It’s been at least a year since I’ve been to the Leather District, that narrow area Downtown wedged South Station and Chinatown. I was surprised to see how tony the area is becoming, with bistros here and there and well-manicured buildings. French restaurant Les Zygomates has been there many years, since 1994, before the post-Big-Dig facelift. Somehow I’ve never managed to go until recently.

The big plus about this place is that it manages to seem nice without being oppressively posh, trendy or stuffy. It’s a relaxed wine-bar and restaurant, with tiled floor, nickel fixtures, black-lacquered wood… essentially that 1920s “bistro” look. And though it’s also a restaurant, the bar space in the front is big enough to be inviting for those simply seeking a drink. The bar devotes more space to the wine than it does to the liquor, which means their selection is decent but limited. Still, my martini was well-executed and, a big plus, had the best olives I’ve ever had in a drink, olives you wouldn’t be embarrased to serve as an appetizer. Frankly, I’ve never considered using anything but the basic bottled Goya cocktail olives when making martinis at home, but now I’ve changed my mind. They were a nice touch.

I could have stood with more inspired beer options; the Kronenberg 1664 is authentically French bar fare, but a quality Belgian ale on tap would have gone a long way to make their offering seem special, not pedestrian.

The Man paid for this trip, so I didn’t get a gander at the check. I imagine it was it hefty enough, though.

Les Zygomates is located at 129 South Street, two blocks from South Station.

Home bartending principle number two: Mind the Cheapest Ingredient

I’ve been thinking about Mike’s list of cost-saving tips and they’re pretty good, but the one I’d quibble with is a biggie:

Don’t buy the expensive stuff. In fact, much of the time, it’s no better or even worse.

I see what he’s saying. Some liquor is expensive because of marketing and brand status. The clear liquors in particular fall prey to this. Bottom or mid-shelf vodka, gin or rum can be perfectly fine. For the dark liquors and liqueurs you are going to see a quality difference, often a huge one. Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark; 2-year aged rum and 8-year; cheap cognac and expensive – you’re almost drinking two different spirits depending on how much you pay.

My response is to compromise with mid-shelf liquors, ones that hover in the mid-20s-to-30 dollar range a fifth. I spend more on Cointreau and Grand Marnier and save a little on the cheaper clear spirits. It’s enough to ensure decent quality but not so much that you’ll be counting the dollars for each sip your guest takes.

The price difference is especially crucial when you’re making cocktails rather than mixed drinks. With cocktails, unlike mixed drinks, there’s nothing except the booze.

That’s why I’m increasingly fond of the rule that you ensure the quality of the cheapest ingredient. It’s all about the least common denominator: a low-quality liqueur or mixer can quickly negate the advantage of an expensive bottle of spirits.

• Don’t get cheap liqueurs/schnapps in plastic bottles unless your liquor comes in plastic bottles. I go to great lengths to avoid using Hiram Walker products in anything.
• Spend the extra bucks for Cointreau. Bottom-shelf triple sec can be fine on occasion (pitchers of margaritas, for instance), but most of the time it makes cocktails sickly sweet.
• Don’t get generic tonic water (there’s a difference) and, please, never serve your company diet tonic water, no matter what low-carb diet you’re on. It’s happened at the fanciest of South End parties, to my horror. The same goes for Coke, etc.
• Don’t use bottled lemon juice, lime juice, or any substitute for fresh ingredients. I realize it’s common for bars to make margaritas with artificial sour mix, but to me that’s the same as making a screwdriver with Tang. When possible, squeeze citrus juice fresh.
• Avoid mixes of all kinds. It’s not hard to make drinks from scratch.

Where you draw the line will depend on your budget and your taste, certainly, but there’s no reason to combine top-shelf vodka with Triple Sec.

The Bronx Cocktail - essentially a perfect martini with orange juice added - is one of those drinks I used to see in guidebooks and recipe lists but never heard of being served. I had never tried one until recently. I imagine two culprit are to blame. First, gin has suffered a precipitous loss of popularity. Second, vermouth itself is used less and less, and the occasion that anyone orders a perfect martini today must be rare indeed. When it comes down to it, drinkers don’t always have patience these days for flavors that aren’t straightforward. We don’t want a complex drink with orange, we want an orange drink.

