I had a chance to visit Seattle this Summer with my family. Since we had the kids with us, I didn’t get a chance to do a real detailed exploration of this, one of America’s premier cocktail towns, but I made sure to have enough time to hit a few highlights, and to get a feel for the general cocktail environment in town.

For a variety of reasons, I will lead with a review of Liberty, at 517 15th Ave. E. (@LibertyLovesYou on Twitter) Liberty is the love child of cocktail warriors Andrew Friedman and Keith Waldbauer. Andrew started Liberty in 2006, with Keith joining him later, so that makes this a very well-established and long-lived high-end bar. I’ve known, or at least “internet known”, Keith since I started blogging, as his now fallow Moving at the Speed of Life was one of the first cocktail blogs I read and among the first such blogs written by a working pro.

Liberty and its owners take great care to characterize it as “just a neighborhood bar”, rather than some Fancy Dan Craft Bar.
This is a load of bull fritters.
I insist that this is a fabulous, high-end bar. From the back wall (pictured above) full of a head-spinning array of ingredients headlined by a magnificent but not over the top selection of whisk(e)ys, to the menu filled with a great selection of classics and modern creations, to each and every drink that I saw placed before me or any other customer, Liberty is a cocktail lover’s dream. This is place with drinks like the Point of No Return, which simply lists fire among its ingredients. (If you visit Liberty, be sure to try one. It’s both delicious and a lot of fun to watch being made.)
There is also an excellent balance between the types of drinks on the menu. Andrew and Keith offer not just a wide variety of spirit bases and flavor profiles, but also what I’ll call “levels” of drinks. Many craft palaces I enter have menus of naught but ridiculously baroque concoctions that will be awesome to talk about with one’s fellow geeks at Tales of the Cocktail, but are too bitter, complex, or simply weird for anyone else. There are drinks here for the snob who isn’t “on duty” that evening, and the “training wheels” offerings still have something of interest to be learned from.

That said, Liberty also really is a neighborhood joint. Liberty’s location is one of the things that really strikes me about it. It is is located on a fairly modest stretch of retail shopping in a quiet residential neighborhood, rather than in the restaurant, tourist, or entertainment districts where most “serious” craft bars dwell.
Tourists like me are an anomaly in Liberty, and businessmen drinking here are likely doing so on their own dime, rather than an expense account. As a result, the prices are almost shockingly modest for such offerings.
To satisfy the Licensing Gods’ demand for food service, not to mention that of any reasonable drinker’s stomach, Liberty has the elegant and tasty solution of devoting about five feet of its bar to a sushi counter, with one or two cutters as demand warrants.

The place has that well-used feel of many older bars, the kind that have been open forever, have seen weddings and wakes, sometimes for the same customer, yet never ever feel run-down, through the sheer force of the love and responsibility of its proprietors. The seating is comfortable, both at the bar and around the room. The bar itself is moderately sized and fits in visually, rather than dominating the space like some altar to the Gods of Fernet and Angostura. There is even a large back room for meetings and private parties, but which is essentially invisible to the regular clientele.

Your average oblivious Jack and Coke drinker could make of Liberty his Third Place happily for years and never care or even realize that he was spending his time in a temple of high-end concoctions.

And this last point, the seamless melding of tavern and cocktail palace is what makes Liberty so interesting to me and, so important to the craft movement.

Craft cocktails as an industry have had a fascinating decade-plus of growth now, and are in a different stage of development in nearly every city in America. When you travel like I do all over the country killing people, you can move forward and backward through the whole history of the craft, using airline or auto as your time machine.
Many locales still have yet to see the first blush of our passion; the only “lime” in bars still has with the word “Rose’s” writ upon the bottle. Other cities have merely discovered the joys, and the commercial possibilities, of fresh or more exotic ingredients. Many, like my own Columbus, have a few restaurants and bars that are making a try at true high-end drinks. And cities like Seattle or New York have reached the point where the craft bars are a well-understood phenomenon, and most high-end restaurants have reached the point of having to offer competitive programs of their own.

But like any movement that is reaching maturity, at least in some markets, there is now a lot of angst about where to go from here. Because the simple facts are, craft cocktails made with exotic syrups, or oddball bitters, or cinnamon smoke, are not for everyone. And even among those who do enjoy them, they are unprepared to drink them all the time. There are very real limits to speed of growth and profitability in the craft movement.

This is why bars like Liberty, and Anvil in Houston, and to some extent Passenger or Bourbon in Washington, DC, are so significant, and why I admire them so much. These are places that serve all drinkers well, not just our specific clientele. The aforementioned Mr. Jack and Coke can happily hang out there with his buddy Mr. Vieux Carre. And Mr. Sazerac can find the opportunity to hit on Miss Greyhound here. (Mr. Grey Goose Martini, don’t waste your time hitting on Miss Knob Creek Old-Fashioned. It’s not going to end well for you.)

Bar like Liberty are where previously undiscovered reserves of cocktail lovers (as opposed to cocktail drinkers) will be uncovered. The easy atmosphere provides no barrier to entry for the uninitiated (quite the contrary), but the magnificent offerings are the sort that can open doors and minds. If you visit Seattle, take the time one evening to cab your way to Liberty and settle in for a great evening. If you live there, this is the kind of place you take your uninitiated friends when they are resisting being initiated….

