Periodista Tales – Page 2

After putting a pile of fried oysters into my body at Mother’s, I was back at the Monteleone, aiming for the Carousel bar. It was about that time. I spotted Jeff Berry sitting at a squat table next to the bookstore, signing copies of his Beach Bum Berry Remixed. There was a potato of a man in a button-down shirt sitting next to him.

I said hello to Berry and thanked him for the Schumann lead.

“Oh, no problem,” he said. “I’m sorry I don’t know more about the Periodista. I don’t know anything about it, really, other than it’s a really good drink.”

I told him he wasn’t the only one. We chatted for a moment about California, then Berry gestured at the man beside him.

“This is Brian Rea,” he said. “You were talking about mid-century Los Angeles—Brian was there, man! You know the Host Lounges?”

“In the airport!” Rea blurted.

“The Host International Lounges,” said Berry. “Brian put tiki bars into those! It was like an executive version.”

I shook Rea’s hand and told him I’d heard of him.

“Who spoke of me? Who mentioned my name? My ex-wife?”

Rea is like a cartoon of an old man from a bygone era. Bald head, elastic expression, wrinkles with wrinkles. He’s been in the business since the ‘40s. He isn’t part of the craft avant-garde, but he has all the stories.

I asked him about the Periodista.

“What was it called?”

I told him.

“What was in it?”

I told him that, too.

“Where the hell have I seen that?” He scratched his pate. “In Muckensturm? Was it in Muckensturm’s book?”

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I told him I wasn’t sure. I don’t have all the books.

“See, I have all the books,” Rea said. “That’s what I’m known for, my collection. It may have been in Louis’ Mixed Drinks. Or it may be in Jack’s manual. I know I’ve seen that combination, because it’s a great combination. Drop me an email, give me what you have on it, and let me figure it out. Everyone else does it. David Wondrich, you know—Dale DeGroff lives in my library, Lowell Edmunds did Martini, you know? I don’t remember it all—I’m lucky I remember my name—but I still have a lot of goodies in there, you know? A lot of history.”

At the risk of gathering evidence to support a theory, I mentioned the possibility of a Hemingway connection.

“Hemingway will drink anything,” Rea said. “You know, Hemingway was a lot of work being a bartender for. We were all probably calling him boss at the time, which made him feel good, but ‘boss’ spelled backwards is ‘double s.o.b.’”

He said it like he’d been there, but the Abbott and Costello line made me doubt it.

“It was probably named for one of the broads he was hangin’ out with, all right? It happens!”

That struck a chord. I thought about something I’d read in Wayne Curtis’s book. Hemingway’s third wife had been Martha Gellhorn. A journalist—one of the 20th century’s most celebrated war correspondents. They frequented El Floridita together in the early ‘40s.

I saw the two of them there at the bar. Hemingway slurps his usual Papa Doble. Gellhorn complains that they always order the same thing. Constante the bartender indulges her with a new creation, a spin on the daiquiri, with triple sec and apricot brandy. For the occasion, he names it for her. La Periodista.

A nice story. Too nice to be true. Rea was still talking.

“What we used to do,” he said, “our worst customer in the world, yeah? Real asshole customer—we’d tell ‘em, ‘Look, we’re gonna create a special drink for you, and we’re gonna buy it for you.’ We’d take a double old-fashioned glass, fill it with ice cubes, put a garnish in it, and then take the bar mat, and dump everything in. Hey! Coulda been a great recipe! Everything is in there, you know! That’s what we used to do for those special customers.”

He pointed at Jeff Berry.

“Who is this, by the way?”

Berry laughed. “Some old rummy,” he said.

“I love it,” said Rea. “He puts on a hat and he collects money. My kinda guy!”

“Don’t organ grinder monkeys do that too?”

I left before they could ask me who was on first.