Shame, too, because in my book the Bronx is a perfect “fruity” drink: flavorful and mildly sweet without being uninteresting or sticky. As before, Punt e Mes picks up seemingly everything is added to, so I highly recommend using that as the sweet vermouth. It’s a flexible recipe: you can increase the gin to make it drier, or you can increase the orange juice or vermouth to taste. Here’s the proportion I landed on:

Bronx Cocktail

2 jiggers dry gin
1/2 jigger fresh orange juice
1/4 jigger dry vermouth
1/4 jigger sweet vermouth

Shake with ice and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with lemon twist or cherry, if you like.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Andrew Barr’s book Drink: A Social History of America. Some of it’s serious reading, including a lot of cultural commentary about American drinking culture from a Brit with an understandably cynical take on it.

His chapter on “Americanization of European Taste” is the best, an overview of how Americans adapted European drinks to suit a different climate and a different culture. In one section, Barr outlines the difference between American microbrews and the eponymous European beers:

Brew pubs are prevented from serving cask-conditioned beer by the prevailing American taste for cold, fizzy beer… Whereas low temperatures may be appropriate for mainstream American lager, they do no favors for the beers brewed by microbreweries and brew pubs, which are supposed to distinguish themselves by their superior flavor. In order to make sure they can be tasted through all that cold and fizz, they are often brewed with exaggerated hop and malt flavors; beers as delicate and subtle as the best English bitters would simply not be noticed. As a result, many American microbrewery and brew-pub beers end up as pastiches of traditional English beers. (68-9).

That’s the best explanation as any for why the porters or stouts or bocks one has from microbrews taste nothing like a true porter, stout or bock. I know the microbrews have lots of fans, and I wouldn’t detract from the goal of making a small-shop crafted product. I hardly dislike microbrewed beer myself, but for my taste, give me a trusty pint of English (or Scottish) bitter. Whereas the American boutique beers are overpowering in their flavor and strongly alcoholic, bitter is smooth, subtle and imminently quaffable. For those uninitiated, think of a milder version of Guinness: often pale colored, not very carbonated, with a creamy consistency.

The city’s Irish pubs don’t always carry bitter, for reasons of nationalism or authenticity. Boddington’s is the most famous brand. It’s almost a different animal served near the source in Manchester, but even imported it’s good, and widely available. A few pubs will stock other varieties: James’ Gate in JP has Oxford’s Old Speckled Hen on tap, Elephant and Castle downtown has draught Fuller’s ESB, and the Publick House in Brookline carried a couple more varieties bottled. Have readers come across any others?

It’s been many years since I’ve been to the bar at Harvest - the Harvard Square regional-haute restaurant, that is, not the food coop - but I’ve always wanted to go back. The decor is traditional, with dark wood bars and paneling and leather seats, but it’s not stuffy. And given the paucity of decent places to go in Harvard Square, getting a good cocktail holds great appeal.

And they can make good drinks. I went with my old favorite, the sidecar, and wasn’t disappointed. I couldn’t see what make of brandy the bartender used (what other place has brandy among their well bottles, by the way?), but it was followed by Cointreau and a sour mix that had to have been made-in house, the result was just too good. Poured into a properly sugared glass, it was a finely made drink. The bartender, too, had the right combination of friendliness and professionalism.

Big drawback: it’s a restaurant bar with not a lot of space (about 10 stools) and others have already discovered it. I barely snagged a stool during Wednesday dinner hour. It also carries a tonier atmosphere than a casual drink out might warrant; I was glad I’d come still dress in office attire. The prices aren’t cheap - 11 bucks a cocktail - but that’s what I paid at Vinalia for a lousy drink. Might as well get quality and atmosphere that’s not faux-chic.

Harvest Restaurant is located at 44 Brattle Street, Cambridge, tucked away in the passageway behind the Crate and Barrel.

The main idea behind a well-stocked bar is two-fold: 1) the majority (say 90%) of cocktails and drinks are variations of a few recurring combinations and 2) having a half-dozen-to-a-dozen spirits on hand, plus some common mixers allow you to make to order a good number of cocktails or mixed drinks your guests might want.

We can imagine a range of bars, from the full bar that a drinking establishment will have to a well-stocked bar for the home to abbreviated, even minimal liquor cabinets. Most likely a complete bar will be out of the reach and even interests of most home bartenders. Traditionally, then, the well-stocked home bar consists of the following:

Classical Well-stocked Bar
Spirits: Vodka, Gin, White Rum, Tequila, 3 Whiskeys (Bourbon, American/Canadian, blended Scotch).