It’s pronounced “ka-roon“. Caorunn is a new gin from that hot bed of white liquor production… Scotland? Produced at the Balmenach whisky distillery in the Speyside region, Caorunn is a small-batch gin with a uniquely Scottish character, a gorgeous bottle, and fascinating flavors. Given the nature of this blog and my own significantly Scot heritage, I am compelled at this point to ask Mike Myers for his opinion on Scottish gin:

Caorunn does not distill its base grain neutral spirit at Balmenach, since pot-distilled barley is not exactly a great base for gin. The Scot element comes from the water (of course) and the unique blend of botanicals, including five unusual ones which they identify as “Celtic botanicals“. Heather, Dandelion, and Bog Myrtle all are sharply evocative of Highland landscapes. Coul Blush Apples are an early 19th century hybrid, recently rediscovered. The final element is Rowan Berry, which the maker describes as “the very soul of Caorunn.” Rowan berries are traditionally used in a variety of Celtic herbal medicines, and seen as a powerful source of mystical good fortune. Also, they are popular eating and commonly used to make or flavor brandies, though I’ve never seen such here in the US.
The traditional botanicals are juniper, coriander, angelica, cassia, and lemon and orange peels.

The infusion of the alcohol into gin is what is performed at Balmenach and is performed in the above pictured 1920′s made copper berry chamber. The botanicals are spread out on the wide trays you see, then the chamber is filled with the alcohol vapor over a long period to infuse them into the gin. This contraption was originally designed for extracting essential oils used in the manufacture of perfume. It is a pretty uncommon device for distilling gin.

The spirit resulting from these unique as the processes and ingredients is pretty special in its own right. Caorunn is bright and very clean in flavor, and has for me the rather odd effect of smelling lightly sweet while tasting fairly dry. The apple in particular seems evident in the nose and less so in the mouth. It is certainly no Tanqueray, but I think it is closer in character to a London Dry than it is to the hard to define “New American” gins.

I like this gin. A lot. But it is not a gin you can deploy indiscriminately in all cocktails. Its real strength is in combination with other herbal flavors. To that end it is a simply magnificent Martini gin. It is difficult to describe why this gin goes so very, very well with vermouth, but it does. I don’t go with the whole olive thing, so I cannot attest to how things will go if you like to dirty up the waters. On their extensive and beautifully illustrated recipe page, they recommend garnishing a martini with a slice of apple, which I have not tried, but will next time I get my hands on some really good ones.

I’m into my second bottle of Caorunn, largely because it’s about the only thing I’m making Martinis with any more. When I find a particular brand that seems perfect in a particular drink I make regularly, I tend to just dedicate it to that particular purpose. But of course, as with all gins I had to try Caorunn in the Greatest Cocktail Ever Mixed™. I actually tried this first, and it almost made me give up on Caorunn from the start. I think the product has a Kryptonite, and it is indeed green: The Lime. There is some chemical interaction happening between the two that triggers a very slight but notable acridity in the mix. If you peruse the brand’s recipe page, you won’t see lime listed at all in the excellent Search by Ingredient feature.

So, no Pegus, no Rickeys, no lime with your Caorunn. It seems to go quite nicely with other citruses, however, and some whose taste I trust say it works particularly well with grapefruit. Rather than get frustrated with this weirdness, I just chalk it up to the marvelous opportunity for experimentation cocktails offer.

Caorunn is not yet available all over the US, so I am happy indeed that Ohio is among the first states where it is distributed. I’m guessing that it will be appearing in lots more markets before too long, so if it isn’t in your local store right now, keep looking. In the meantime, it is available from several online retailers such as DrinkupNY.

Your Turn, Ladies

Let’s face it, speaking from experience, I can say it’s good to be a Man.
One of the great things about being a guy is in the field of indulging yourself in Badassery. Our popular culture is awash in badass guys, and our country is equally awash in businesses who want to let regular guys get in on the fun.
Whether it is flying a Russian MiG fighter, attending baseball fantasy camps, manning the rigging in a Tall Ship, or these friggin’ idiots, the world is filled with opportunities for men to indulge their self-image.
Even real life superstars give it a shot, as with the program where the Navy SEALs drag off our top Olympic swimmers and give them a look at what REAL training in the water is like. (Actually, they don’t. The Olympians can’t take what the SEALs dish out to real trainees.)

But when women want to lay out money for recreational escape, what is mostly on offer? Culinary camp? The spa? Pottery weekends?

In case you haven’t noticed, popular culture is increasingly embracing the concept of the female badass.

Miss Romanoff doesn’t do cupcake class.

Enter Femme Fatale Finishing School in Central Ohio. Femme Fatale is your one-stop shop for a taste of all the best aspects of being an International Woman of Mystery. What’s great about being Jane Bond? Shooting guns for a start. They have that covered. Hand to hand combat. Check. Skilled gambling, car chases, and the art of seduction? Check, check, and check. And of course, neither self-image nor public persona is complete without knowing to the core how to drink a cocktail better than everyone around you.

Femme Fatale Finishing School is owned Peg McCort, a mother, businesswoman, and fitness enthusiast, and Jason Holt, a personal trainer and Krav Maga instructor. Together, they had an idea for a series of experiences for women looking for ways to be more adventurous, exciting, and assertive without sacrificing any femininity. Over the year they spent developing the concept, it grew into the metaphor they now use. The name really says it all.

FFFS doesn’t do “classes”, they offer “Missions”. The names of these Missions, such as Loaded Guns, tell as much about the attitude as they do the subject matter.

Combat Ready, for instance, embodies in its name the difference from more prosaic offerings such as How Not to be a Victim, or simply Self-Defense. The kind of training Combat Ready introduces participants to has a more assertive mind-set than, “just kick him in the knee and run away classes,” as Peg describes them. Combat Ready is more about the concept of taking the gun or knife away as a means of ending the conversation.

Not that a session of Combat Ready is going to give a woman the ability to safely do that. The point is to show participants that it is possible, that learning to actually do it can be fun, and give them the contacts to pursue these skills in the future. Most of FFFS’s missions are like this. The Missions are about having fun and expanding the horizons of what you can do. The advantage over things like Fantasy Baseball Camp is that the activities Femme Fatale introduces are one that real people can actually participate in and use when the adventure is done.

Their two biggest mission specialties so far are Loaded Guns and Seduce.