To be continued…

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 5 — Mixography with Dave and Jeff

By devhahn

On August 8, 2010

In Periodista, Tales of the Cocktail 2010

I was riding the streetcar down Canal Street toward the French Quarter. It was nearing 10 a.m. on my second day at Tales of the Cocktail and I was trying not to think too hard. Every time a neuron fired my head throbbed with equal parts pain and recrimination. At the Dauphine Street stop, two middle-aged men in wife-beaters and jean shorts were eating sausages out of a can. They knew how to start the day.

I’d gotten some good leads the day before, but I’d lost focus—lurched down the rabbit hole and passed out. Today I needed to be on my game. My first seminar was with David Wondrich and Jeff “Beach Bum” Berry, both experts at tracking down old cocktails. Berry had already delivered all he knew, but if there was anyone at that year’s Tales who might be able to give me a hard lead on the Periodista, it was Wondrich.

There was a crowd of people outside the Queen Anne Ballroom on the second floor of the Hotel Monteleone. They all had the same, haggard look. Long night. I spotted Jackson Cannon. He looked rough, but still bubbled with the usual effervescence. Like one of his own cocktails.

I asked him about the golden key he’d put in my hand the night before.

“That’ll get you into the bartender’s breakfast,” he said. “It starts tonight at eleven. It’s sort of the last hurrah. All the bartenders who’ve been working hard all week get to go wild. Except me—I’ll be working the breakfast.”

The doors opened and we filed into the room. Long rows of tables led up to a raised platform where Wondrich was seated next to Berry. The title of the seminar was New Tales for Old Cocktails: Techniques and Problems of Historical Mixography. I sat down next to Cannon in a middle row.

“Thank you all for coming down to listen to us at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning at Tales of the Cocktail,” Wondrich said, “which is like 5 a.m. for normal people on a workday. This is gonna be a little meandering—if you think it’s bad to come and listen to this, you should try coming and talking at this hour. Whew!”

David Wondrich is the author of Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail to Whiskey Smash, a Salute in Stories and Drinks to “Professor” Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. Wondrich’s book set the standard for writing about drink origins. It’s part academic history, part swashbuckling historical fiction. If you want to know how they made a Manhattan in 1915 at New York’s Manhattan Club, read it.

Wondrich has the godfather of all goatees. Bare cheeks and chin hair down to his second button. He’s got a thinking man’s belly. When he speaks, you get the sense that he feels right at home being the most knowledgeable guy in the room.

“I’m Dave Wondrich,” he said, “spirits writer, historian—sort of. And I’m very, very pleased to have Jeff Berry with me. Jeff is responsible more than anybody else for bringing the drink part of the tiki world back to life—figuring out why these drinks were great, and how to make them great in the modern world. So it’s a real thrill and an honor for me to be speaking with Jeff.”

“Oh, you hush, Dave,” said Berry.

“Beach Bum” Berry was wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a floppy straw hat. When I looked at him I started to hear ukeleles. I stopped looking.

“We’re here this morning to talk about drink history,” said Wondrich. “How to write it, how to research it, how to make it work. Mixography—okay, perhaps not a true academic field, thank god, but nonetheless, a practical one. The past decade has seen an upsurge of interest in craft cocktails, and a big part of the reason people drink these drinks is the context—the stories behind them. So a lot of people are starting to write histories of drinks.”

Young bartenders who had enrolled in the Tales of the Cocktail apprentice program were shuffling around the room in their drab apprentice uniforms distributing orange drinks in little plastic cups. There was a small bucket on the table in front of me.

“It’s a very tricky field, the history of mixed drinks,” Wondrich continued. “It involves traditional history, of course. Wars and battles and great men and women of the past. The movement of armies means the movement of vast amounts of thirsty people who really, really enjoy alcohol.”

People around the room laughed. I saw Wayne Curtis in the front row. Jim Meehan and Paul Clarke further back. Popular talk. I tried not to smell the alcoholic vapor wafting up from the plastic cup on the table.