Mixing ingredients: Triple Sec, dry Vermouth, Rose’s lime juice, sweet Vermouth, Angostura bitters, Grenadine

Garnishes: Cocktail olives, Maraschino cherries, Bar salt (kosher salt works), Cocktail onions

Mixers: Tonic water, Club soda, Soft drinks (Coke, Sprite or 7-Up, Ginger Ale), Orange, cranberry, tomato, and grapefruit juice

Fresh ingredients: Lemon and lime for garnish, mint leaves

Each is listed in order of frequency of use.

So is this what you should buy? Depends.

On budget first of all. Even if you don’t go for top shelf, buying fifths of all the above will cost a pretty penny. Say you’re a struggling twenty-something or a sometime cocktail drinker who wants to have spirits on hand when friends drop by but doesn’t feel the need to be a completist. I can imagine you getting away with the following basic home bar, in order of purchase:

Basic Bar
Vodka, Gin, Triple Sec, dry Vermouth, Bourbon, and White Rum or Tequila, sweet Vermouth

Fresh lemon and lime on hand, Tonic Water, Cranberry, Olives and maraschino cherries, Rose’s Lime, Club Soda, Orange Juice

Or, if you’re being particularly budget-conscious, try:

Minimal Bar
Vodka, Gin, dry vermouth, tonic, cranberry, Triple Sec, olives, Rose’s, soda.

It’s barebones, but there are still a number of drinks you can make with that.

Just as important as budget will be the crowd you’re serving for. American, Canadian, or Irish whiskey drinks and scotch drinks are not nearly as popular as they once were, and if your friends are under the age of 40, you may be able to safely omit. You’d be better off buying a single malt scotch for your scotch-loving friends than trying to accommodate the rare Rob Roy, Rusty Nail or Presbyterian requests.

Finally what you stock will vary by what you like to drink and serve. I love sidecars, so I keep brandy on hand. If you like Alexanders or Chocolate Martinis, you’ll stock crème de cacao. Et cetera. As a general rule of thumb, if you’re looking to build on the well-stocked bar, I’d add brandy, Grand Marnier, and two or three cordials of choice, including one sweet liqueur (Kahlua, say) and one bitter (such as Campari).

Ultimately these rules of what to stock are there primarily to guarantee you can make a cocktail or drink to order. The well-stocked bar is a great enabler for entertaining, particularly for occasions when you have more formal affairs or are entertaining guests beyond close friends.

But that’s the only reason for the rules, such as they are, and they can be broken without much harm. After all, you know your guests better than anyone.

I’d always wanted to try Carpano’s Punt è Mes because of its label design alone, but somehow had never gotten around to it. Maybe I was unenthused when I discovered it was vermouth; after all, I had a perfectly full bottle of Martini & Rossi red on the shelf, why shell out money for more?

I’m glad I did. What a revelation. I never knew I liked Italian vermouth before. I’d see vintage cocktail recipes calling for it, lots of them, and wonder how people back in the day were so fond of the stuff. But with quality vermouth you can see it. It’s not to everyone’s taste, to be sure. If you don’t like herbal or bitter overtones, you probably won’t like it - but you’ll probably like it better than cheap vermouth.

I started with a mini-taste test, comparing the Carpano with the Martini & Rossi. Even by sight, you can tell the former (on the right) has more body than the latter (on the left). The amounts I poured are the same:

Whereas the cheaper vermouth was thin, tart and winey, like a cross between a so-so sherry and a cheap wine, Punt è mes had a full-bodied, well-rounded palate, herbal and just as much bitter as sweet. It reminded me of Italian bitters (amaro), and I guess it actually is in the same category, being a fortified wine with herbal infusion. Even more than amaro, it tastes great on ice, with a squeeze of lemon if you like (not necessary though). A great apéritif.

Next, I tested Manhattans, one made with Martini & Rossi and one made with Punt è Mes, using three parts bourbon to one part vermouth. The first tasted thin and unbalanced, though it was hard to pin down what was lacking. Meanwhile, good vermouth really excels here, standing up to the full body and complexity of the bourbon and bringing out the spicy Angostura bitters in harmony. If you’re into Manhattans, I highly recommend getting Punt è Mes for a noticeable difference.