Loaded Guns 1 and 2 are firearms experiences. Loaded Guns 1 is an introduction to guns, primarily aimed at women who either have never touched a gun or otherwise feel uncomfortable around them. It starts with range and safety instruction at Black Wing Shooting Center (they are negotiating adding other venues in the area), then an extended period out in the range, shooting with handguns. They start with .22s and eventually work all participants up to 9mms and .45s. They finish up with more discussion and a light party.

Personally, I’m a big believer that adults, and even most older kids, should at least be familiar with firearms, know their real safety issues, and simply have some experience with what happens when a gun goes off nearby. Peg talks eloquently about the therapeutic and empowering value shooting a firearm for the first time can have for women. For some women, just doing it once will be enough to scratch the itch, others may find it to be a great pastime and go on to try recreational shooting, or even take a concealed carry class. (I intend to take a concealed carry class myself for the legal, safety, and skills training. I doubt I’ll actually carry.)
For many, it is simply a fear to eradicate forever. Jason told me, “we have lots of women come in who are scared to death when they walk out on the range and we put a gun in their hands for the first time. I had one lady who was literally in tears at being expected to fire a little .22. but by the end of the session, we practically had to pry the .45 out of her hand. She wouldn’t even swap back to the .22.”

This brings up something important about what they are doing with FFFS. When men do an adventure experience, we have ways of psyching each other up to get on that animal, or jump off that thing… ways that are neither pleasant nor particularly effective with normal women. These folks work very hard and very carefully to recognize the different motivational techniques you need to not only succeed and but make it fun for female clients to take that leap. Whatever the leap may be.

Loaded Guns 2 is more pure adventure for women who have already experienced the introduction. It gives them the chance to experience firing serious weapons such as assault rifles, carbines and a machine gun or two, I believe.

At the other end of the spectrum, but just as Bondian a skill if you think about it, is FFFS’s other most popular series of missions, Seduce. Seduce is about learning to control and enhance your sensuality through movement and dance. They start out with just how to walk and move on to a variety of dance ideas. Yes, they include an introduction to dancing with a pole, but Peg goes to pains to explain that they are not teaching stripping, or the kind of dancing strippers do. It’s about asserting your femininity. To me, it’s about a perfectly acceptable way to keep one’s rightful share of power in a relationship. And it certainly fits with the spy movie-esque theme of the business. If 007 didn’t know how to Seduce a variety of women, he’d have been in an unmarked grave a long time ago!

While most Femme Fatal Finishing School Missions are just a couple of hours, they are beginning to do some longer, more involved events as well. A great example is the upcoming Ride the Edge special mission. Held at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, one of those tracks where the Indy cars get to turn right every so often, this full day mission will involve training the women on spin-outs, evasive driving, pursuit driving, and a high-speed run. Oh, and there also will be the opportunity to drive around the track at speed, shooting pistols out the window of the moving cars at targets by the side of the track….

Tom Cruise not included.

Will someone tell me why the hell this company only allows female customers?

At least for right now, the mixology missions are mostly piggy-backed on other missions, after the activity is over for obvious reasons. They make a pleasant and enjoyable wind-down from the excitement and a great way to enjoy the more relaxed elements of being an international mystery woman.

All missions have different pricing, but a few examples are: Loaded Guns 1 at $100 and Loaded Guns 2 at $150; Seduce 1 at $75; and Ride the Edge is obviously pricier at $650. While larger groups can reserve an entire mission to themselves, most missions are made up of individual women and groups of a couple of friends each. The company’s website is here, and this is their Facebook page. The fabulous broad that is the PeguWife will be trying a mission or two, but I’d love to hear from any of you out there who give being a badass a whirl!

Over the Martin Luther King Holiday, I took my family to Chicago for the long weekend.

Wait… What?
You voluntarily went to Chicago… in January…
Why?

Because I have a nine year-old daughter, who absolutely had to have one of these:

She had saved up her money (a lot of money), so we took her to Chicago to the American Girl Doll store to buy the doll, and do the Experience, including brunch in the store’s restaurant.

We’d have done dinner instead, but I hear the cocktail program there is terrible….

This, however, left me with a powerful thirst each evening. Fortune smiled upon me in this in the shape of Sable Kitchen & Bar. I’ve written before of my fondness for the Kimpton chain of boutiquey hotels. We chose one of their Chicago offerings, the Palomar, because it has a pool, only to find from my “legion” of cocktail geek twitter correspondents that adjoining its lobby was one of the most highly recommended bars in the city!

I was surprised to such a nice hotel bar, Bambara, in the Hotel Marlowe in Boston. I was amazed to find not just an above and beyond hotel bar, but an absolute top-shelf craft bar in the Palomar. Really. It rocks.

Sable is a restaurant as well. And a delicious one. Chef Heather Terhune (@HeatherTerhune) runs a smooth and elegant operation. The menu is an eclectic mix of range of dishes from sides such as duck fat french fries and all sorts of game entrees, to things like sweet corn creme brulee and bacon jam with toasted baguette points. They offer fried chicken on waffles for both dinner and weekend breakfast. Most of the larger dishes are offered in half-portions to facilitate a Tapas-like sharing experience.

And it is all really very good, though I’ll admit that while the bacon jam was as tasty as I expected, it had more of a novelty appeal for me. Still, you know if you go, you’ll order it, because, well, bacon jam.

Terhune is a contestant in the current season of Top Chef. I don’t watch the show myself, but I was told by some fellow guests that she is being given the “villain’s cut” by the show’s editors… poor girl. But that probably means she’ll be around til the end. Regardless, I don’t care. I’d eat at Sable often if I lived anywhere near.

But the bar….