“It also involves cultural history,” said Wondrich. “Folkways and cityways. Commercial history is a very big part of it, too, because in one way the story of a cocktail is the story of mixing products together, and you have to know the histories of the products.”

I thought about the Periodista. The liquor company pamphlet where Joe McGuirk claims he discovered the original recipe. The Bacardi family history Ed Hamilton had mentioned the day before. Stories of products.

“It also involves a good deal of literature,” Wondrich continued. “Nobody likes to drink more than writers, except for maybe the aforementioned soldiers. There will be frequent artifacts of mixology to be found in the annals of Western literature.”

Cannon nudged me. I knew he was thinking about Hemingway. I was, too. Jeff Berry leaned into his microphone.

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“I’d like to add something,” he said, “which is, no pun intended, but the driest thing you could want to write about, really, is drink. Deconstructing a cocktail, putting it back together. Okay, it’s interesting to you, it’s interesting to me. Today it’s interesting to probably everyone in this room. But who are you writing these things for? Are you just writing for the people in this room? Are you doing a blog for twenty people?”

Twenty people. That was generous.

“Think about your audience,” said Berry. “People like reading about history, people like reading about people. When drink writing is the most interesting for me, and the most fun, is when you weave it into the fabric of life. It’s not just about the drinks, it’s about when people were drinking them and why they were drinking them. We get to bring the past to life through cocktails, which is really cool.”

Wondrich and Berry continued to lecture. They introduced what they called “Dave & Jeff’s 20 Axioms of Mixography.” Rules for the aspiring cocktail historian.

“Write with no attachment to outcome,” said Wondrich.

“Don’t start with a theory and then gather evidence to support that theory,” said Berry. “At that point you might as well be a Budweiser Clydesdale—all you’re going to see is that goal a hundred yards away. You’ll lose out on all the other information along the way that could have taken you in a much more interesting direction. Instead, gather evidence and let it lead you to a theory. Or not! But just let the evidence take you where it may.”

Wondrich introduced another axiom: It never stands to reason. Means, motive, and opportunity are not sufficient. You need testimony, not argument.

“This is the third rail of all cocktail history,” he said. “Just because ‘coquetier’ is the French word for egg cup and it sounds kind of like ‘cocktail,’ and just because a French egg cup looks a little bit like a cocktail glass, and just because they speak French in New Orleans, does not necessarily mean that the cocktail was invented in New Orleans.”

There was some booing and laughter around the room. Wondrich smiled.

“There are so many stories like that,” he said. “I love this one: it’s called a cocktail because the feathers in a cock’s tail kind of look like the rainbow colors of the liquors that go into a cocktail. Okay, what color liquors would have gone into an original cocktail? Brown! Show me a brown cock’s tail.”

He stroked his goatee thoughtfully. Probably no other way to do it.

“My current thinking,” he said, “is that a cocktail was something that, you know, cocks your tail up. Like you would call a nail-biter a bite-nail. And so it’s a cock-tail. It’s grammatically like that. Something to cock your tail up in the morning. That seems in some ways more likely, because there was a general class of drinks that you would have in the morning. Like, we would say eye-opener. What’s your eye-opener this morning? Well, in my case, gin, and plenty of it.”

More laughter. People were sipping the orange drinks that had been passed out. Cannon tasted his then spit into the bucket. That was one option. My stomach could think of another.

“This is how I comfort myself,” said Wondrich. “You’ll never get to the bottom of it. This is what happens in the eye of history, for the most part. The martini—that’s sort of the holy grail of cocktail origins. And even though we’re throwing huge amounts of computer software at it—you know, every book from the 19th century has been scanned for the origins of the word ‘martini’—we may never know who invented the thing.”

Then there was me, wandering around in the dark, shouting the word “Periodista” at anyone who would listen. But I wasn’t the only one. I just had the least funding.

“So, and I say this with a great deal of hyperbole, but The moment of creation is shrouded in stygian blackness, and if one should be granted a glimpse of it, one should be extremely suspicious. You’ll never find that actual moment, that active generation. You’ll never actually see that. Almost impossible.”

