I've already written a fair bit about my experience at Drink, the amazing Boston bar, but I'd like to take a moment of your time and elaborate on the subject of what makes a good bar.
I have been to quite a few bars, probably not as many as most of my peers but enough to have opinions about them. My hesitance with bars is probably because I've never really valued the bar as a social space. I don't like places that are really loud and packed so full of people that you need a machete just to find the bathroom.
I was in a place like this not long ago with an old friend of mine. We had a pleasant conversation, shouting at each other to be heard over the din of at least two separate sound systems and being jostled by hundreds of rude patrons, each successively more desperate to get to the bar and place his precious order. The drinks were all right, but you couldn't order anything unusual or interesting, since they didn't have the ingredients. I was told later that this was considered one of DC's best bars.
This was, simply put, a place for a lot of newly minted yuppies to get drunk. It serves no other purpose except to inebriate them as fast as possible. Drink, in Boston, is not this kind of place.
Drink, as the name suggests, is all about experiencing a drink. Not as an intoxicant, but as a visual, gustatory, olfactory, auditory, and, yes, physical event.
As we sat at the bar, Sam the bartender prepared our cocktails. Slowly, he poured precise measurements into steel beakers. Some he combined with ice cut from large blocks behind the counter into a glass canister where he let it sit while cutting still more ice, and measuring still more draughts. From a collection of eye-dropper topped little bottles with hand-written labels he dispensed bitters for aromatic drinks served elsewhere.
I noticed that unlike most bartenders I've encountered, Sam moved slowly but deliberately. Measuring portions exactly, stirring just enough, deftly dashing from bottles under the bar. When he took my drink to shake it, he did so with astonishing intensity. This wasn't the flabby-armed vibration of an airport bar, this was something closer to a fastball pitch.
Speaking of baseball, there were no TVs in Drink on which to keep up with any sporting event. It would, I believe, distract from the overall experience. But Boston takes its teams seriously, and to that end, scores are posted discretely on the specials board with little plastic numbers at the end of every inning.
I would be exaggerating if I said that Drink was "my kind" of bar. My ideal locale is a more pub-like place, and Drink lacks a personability that gives a patron a sense of ownership. I would be very much surprised if anyone considered it to be "their" bar. But I think that's exactly what Drink is trying to do. It is a minimalist place, like a gallery, where the beverages and the skills of their craftsmen are on display.
There is also no trough, the special area on the bartender's side which I have been told is their exclusive domain, at Drink. Instead, your cocktail is prepared in front of you. The whole area is the bartender's space, and we are guests. The lack of a menu reinforces this idea, since you have to talk to your bartender and share a little bit about yourself as you order.
I shared some of these observations with Sam, and he agreed. He said that if he wanted to, he could make a lot of money mixing fast and easy drinks 20 at a time in some other bar. To illustrate his point, he took the shaker he had so deftly handled before and mimed the production of several fast and easy drinks. The difference was obvious.
He shrugged. "I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and I like talking to people," he said. And this place was the place for perfection. Combining history and mirth the same way that they mix gin and aromatic bitters, Sam talked about the drinks he served us. Not just about what was in them but where they came from, what I would feel as I drank.
At some point, Sam mentioned a world-renowned Japanese bartender that espoused these kind of beliefs. A sort of zen-mixology. I was reminded of Japanese flower arranging, where aesthetics and physical experience -- in this case, scent -- came together. Heady stuff, for a bar.
All this might make Drink sound stogy and pretentious, but that is not so. Case in point: after describing the plans for my trip and the odd circumstances that brought me to Boston, same produced this:
The Fortress of Solitude. The bartenders, said Sam, had worked to create a drink worthy of Superman. "We didn't want to make some blue and red thing, we went with some icy and refreshing." Creme de Menth with plymouth gin, shaken and served over two jagged ice crags. Brilliant.
We ended the evening with "Zombie Milk Punch," a complicated cordial packed with spices and infused with milk in a complicated process dating back to 1711. "A bon voyage for you guys," said Sam. Quite the send-off.