The room is on a corner of the hotel, with solid glass walls on two sides of the very large space. The decor is modern, all dark leather and wood with metal accents. The bar itself is huge, about 40 feet long, with a massive liquor wall behind, boasting an impressive selection of all manner of spirits, rather than the 73 identical bottles of Grey Goose you find behind too many bars.
The bar has a design element that I’ve not really seen before and which works very well. Most of the bar is dark wood, and fronted by large, comfortable bar stools. But two segments of the bar, about 6-7 feet long each, are glowing blocks of white marble. There is no seating here and these spaces are for patron standing, rather than server access. For all its high-end nature, Sable is not an intimate environment. It is a hotel property after all, and well situated in downtown Chicago, so I’m imaging it is packed to the gills with power ties after regular workdays. It was plenty full every night we were there on a holiday weekend. (Yes, I had at least one drink there every night. Shut up.)
Crowds suck especially hard for a cocktail geek, as once the seats at the bar fill up, it is ordinarily impossible to interact with the bartenders without looming over or squeezing between other patrons. If they will put up with you trying. These blocks of standing room only at Sable’s bar go a long way to fixing this. Yes, they can fill up too, but people who are standing are more likely to make room happily, and the crowd in these segments naturally turns over much faster. The bottom line is, even on a busy night, you can still get to the bar staff.

And at Sable, getting to the bar staff is well worth the effort. Lead Dog Mike Ryan (@gastronautmike), who is currently sporting a lot more hair than in his picture on Sable’s website, is a star. A former chef, I’m guessing he just liked people too much to stay in the kitchen. Mike has a terrific resume, including Violet Hour; can carry on a cocktail geek conversation with the best of them; mixes drinks with care, craft, and style, while somehow also being swift; and has allegedly read this blog before. So what more can I say? Oh yeah, he also has what I consider the most important quality in any manager, bar or otherwise: He attracts good people.

Mike Ryan, now with 250% more hair.

I drank there every night, but Friday night Sable was the only place I drank. I spent a couple of hours bellied up to one of those glowing marble sections of the bar, trying to find the limits of former Pittsburgh bartending fixture, Fred Sarkis (@FredSarkis), and failing. This is how the Official Illustrator of the Cocktailosphere™ told me on Twitter to recognize Fred: “Reddish mustache, powerful build, probably wearing a vest. Moving swiftly & smoothly, making shakers beg for mercy.” Accurate but incomplete, as Fred has added a gigantic bartender’s beard since Pittsburgh.
I felt like being a pain in the ass, as usual, so I just kept describing elements I wanted in my drink and letting Fred decide what to make me. Everything he returned to me was not only essentially what I asked for, it was good too. He made me an Old-Fashioned with yellow chartreuse and cinnamon syrup that was particularly good.

I blush to say that I can’t remember the name of the bartender who served me Sunday before an early bedtime, but he too knew his drinks and his drink talk.

The cocktail menu is lovely, as you can see in the picture above, with a thick cover and page after page of about half original cocktails and a listing of spirits. The word “vodka” appears but twice. And while they put a certain cocktail on the menu, they have the puckish balls to refer to it by its proper name, the Kangaroo. The menu is also liberally sprinkled with a variety of excellent quotes of cocktail jokes and aphorisms. Many of these I had not read before, which is saying something. I was able to resist stealing one only because it is available online.

Sable is a wonderful cocktail bar, earning a spot in the overall top echelon of bars I’ve been to around the country. It bests a number I can think of with far wider reputations. It isn’t intimate, but the noise level is reasonable, and the crowd surprisingly manageable due to the innovative bar layout. There are no crazy high-end Ice Programs or Soda Programs, but I could perceive nary a corner cut either. Most importantly, should your fancy extend beyond the menu, the staff has the inventory and tools, and moreover the knowledge and inclination, to take you there. If you live in Chicago, you really need to explore Sable for yourself. And if you travel to the city, Sable alone is enough to put the Palomar on your short list of places to stay.

I’m big into logistics. It’s in my blood. Most of the useful work I’ve done in my life (as opposed to killing people or cocktail blogging) has been in transportation or logistical support. But even I find the logistics of leaving a bar a pain in the backside. And whatever your background, I’m guessing that we have at least that in common. Moreover, your bartender is of the same opinion as well.

There are a lot of moving pieces to paying your check, and each has to happen in the correct order. You have to get the check, look it over, pay the bartender, wait for change or for your card back before you can finally move on to the next stop or to home. At any point in this process, your bartender may be in the weeds, or maybe he’s just down at the other end of the bar, flexing for the group of young ladies with questionable virtue but unquestionable cleavage. It is frustrating. And it is for the bartender as well. The time she spends running your tab, finding your card, or making change, is time she can’t spend with other customers who are still producing revenue and need service. Most times, things go pretty smoothly, but even the occasional hiccup is a memory you don’t want, and can be a disaster for the bartender and his employer.

But technology rocks logistics, and there is a new company out there that aims to radically ease this particular burden on both patron and bar. It is called TabbedOut and it would seem to offer a really great way to nearly eliminate this scourge from our lives, through a nifty little app on your smartphone and some add-on software to common Point-of-Sale systems.

When she turns around to that POS system, she isn’t helping any thirsty customers.

TabbedOut is incredibly simple, and like many simple things, incredibly powerful, too. Here’s how it works:

• You enter a restaurant or bar that supports TabbedOut. The app uses location services to tell you whether your chosen watering hole is hooked in, and if not, which places nearby do. You tell your app you’d like to open a tab, give it your password, and it returns a short code. You show this to your bartender, and they enter it in the POS system. Your tab is open.
• From now until you leave is the same as any other way of operating. Order drinks just like usual, and they go on your tab.
• When you are ready to go, open your TabbedOut app, review your tab online on your phone, select the amount of tip you’d like to leave, and walk away. That’s it. You’re bill is paid, your tab is closed, you can go, and your bartender can go right on pulling Budweisers for the crowd of Steelers fans drowning their sorrows down the bar.