“But just because it’s unsolvable,” said Berry, “just because it’s this black hole that depresses you and makes you not want to get up in the morning, don’t let it stop you.”

Eventually, the lecture ended and a horde of people holding copies of Imbibe! and Sippin’ Safari! mobbed the front of the room. I should have been part of the mob, holding the Periodista question high above my head. Instead, I slunk out in silence.

To be continued…

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 4 — The Bar Room Brawl

By devhahn

On August 4, 2010

In Periodista, Tales of the Cocktail 2010

Continued from Part 3…

Time passed like it does on long nights. The ornate galleries of the French Quarter blended together in streaks of light. My cab pulled up in front of a velvet rope. I didn’t remember hailing one.

Tales of the Cocktail‘s big ticket event that night was the Bar Room Brawl, a competition that pitted six bars from across the country against one another for the chance to be heralded as the Best Bar in America. Los Angeles was represented by The Varnish, Sasha Petraske’s newest speakeasy, with Eric Alperin at the helm. New York had sent the Long Island City bar Dutch Kills, under the command of Richard Boccato. There was Rickhouse from San Francisco and The Florida Room from Miami. I’d heard the team from Chicago’s Drawing Room was a favorite. These were the country’s elite.

And then there was Drink. Drink is part of the Barbara Lynch group of holdings, buried down in Fort Point in South Boston. Drink launched Boston’s cocktail scene onto the world stage. It gets all the press. New Yorkers brave Amtrak to drink there. Cambridge imbibers who haven’t crossed the Charles in years find themselves trekking across the channel, through high-bricked corridors and back alleys, just to for a chance to taste what they’re doing at Drink.

I’d been there a few times, but never in search of the Periodista.

Drink is managed by John Gertsen, Jack Rose Society member and former bar manager of No. 9 Park. This is a man who can make a cocktail. But Drink’s real superstar is Misty Kalkofen. The local legend, forged in the fires of Cleve’s Saturnalia, seasoned in the boiler room of Lansdowne Street. Drink had given Misty a chance for national and international exposure, and she had seized it, shaker in hand.

The Bar Room Brawl was being held in an anonymous event space they’d dressed up like a Vegas nightclub. Women in sequined fedoras and not much else danced on tabletops. Women in tiny red dresses carried around trays of cloudy Grand Marnier cocktails. Women with microphones dragged film crews from room to room. Men watched the women, goatees trembling.

Everyone who was anyone was there. And plenty of people who weren’t. A beautiful woman put a drink in my hand. I felt like an iguana.

Six stations had been set up across two main rooms. Each was designed in the style of the competing bar. Drink’s station was austere—some vintage glassware and a sign showing the names of the cocktails they were entering into the competition: Mission of Burma and the Alicante. The latter was attributed to Scott Holliday, friend of Gertsen. I thought about my conversation with Scott at Rendezvous, almost two months ago. I had the sensation of looking down at myself from far away.

The staffs of the competing bars were hidden behind velvet curtains until the showdown began. Aaron Butler, bar manager of Harvard Square’s Russell House Tavern, and Corey Bunnewith, bartender at same, were milling around Drink’s empty station. They were both Drink alums, there to cheer on the team.

John Gertsen peeked out from behind the curtain. Butler and Bunnewith hollered. Gertsen shushed them, but walked over and shook their hands. Then he shook mine. I’d never met the man. I told him who I was.

He kept his game face, but made a gesture of triumph and looked me in the eye. “Before we do anything,” he said. “Thank you for what you’re doing. You’re teaching us all a valuable lesson. The stories are better than the drinks themselves.”

I gaped at him until he vanished behind the curtains.

Jackson Cannon appeared with some of the Eastern Standard crew—assistant manager Kevin Martin, bartender Nicole Lebedevich, ace mixologist Tommy Schlesinger-Guidelli. Cannon saw me and rushed over, excited.