Finally, I wanted to try a cocktail that would foreground the vermouth. The similarity to amaro made me think of the Negroni, which is equal parts Campari, gin and Italian vermouth. While I like Campari and occasionally will order a Negroni, it’s catch-in-the-back-of-your-throat bitter and not a smooth, pleasant drink. So I whipped up a revised Negroni with milder amaro instead of the Campari. (Ramazzoti’s my favorite.) I used Plymouth for its smoothness (i.e. restrained juniper), but any gin should do. An orange slice/wheel is traditional, but I like the extra touch of squeezing the peel’s oil into the drink. Everything else, especially the equal proportions remains the same, and the interplay is perfect.

The Negroni works better as a smallish cocktail. Save the oversized martini glasses for another occasion.

Revisionist Negroni
1 medium-small cocktail

1/2 jigger Plymouth gin
1/2 jigger Punt è Mes
1/2 jigger amaro of choice

Shake with ice, then strain into a small cocktail glass. Take an orange twist and squeeze over drink to release oils; drop in.

I don’t know if it’s the strong euro, or the Sex and the City factor - legions of would-be Carrie Bradshaws swilling down cosmopolitans - but the never-cheap Cointreau seems even more expensive these days.

Not that it’s unworthy of the price. For those unfamiliar with it, Cointreau is a liqueur made from the rinds of Seville oranges, much like Grand Marnier, only with a neutral rather than a brandy base. Technically, it’s a triple sec and thus interchangeable in recipes, but it’s miles apart from the run-of-the-mill orange distillate that’s cheap and candy-sweet. It’s used in so many cocktails - more and more given the preference these days for fruity drinks - and its dryness carries them off much more admirably than triple sec. I even love drinking it on the rocks, no garnish or additions necessary. Try that with the twelve-dollar-a-bottle stuff. Still, if you’re entertaining, you can be surprised how quickly your booze budget can disappear.

Fortunately, Martignetti’s Liquors comes through with a great price, $26 tax inclusive for a fifth of the exquisite liqueur. So stock up while you can.

Martignetti’s is located at 64 Cross Street in the North End, right next to the former Central Artery.

It turns out that the cocktail blog idea is not as original as I originally thought. The bad news is that I’m not so creative. The good news is that there are a few excellent sites out there worth reading. These guys (and they are guys) know their stuff.

Seattle-based Cocktail Chronicles seems to have been up and running for a couple of years. Check out his post on “tiki” drinks, with a recipe for a Demerara Dry Float.

Kaiser Penguin has also been on a polynesiana kick, with his taste test of four different mai tai recipes.

Boston-based Days that End in Y is an amazingly thorough compendium on all news booze-related. See his list of how to save money stocking the bar, a topic on which I’ll try to add my thoughts soon.

DC Drinks has some good whiskey reviews, and a gripe about the international style in lager. Me, my gripe is about American (and Canadian) exceptionalism - we’re the only country that doesn’t make a decent lager.

I’ve added these sites to the blogroll, naturally. Feel free to send me other reading suggestions my way.

I never really go out to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. The loutish crowds, the naff green beer… well, tonight, I’ll be safely at home with friends for a quiet drink in. An Evacuation Day celebration, if you will.

What’s more, I do not gravitate toward Irish drinks, the occasional Guinness aside. Inspired by the New York Times tasters, however, I ‘ve decided to take a break from my usual Southern-bred preferance for bourbon and venture into the world of Irish whiskey. I got a bottle of Power’s that was smoothly flavored and not very expensive, even if you won’t confuse it with the best. A Collins drink struck me as the best treatment for such middle-quality whiskey. It’s my vote for St. Patrick’s fare.

Mike Collins
1 - 1 1/2 jiggers Irish whiskey
juice of 1/2 lemon
2 t. sugar or couple of dashes sugar syrup
Club soda

If using granulated sugar, use a shaker to combine all ingredients except club soda. Shake well and pour into highball glass with ice. Top with soda and garnish with lime wedge. If using simple syrup, you can stir directly in glass before adding ice and soda.

Note that with Collins drinks - as with sours - real, freshly squeezed lemon juice makes all the difference. There are no acceptable shortcuts, and sour mix definitely will not do. For that reason, I’d never order them out, except at the most top-of-the-line bars.