The ease and convenience of TabbedOut’s basic features alone makes it well worth checking out, but there are more considerations here than meet the eye, as well as more functionality.

This is a very secure way of doing things for everybody involved. Most importantly, you never let the credit card you pay with out of your possession, much less have to leave it in some plastic index card box behind the bar all evening as you must in some places. TabbedOut’s servers send your card number from your phone securely and invisibly to the POS system.
I once had my Amex card skimmed. I hadn’t used it anywhere for a while, so I knew it had to have happened in one of two bars I went to the previous weekend. I called both places to give a friendly heads-up to management about my suspicions. One was apologetic and thankful for the opportunity to watch out for the problem. The other was defensive. I’ve never been back to the second place, despite the fact that it was (is) a great bar here in Columbus. My point is, credit card fraud is a disaster for both the patron and the bar. With TabbedOut, your chances of a security failure are significantly reduced.

“Let’s see… Phillip, you had the Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and three Jager Bombs…”

There are other very nice features beyond that bare-bones description, too. The biggest one is check splitting. The only people who like this process are those who revel in arguing their share down to the last twenty five cents on a four-hour dinner at Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse. And yes, I have sat next to those people. I hated every second of that process and it wasn’t even my check.
TabbedOut offers several very easy ways to split the check. You can split the check in equal parts. You can manually split it into shares. Or best of all, and this short-circuits the quarter-pinchers, you can bring up the tab on your phone and pick which items each guest had. If your friends are also on TabbedOut, they can get your tab code from you and add themselves to your tab. Then they can pay their portion, as determined above, any time they want to. Or they can go through the hassle of paying the bartender directly, and their portion will be taken off your tab. Regardless, all the information and tools you need to easily split the check are always in your pocket.

There are a few other handy features for customers of TabbedOut too, such as CabbedOut, which will find a cab company for you whether you are in an unfamiliar city, or just so drunk you can’t remember your own.
For the social media addicts out there, TabbedOut has all the hooks needed to Tweet, post to your FaceBook wall, or check-in with Foursquare automatically whenever you open or close a tab.
The system also facilitates a really good pubcrawl, as you can keep a number of tabs open simultaneously in different bars. Incidentally, this and other factors make TabbedOut more popular in areas where there is some density of establishments that offer it, but that doesn’t mean it cannot work just fine at only one place in a city.

And TabbedOut has much to offer bartenders and owners as well. Foremost, it saves a lot of the bartenders’ time. That is time that can be spent taking care of customers (or flexing for the attractive barflys). This can mean significant extra revenue at time periods like Last Call, or the end of a ball game. In restaurant bars, a patron won’t have to delay to get their check when their table becomes ready. Also, like with OpenTable, patrons who get used to using the app will prefer to go to places that support it, and the app provides a very nice feature to help them find bars that do.

There are significant financial protections for the bar as well. The reputation of the bar and its honest employees are protected should a bad apple slip in. More importantly, should a customer just walk off, there is no need to chase them down. The bartender can close out any tab any time they want, or just at the end of the night. Or should the customer forget to close the tab, they can still close it themselves from home or the next bar over.

TabbedOut is easy to setup for most establishments, as it hooks in to most of the major POS systems, such as MICROS, Focus, Future POS, Dinerware, Jumpware, and others. It does require some additional training, which can be a consideration in such a high-turnover business. But the system is so simple and transparent, I imagine much of the process is taken up by simply convincing a new employee how easy it is going to be.

The last thing I’d like to address with this system is tipping, something that is important to both patron and employee alike.

Tipping is also made easier with the TabbedOut model. When a customer chooses to close their tab, there is a percentage slider to set the desired tip amount, and that is it. There is no math to trip up or embarrass you after three Pegus and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. Each restaurant sets its own default tip percentage, and if the customer forgets to close his tab, that default amount will be applied for him when the bar closes it. The default amount is also a minimum amount, so the staff will not be stiffed on any tab run through TabbedOut any more than they will be stuck with a walked check.

I’m really very excited about this product. TabbedOut appears feature-rich, easy to use, a little fun, and offers value to both customer and establishment alike. I suggest downloading the free app from the iTunes store or Android Marketplace and seeing what bars near you are set up to use it. And if you are a bar owner or manager, may I suggest giving them a call?

Yes, really. My first post written after Tales of the Cocktail 2011 is a road review of an airport bar. Bear with me, it’s worth the journey.

I had the superior sense and forethought to book my flight home from New Orleans in the afternoon, but the result was that I had three hours in Atlanta Hartsfield at dinner time. I idly tweeted, “Hmmm. 3 hour layover in ATL. Anyone know where the best Sazerac is made in Concourse C?” I fully intended to sup on lukewarm Budweiser and chicken fingers, so the tweet was really just an idle musing on how cocktail-spoiled I’d become in The Big Easy. Thus, I was surprised to receive this reply moments later from follower @Vespajet, moments later: “Nowhere on that concourse. Your best bet in terms of cocktails is One Flew South on Concourse E.”

With a shrug, I set off. Concourse E is the main international rib in ATL, so I figured that if there was decent food and the chance of an un-shaken Manhattan to be had in this or any airport, it would be found there.

One Flew South is located right at the top of the escalators accessing the councourse. It is an elegant modern sushi bar, restaurant and cocktail lounge. It is decorated in spare, Japanese style, all in white enamel and blonde woods, with modern white leather and chrome seating that is more comfortable than it looks. (This is more important than it might sound at first, since this place is designed for travelers who may have just spent up to 12 hours scrunched into those pretzel molds they call coach seating.) There are 11 seats at the bar, a few less in front of the sushi chefs, and a bunch of two person tables surrounding these.

I slipped into a seat in the middle of the bar, not expecting much, and that’s when all the fun began….