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“I’ve been talking to my father a lot about the Periodista,” he said. “My father has read every word of Hemingway—letters, everything. He has some ideas, but we’ll talk about that later. I’m toying with this theory that it might be connected with the Sandanista movement in the ‘80s.”

Hadn’t somebody said that to me earlier?

“Whatever it ends up being,” he said, “I just want to thank you. You’ve made us turn a more critical eye on ourselves.”

Cannon took something out of his pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a golden key. He muttered something about a “breakfast” before being swept away by the crowd. I stared at the key for a full calendar minute. It didn’t have anything constructive to say, so I put it in my pocket and tried to remember what I was doing there.

Time continued to pass. Suddenly, a man with a microphone began to announce the main event. All I heard was enthusiastic static. Then the team from Drink began to file out from behind the curtain and take their places at the bar. There was John and Misty. Scott Marshall came out, Josey Packard and Sam Treadway, Cali Gold and Bryn Tattan. Barbacks Will Thompson and Tyler Wang slid in behind them. Even Drink’s hostess, Rebekah Powers, was there to work the crowd.

A moment later a globe of light appeared in front of the bar. It was filled by the forms of Dale DeGroff, David Wondrich, Audrey Saunders, Jim Meehan, Tony Abou-Ganim, and others I didn’t recognize. These were the kings and queens of the bar world. This is why I was here: to find these people and ask them what they knew about the Periodista. I had a goal, and there it was, lit up like a Broadway show. Only a velvet rope blocked my path.

The Drink team went to work churning out cocktails. Butler and Bunnewith shouted like Red Sox fans as DeGroff, Wondrich, and the others sampled the drinks. I tried to shuffle nervously on the spot, but my shoes were sticking to the floor.

Soon the judging was over and the six bars were opened to the guests. I ranged blearily from station to station, sampling drinks that had originated in New York, Florida, California. One from Chicago was named for a Tom Waits song and contained citric acid and baking soda. My head was a wreck. I wondered who’d been driving.

The man with the microphone turned out to be Steve Olson, of AKA Wine Geek. Suddenly he was on a stage with a look of deep meaning on his face. It was the moment of truth. The room fell silent as the runner-up was announced. Varnish, from Los Angeles.

The room cheered as rooms do for runners-up. I turned around to look at the crowd and saw a sea of Boston faces. Dave Cagle and Max Toste from Deep Ellum were there. The team from Eastern Standard. Lantheaume and the Glassers. Kitty Amann, Joy Richard, and the other ladies of LUPEC Boston. Drinkers I’d seen at various bars around town. All holding their breath.

“And the winner,” Olson said, “of the best bar in America is—DRINK.”

Then there was a moment in which we were all one. The Boston contingent erupted as only Bostonians can. Screams, tears, profanity. There was no tension, no competition. It was a community celebrating the triumph of one of its own. Where I fit in, I didn’t know, but there I was, and I hugged each of them like I was right where I was supposed to be. Scott’s wife kissed me on the cheek. I was lost in the collective outpouring of joy.

And later, even after they had won, Cali scrubbed the bar top clean and Will made sure everyone had a bottle of water in their hand.

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 3 — The Mixoloseum

By devhahn

On August 4, 2010

In Periodista, Tales of the Cocktail 2010

Continued from Part 2…

Our cab stopped in front of a townhouse barred by a six-foot-high iron gate. We stepped out into a roaring symphony of cicadas. Adam Lantheaume hit the buzzer on the gate. A plastic banner strapped to an upper balcony read The Mixoloseum. I could hear the wailing of a clarinet off in the distance. We spent a few minutes baking in the night air before a man in faded gray livery let us in.

“Welcome to Mixo House,” he said.

A long hallway with white wainscoting led us into a room full of people. At the back wall, a man with a straw fedora and bushy mustache was buried in a thicket of bottles, stirring frantically. Next to him, chips of ice were flying out of a huddle of men flinging small hammers. It smelled strongly of bourbon.

