be missing out.

Deep thoughts were quickly brushed aside, however, when some ladies down the bar recommended an intriguing drink.  I heard tequila, cocoa, and chipotle and had to place an order.  

Heather's (Mexican) Love Affair

2 oz Milagro Silver Tequial

1 oz Marie Brizzard (sp?) Creme de Cacao

6-7 Sichuan Peppercorns

Mexican Smoked Salt

Dash Chipotle Tabasco

The succulent cocktail was eerily reminiscent of a good Mexican hot chocolate (maybe a touch of cinnamon or almond to perfect the analogy) with all of the refreshment necessary for a summer drink.

Sufficiently lubricated, we headed back to the Common to be enamored with Pixar's latest offering.  Even the pretentious movie snob was sold, and it can't have been entirely due to his Mamie Taylor.

Tribes

[by Naveen]

How do you change the world?

It's easy to feel trapped in grad school - learning more and more about less and less. A recent TED talk by Seth Godin, one of my numerous sources of inspiration, got me thinking about the big picture. He has spent years thinking deeply about how the nature of marketing has changed over the past hundred years. This doesn't apply just to selling toothpaste or pain-relievers: it applies to ideas. I often contemplate how to apply this to the spread of scientific information, but the culinary world provides more readily-accessible case studies.

To summarize his argument, at the turn of the last century, the economy was driven by mass-production: faster machines, more efficient labor, etc. By the middle of the century, this model was supplanted by the mass-advertising age: swamp the market with advertisements for your product to capture the market. This went on for decades leading to a saturation of people's attention. Now the key is to capture the attention of a small group of people who are especially receptive to your message and to create a tribe that spreads outwards through word-of-mouth (or the modern, electronic equivalent).

Seth Godin asked three questions to people who want to start a movement. I thought it was interesting to apply these to local trends that I've seen or heard about:

"The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo. "

The fastest way to the answer is to look at Yelp. Amateur reviewers complain that Drink has no cocktail menu. Vegetarians in San Francisco complain about the lack of options in sushi restaurants. Bargain-hunters in Harvard Square complain about the cost of Sweet cupcakes.

"The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for. The connections that are being made, one to the other."

Going back the the previous three examples: Drink unites people who are passionate about cocktails, high-end sushi joints attract people who care about fresh, seasonal seafood, and Sweet attracts people looking for a particular social setting.

"And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it, not the mechanics of what you're building, but the who, and the leading part is where change comes."

Barbara Lynch was a driving force behind Drink. Michael Black and Danny Dunham at Sebo led a movement to bring authentic Japanese sushi to a region that knew little more than salmon and California rolls. Courtney Forrester brought Sweet cupcakes to Boston (and now Harvard Square). In their own ways, each of these people is part of a growing movement.

I highly recommend watching the original presentation, since I admire Godin's unique delivery style and great use of visuals.

burying the lede

[by john]

at the risk of living up to my own title, i'll put my point up front: i went to drink last night and tried two new spirits, but had them in cocktails with other ingredients that, well, buried them. lesson learned.

my friend steven is visiting from nyc for the weekend, which is more than occasion for a trip to drink. i was excited to show off boston's best to steven, who had taken me to some great nyc speakeasies last month.

we found perches at the ice peninsula, where misty was holding it down. we held her captive for a while, asking her what she was working on (a lot, it turns out, but no names yet). steven went for the laphroaig-rinsed apple brandy cocktail, with some benedictine and muscovado (molasses-like) simple syrup. my interest was piqued when misty mentioned dolin vermouth (this stuff is hard to get).

the dolin drink was mostly dolin blanc (not your typical cocktail), with smaller amounts of rye and green chartreuse. the effect was intriguing - a pale colored drink with ebbing hints of rye. but the chartreuse (one of my favorite spirits, don't get me wrong) cut through everything, leaving little to taste of the vermouth. we got to try some of the dolin alone, and i think its delicate profile would be more suited towards a gin drink like the marguerite. steven's cocktail, incidentally, was fantastic - the dry, peaty hint of scotch acted as guardrails for the driving, complex sweetness of the rest of the drink.

for our second round, we both went the digestif route to settle our dinners from the south street diner. i had been eyeing the cynar bottle the whole night, having never tried the artichoke-based liqueur. when misty said a ponte vecchio contained equal parts cynar and fernet (the you-drink-it-if-you're-in-the-industry drink), and a bit of citrus, i was sold, on curiosity alone. the fernet's sharp, minty elbow overpowered the body of the cynar, but the drink was easier to sip than a shot of fernet, for sure.

steven, again, chose inspiredly and got an appetizer l'italiene: 2:1 punt e mes to fernet, with dashes of absinthe and simple syrup. the nose on this drink was crazy...sort of savory, reminding me of bacon. the taste, though, was sweet and nicely rounded. cool.

so to set this extended metaphor to rest, the next time i try to discover the story of some new alcohol, i'll have it in a drink that doesn't make me read between the lines.