Bartender Norm Johnson presented me with both sushi and cocktail menus as I sat (an important detail I highlighted in my last post on menus), and I almost laughed out loud. No Sazerac, but this menu offered me such non-obvious but essential craft cocktails as Bellinis, French 75s (gin, sorry NOLA), Vieux Carrés, Negronis, and Aviations. They offer Pisco Sours and ‘Treuse or Dares… These are raw egg white drinks… In an airport bar.

As I sipped my Aviation (what else to go with first in an airport bar?), I started paying real attention. Just how crafty is this bar, I wondered. The next drink someone ordered was a simple gin and tonic…
“Really?” I asked Norm. “You have a Kold-Draft machine here?”
Yep. No soda gun, either, only premium bottled mixers. They have a small but useful selection of fresh juices and herbs. I counted at least nine bitters. (Unaccountably, no Angostura.) And they boast a pretty interesting selection of premium liquors and liqueurs.

The sushi offerings were limited but very well executed, with excellent quality tuna. While the drinks are priced very much in line with a regular craft bar, the food prices are up there where you’d expect for the captive airport clientele. They offer non-sushi dishes as well that looked pretty good, but I saw none served whilst I was there.

Of course, you can build a nice facility, stock it with great stuff, and still have a crappy result if you don’t have the most critical element of any bar, craft or otherwise: good staff. Rather than the usual parade of temporary journeymen who toil behind the mahogany-print vinyl in most ‘tween runway establishments, One Flew South boasts a small, long-term professional staff. Norm has been there the whole three years the bar has been open. He’s enough of a drink geek to have fun with the resources he has before him, but isn’t self-indulgent about it. He also has that great judgement about character that let him treat every customer at the bar with me in a subtly different way from the one next to them. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that he has a private bartending firm, as well.

So, is One Flew South another Pegu Club? No, of course not. But it is a damn well-executed classic cocktail bar with some nice touches that would be worth a spot in a local’s rotation if it were located in Buckhead. And it wildly exceeds any reasonable expectations a traveler should have for a refuge between flights. If you fly through Atlanta and have the time, I highly recommend a ride on the train to Concourse E. It’s the best bar I’ve ever seen in an airport. Say, “hi,” to Norm for me.

Source: Oyster

For the last three stops of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl, Maggi and I stayed at Kimpton Hotels, a new chain for us. (The one we liked in DC was full.) In Boston, we stayed at the Hotel Marlowe, on the river in Cambridge. I want to do a quick post at this point about the Marlowe’s restaurant and bar: Bambara.

With the exception of Ritz-Carltons (and San Francisco hotels, as I shall discuss soon), I usually only enter hotel bars when exhausted and intending only to self-medicate. “Double vodka martini, lots of vermouth, hold the fruit,” is my usual, let’s-get-this-over-with order. I was very pleasantly surprised with what the Marlowe had in store for us.

We needed a convenient place to eat before heading out to Drink for the evening. To our surprise, our own hotel’s restaurant was the highest rated place on OpenTable in the immediate vicinity. With a shrug, we went on down. Bambara is a smallish place with a very open floor-plan and lots of windows. The menu is light but inspired by New England traditions and ingredients. You’ll be shocked, shocked to note all the lobster on it…. We mostly stuck with appetizers so we could try more things, and found everything to be generally quite good.

As is our practice, we had a seat at the bar for a drink before getting our table. That is when I looked down at the fairly extensive cocktail menu and saw the following, for the first time ever, in any hotel bar: A Pegu.

He swooned.
You just don’t see men execute a good swoon much any more…

I did not swoon. I may have giggled a bit giddily, but that is it.
Anyway, said Pegu was delicious, but I do question where they got the making instructions for it. It looked like this:

Orange wedge, and served on the rocks? Really?

I had to tease there, but Pegus on the menu (+1000), executed weirdly but still deliciously (-250), aside, it’s not a bad cocktail menu at all. Damned impressive, in fact, for a hotel bar.
There are more vodka drinks than I’d want, but fewer than I’d expect. They sport a good selection of classics (including one I won’t name because they don’t deserve a visit form the Trademark Cops) and a number of originals. Whoever is responsible for the menu likes blueberries (again with the local influences) and really likes spicy drinks. It’s a nice selection, and those we tried we all well-balanced and tasty.

Bambara is a nice restaurant, considered by itself. If you are looking for a hotel in Boston (or Cambridge to be exact), a place of this quality in which to have a cocktail should be a huge checkmark in favor of the Marlowe.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.

Our last stop in the Boston round of the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl was Clio. Located in the Eliot Hotel on Commonweatlh, Clio and the Bar @ Clio (which also serves Uni Sashimi Bar) are an intimate, upscale, fabulous dining and drinking experience. Clio was actually the only place we went on the entire coast-to-coast extravaganza where I did not enter the bar. But Maggi deserved a dinner free of the constant cocktail chatter we engaged in to this point on the trip. So of course I spent the dinner with nose buried in the fabulous cocktail menu and pestering our waiter instead of the bartender….

The dining room is a small affair, with elegant table settings and soft, contemporary decor. The atmosphere is quiet and graceful, but not stuffy. Our waiter was friendly, knowledgeable, and eager to serve, but exuded none of that obnoxious, extravagant grovelling that mars many a truly upscale room. More on him later.

The menu is very interesting and changes daily. It is a bit nouvelle cuisine, with some molecular gastronmic elements thrown in. I get my guard up a bit when I first visit a restaurant with a menu like this. But since Chef Ken Oringer demonstrates through the results that his aim is pleasing your palate rather than demonstrating his magnificence, the food was delicious and approachable.
We went with the smaller of the two tasting menus offered each evening. May I suggest that you definitely go that way yourself if you visit. The offerings were delicious and made a very cogent progression through the whole meal.

