The Florida Stint: Part Four
Continued from Part Three. Yeti emerged from his slumber around noon, disheveled and confused. A mass of man, chin, and fur. “When did you get here?” He said. “You let me in.” “Oh.” The first floor apartment was small and dim. I sat up in the wan light and pushed aside space for my feet.…
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The Florida Stint: Part Four
Continued from Part Three. Yeti emerged from his slumber around noon, disheveled and confused. A mass of man, chin, and fur. “When did you get here?” He said. “You let me in.” “Oh.” The first floor apartment was small and dim. I sat up in the wan light and pushed aside space for my feet.…
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The Florida Stint: Part Three
Continued from Part Two. The next blizzard started as soon as I hit Western Massachusetts. This one was a complete whiteout. Big, dry walls of snowflakes opposite from the heavy, wet, slick dump that occurred in Northern Vermont two days previous. The throttle on the old Golf held true and didn’t stick, although it was…
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New Cocktail: End Zone
It’s not going on the menu (no seasonal ingredients) but it was approved by the J&L duo last night. Sort of just came to me after getting pounded mercilessly in the well for four hours straight. It was National Cocktail Day yesterday. Not sure what that means. I wanted to call this the widowmaker but…
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The Florida Stint: Part Two
Continued from Part One. I woke and went to the mechanic early to get a jump on the day, eager to get some miles behind me. Ah, there she was in the parking lot. My magnificent steed! The little trusty gold five speed VW Golf. A triumph of German engineering from the late eighties. Dull…
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The Florida Stint: Part One
Twenty one years old, no driver’s license, ponytail. Seemed like a good time to leave Vermont and move to Florida. Drive over 1800 miles through a bunch of red states illegally? Yeah. What the hell? Through the haze of time I can conjure up some of the reasons why I did it. One, I hated…
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Bartending Videos are a Thing
I came across a restaurant’s cocktail video yesterday on instagram and instantly felt a combination of seething rage, annoyance, and at the pure pomposity of the whole production. A dude in a button up shirt, face obscured, pouring milk punch from a fancy crystal decanter onto an ice sphere into an overly grandiose rocks glass…
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Restaurant Review: La Vecchia Cucina
I’m starting to become even more nostalgic as I age. I watched Mr. Mom the other night with the wifey and ached for the old times of no cell phones where you could be middle class, own a house, and have three kids on one person’s salary. Unibrows, brown, boxy sedans, and bad teeth aside,…
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Irish Cream Is A Beautiful, Necessary Sham
I know its delicious. But here’s the thing, it contains Irish whiskey, cream, and sugar so how can it not be? But what other malevolent devils swirl around inside the bottle? Maybe some immoral combination of anti-caking agents and suspension polymers to keep it all falsely suspended together as it squats on the shelf? I…
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New Cocktail: Child Prodigy
I once thought I was a child prodigy but I later learned Mozart began composing at five years old. At that age I wandered the woods with my dog, an insane golden retriever named Morgan, and pretended I was a knight, using a long stick as a sword. No genius, but a grade A smart…
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Bar Hack: Bomb Strawberry Clarified Milk Punch
Clarified milk punch is to bartenders what pork fat used to be to cooks. Weak analogy. I’ll think of another. I haven’t had the correct dosage of coffee yet. The boy came in our room and woke us up at 3:00 a.m. Nightmares, who knows what else. A child’s nightmare soon becomes a parent’s nightmare.…
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In the Shadow of the Prodigal Son
Our seasonal strawberry cocktail last year, Prodigal Son, was a big hit. The whole point of it was to pump the strawberry flavor up to max decibels. People loved it, it took a metric fuck TON of preparation, but I’ve got to say it was the beginning of a long string of great cocktails that…
The Aging Bartender 