The really surprising dish that stood out in both our minds was the tomato water martini. There was no alcohol in it, and it served as a soup course. It consisted of the most amazingly clear, but rich tomato water with a bit of basil oil drizzled on the surface. Instead of an olive, there was a nearly identical-looking caperberry and a sprinkling of chopped jicama for garnish. To the side was a tiny lollypop of frozen tomato pulp, from that left over making the water I guess.

I have no idea how they made tomato water this clear, but it has definitely rekindled my interest in perfecting the Plasma Mary.

The cocktail menu at Clio is 32 pages long. Several are lists of the extensive spirit selection they offer, but most are collections of cocktails. There is a huge Tiki section, including a whole page of Dr. Funk variations. There is a page of molecular mixology experiments. The largest section is gin drinks, with most of the greats contained therein, with a notable omission…. Get with the program, Todd. There’s even a nice glossary in the back, and the phrase, “Yeah, we’re fired up about booze.”

The last words in the cocktail menu are, “If you find this menu… keep it.” While admitting nothing, I may have found a copy in my jacket pocket after we left the restaurant. For the cocktail aficionado, perusing this menu is almost as much fun as I imagine it was to write it.

As a last note, several of the offerings on the cocktail menu are usually available only Monday-Thursday, such as the Ramos Gin Fizz. We visited on a Saturday, and I ordered one before I read the restriction. But our waiter insisted on doing the leg, er, armwork himself, and I got the best RGF I had on the entire barcrawl. I’m really hoping I left a big enough tip.

Clio is a wonderful, though not cheap, dining and drinking experience. I can heartily recommend it.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.

Source: Cocktails for Everyone!

Our second evening in Boston for the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl, we started out with drinks at Eastern Standard. Eastern Standard is not really a craft cocktail bar, as much as it is a high-end bistro with an elaborate craft cocktail operation embedded within. Fred and Andrea were able to join us a second night in a row. This was great, because while I enjoyed the hell out of our meeting at Drink the night before, I couldn’t hear well enough there to have an intelligible conversation! Despite it being Saturday night, Eastern Standard was much quieter, and I was able to absorb plenty of local cocktail lore from our friends.

On the outside, with its huge red awning and plentiful sidewalk seating, Eastern Standard has the appearance of any of a thousand bistros scattered all over the better neighborhoods of Paris. Once you enter, the atmosphere adds elements of upscale American steakhouses, with rich woods, high ceilings, white tablecloths, and leather booths. The bar shares the same volume with the main dining room and is elegant but hardly intimate. (The is a separate small lounge area that we didn’t enter for that) The high wall of shelves and illuminated cabinets behind the bar showcase a serious array of ingredients, glassware and more. The long, beautiful marble bartop seats a great many customers. I’m not really a fan of marble or granite bartops. They tend to be cold, especially in the Summer when you are wearing short sleeves. Also, I tend to cringe every time I set down a drink, afraid of breaking the glass. But this one is made of very, very pretty stone and the rounded edge treatment makes it more comfortable than most.

A great number of the guests at the bar were eating dinner, rather than just there for a drink or waiting on a table. Indeed, I think we may have confused the staff when we said we weren’t eating! I have a strong and consistent opinion about bars where lots of the seats are taken up with diners: If I want to eat, then I find the practice a warm, inviting, and interesting one; if all I want is drinks, then I get irritated because I usually have to wait longer than I like to sit down.

The mixology at Eastern Standard is very interesting. The large cocktail menu is divided into a number of categories. Some, like Tikisms and Heritage are mostly all classics, whereas other categories hold a mix of old and new. The proffered variety is pretty comprehensive in styles and flavors. If you were to work your way through it all over the course of some time, you’d have a pretty good survey of how flavors go together with spirits.
The bartenders are friendly and informative, but don’t make quite the performance of producing your drinks that some other bars do. The result is swifter than normal service for a craft bar, but not quite the fascination.

Still, there are some delicious elements to the design and workflow of this bar. An extraordinary number of ingredients, even many of the commercial spirits, are kept in racks of identical, unlabeled, bespouted bottles. Along with other touches such as a magnificent array of bitters and aromatics, as well as very attractive bar tools, the overall effect feels very much like an apothecary.

I found it all an enchanting combination.

Finally, they certainly don’t limit you to the menu. While I stuck largely to the listed drinks, Maggi tried a Boston original, the Pamlico, at Fred’s suggestion. It used to be on the menu here, and it’s absence points out one of the downsides of menus: You have to leave great stuff off of them. (For more on the relative merits of having versus not having a cocktail menu, see my post on Drink.) Regardless, the Pamilco is a fine cocktail, you can still get one at Eastern Standard, and if you’d like to know how to make one, Fred has already done a post on it over at Cocktail Virgin Slut.

If I lived in Boston, Eastern Standard would be a regular Happy Hour-type haunt. Though we didn’t eat, the food sure looked to be gorgeous, non-traditional, and varied. The crowd seems to be a bit better-dressed than a lot of the places we went on the barcrawl. (That’s code for a lot less hipsters, and a lot more suits.) Like Bourbon in Washington, DC, you could come here, eat, and have a great time without ever knowing what kind of cocktail operation they offer. You could bring friends that only drink Budweiser and laugh at all your fancy “drinkies”, and you can both have a great time together. Unlike Bourbon, Eastern Standard is tony, upscale, and well-lit, and caters to those who are comfortable in such an environment.
If you are a cocktailian visiting Boston, Eastern Standard is not the Must See Experience that is Drink. but it is a very good idea for a relaxing high-end meal, either in the dining room or at the bar… unless I’m there just wanting a seat that is!

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.

Our first stop in Boston on the Great Cross-Country Barcrawl was at Drink in the Fort Point neighborhood of Boston. Drink fills a huge basement, and it is worth taking a few minutes to look through the leg-level windows out on the street in front before going inside. The view is impressive as you look down on the room from above and behind the bar.

The plain wooden bartop runs the whole length of the basement. And rather than being simply straight, it bends outward in three rectangular humps, greatly increasing the length and available seating at the bar. The center segment is larger than either end. There is very little other seating at Drink, almost all the action is at the bar. This place is entirely about the mixology. There are no menus here. You ask your bartender for what you want, and they deliver. It’s like a giant, full-time game of Stump the Bartender. Amazingly, even if you are a serious cocktail geek, you are going to lose.

The obsession here is with classic mixology, and the bartenders are part and parcel of their obsession. An icon of said obsession is the daily special board (The black felt board with white plastic letters type) that hasn’t apparently been changed since “May 13, 1806″ when some drink consisting of “Spirit, water, sugar, and bitters” was first offered….

If you don’t get the joke of that message board, you’ll still enjoy Drink, but you won’t be able to really appreciate it. If you do get the joke, you have to go here.

We were fortunate enough to be able to share our Drink experience with Fred and Andrea of Cocktail Virgin Slut. We met outside and made our way downstairs. Pay attention to the address (348 Congress St.), as there is no exterior signage to direct you. We went on a Friday night, which was a bit problematic as Drink is very popular on weekends. As I said, there is no real seating other than what is at the bar, and the place was packed.
But as was demonstrated numerous times on this trip, it is good to have old friends whom you have never previously met. Fred knew the hostess Rebekah Powers pretty well. (Apparently they kick box together or something. My advice is: don’t act up at Drink) Despite the crowd, she found us four seats around the corner of one of the smaller end bars before we had much of a wait. I think we were lucky with this. There was a hockey game of some importance to Bostonians going on and the crowd was “thin”. (June is of course the only logical month for championship ice hockey.)

Drink was awesome, but I really want to get back there on a night early in the week when the crowd is much less intense. The biggest problem I had was with the noise level, which was more in line with a dance club than what I’d expect from a craft bar of this magnificence. Fred assured me that it is much quieter during the week. At least I think that’s what he said….

But enough bitching about the din of all those people having fun, let’s get back to the awesome. Our bartender was Brynn Tattan, an elfin yet very intense young woman who may have paused a moment to catch her breath about twice all night. Between the noise and the pace of orders, we didn’t get much of a chance to talk, but she was a ball to watch. In the course of our visit I saw several fascinating new techniques and presentations. She also shook cocktails so long and intently, I occasionally worried about her health.

Drink is dedicated to the whole ouvre of craft bartending. As such, they posses a bewildering assortment of ingredients, spirits, tools, and barware. Brynn was particularly skilled with manipulating the block ice they employed for a variety of uses. I love cutting chunks of clear ice in my own home bar for Old Fashioneds, but they use that same block of ice for shaved ice in juleps, Tiki drinks, and other concoctions. I’d never before seen the Mexican Ice Shaver Brynn used, but I want one now so much it hurts.

The ice manipulation was not the only spectacular technique I saw that night. Most bartenders have no idea what a Blue Blazer is. Most of those that do, won’t make one. Most of those that will, will only do it for special events. Brynn made one for some random dude who came up to the bar after us, in the middle of a crowded Friday night. Fortunately, I sussed out what she was up to before she lit it up, so I was able yo get my iPhone camera set to video. The clip below is worth a watch. I know it is dark, but I didn’t punch it up for a reason. It gets really spectacular starting about a third of the way in….

I often say (especially when I want to piss off a craft bartender) that full-on craft bartending is another form of “flair“. While most of the drinks I saw being dispensed were fairly straight-forward, there was a steady stream of occasional crazy stuff to prove that point. Of course, the construction of most craft cocktails is a subtle skill, a tiny performance. But a serious skill nonetheless. It’s clear that there is a pretty rare collection of such skills staffing the bar at Drink.

I wouldn’t be much of a critic if I couldn’t find at least one quibble with how Drink works. No one should expect a craft bar to serve drinks quickly. The care and deliberation with which craft cocktails are made makes a reasonable wait for a drink expected. Throw in the occasional Blue Blazer, and no one should complain about the pace of service at Drink. (I’ll bet there still are guys who don’t recognize what they are seeing who do complain though. Screw them.) That said, I could not understand how inefficiently laid out the tools and ingredient storage behind the bar seemed to be. I think each bartender at Drink must walk a half-marathon over the course of a shift, in search of this or that.
Admittedly, a bar that seems to have the knowledge and, more to the point, the inventory to produce whatever drink you ask for can’t have all that inventory within arm’s reach. Brynn seemed to flit around from this cooler to that, and between a cabinet here and a rack there for just about every order. It made me a little tired just watching her.

I also am a bit mystified about how they maintain profitability. Drinks aren’t cheap here, but not terribly out of line either. With no cocktail menu to direct customers toward certain fresh ingredients (or even liquors for that matter), I wonder how the management controls inventory in a cost-effective manner. So far, they seem to be managing it, so Bravo say I.

Beyond the business implications, I’m of two minds about the lack of a menu. For a geek like me, it’s no limitation, and is kind of liberating in fact. Whatever I wanted, I could indulge in and not worry overmuch about whether I could get it, or seeming a jerk for asking for it. But for someone with less accumulated knowledge of such otherwise dubious utility than I have, they might actually feel a bit limited. And a customer who knows nothing of classic drinks might find themselves simply drinking G&Ts without realizing the delights available to them here. On a less crowded night, I’m sure the bartenders can more than compensate for the lack of a menu, if you ask.

Drink is a bar I can recommend to both the jaded coaktailian and the relative newbie. Don’t go on a crowded weekend if you are an old fart like me whose tolerance for shouting over music you didn’t choose has long ago run out. Similarly, if your aim is to try new cocktails, go during the week when you will have the time (and hearing) to discuss where you’d like to go. But whatever you do, if in Boston, you need to go.

This review is part of my larger Great Cross-Country Bar Crawl series. Here is the main post for our Boston stop, with links to all reviews for the city.