“Bulleit is underwriting a lot of the costs of the house this year.” A man in a tan linen shirt and sandals was standing beside me. He had small, intense eyes and a glass in each hand. “And the food—there’s food out on that table, help yourself to it—the food was also underwritten by Bulleit. The shuttle that will take you back to the hotel was—”

I guessed. Underwritten by Bulleit.

“Yep,” the man said. “For them, it’s a bit of guerilla marketing. For us, it’s a way to evangelize certain brands we’re interested in that other people might not know about.”

I asked who “we” was.

“Most of the people here are members of the Cocktail and Spirits Online Writers Group,” the man said. “It’s mostly bloggers, but we have a few journalists as well.”

I told him who I was. He already knew.

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“I really like what you’re doing,” he said. “If you keep it up, there could definitely be a place for you here.”

He surveyed the room as a Baron might his acreage, and drank deeply from the glass in his right hand. I asked him where “here” was.

“This is Mixo House,” he said. “Two years ago, the members of the CSOWG started renting out a bed and breakfast at Tales of the Cocktail. Most of us stay here instead of the Hotel Monteleone. There’s an appeal to being outside of the Quarter—these are not necessarily Bourbon street people. And we have events each night. Tonight some bartenders from Louisville are doing custom ice-carving.”

One of the carvers tossed a perfectly-formed ice sphere to the bartender, who capped off an Old Fashioned with it. Sugar, bitters, spirit, ice. Within the room, people mingled, lounged on couches, gestured furiously, laughed. And drank.

“Mixo House is a place for us to gather and be together once a year,” he continued. He pointed to a big man dressed in casual tiki. “Matt Robold over there—Rumdood—he’s from Southern California. The woman with the hair, that’s Tiare from A Mountain of Crushed Ice. She’s based out of Sweden. This is one of her only trips to the States each year. There’s a camaraderie that forms among us online, and one week a year, at Mixo House, we get to have that in person.”

These were my people, then. The chroniclers. The documentarians. The seekers. I recognized Paul Clarke chatting with Camper English. They’re both well-regarded drinks journalists as well as prominent bloggers. I saw myself joining the conversation, becoming a note of harmony in the larger cocktailia chorus.

Someone put an Old Fashioned in my hand. I drank it. It was sweet and strong, warm and balanced. The kind of drink you could curl up with and forget the chase. Forget the chase.

I had the sudden sensation of falling. My body jolted. I looked around, eyes throbbing. More laughter. A shaker tortured ice across the room. The acrid smell of bitters was trapped in my nose.

I was getting in too deep. I finished my drink in a swallow and left. For the moment, I’d completely forgotten the Periodista.

To be continued…

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 2 — Clues at Cure

By devhahn

On August 2, 2010

In Periodista, Tales of the Cocktail 2010

Continued from Part 1…

I knew Adam Lantheaume as the owner and operator of The Boston Shaker, a cocktail supply shop in Davis Square. He was at Tales of the Cocktail hosting a coming-out party for a new product line. Bittermens bitters, made by a husband and wife team based in Somerville. The party was at Cure, New Orleans’s hottest new cocktail bar, located five minutes from absolutely nothing.

When I arrived I made nice with the Bostonians then went to the bar for a drink. Before I could order, somebody handed me a glass of punch. In the corner, Lantheaume was placing a drop of bitters on the back of a woman’s hand with an eye dropper. She licked her hand and her eyes scrunched up, then widened. Call that a sale.

It was early but the place was packed. The back bar at Cure is floor-to-ceiling bottles. Death’s Door white whiskey. Chartreuse VEP, yellow and green. Rums from countries I’d never heard of. A man in a pinstripe suit asked for a single-village Mezcal, neat. The order sent a barback scaling the wall. I drank my punch.

From the slurry of nearby conversations I picked out the name Angus Winchester and connected it to a man in a dark suit with a starched white shirt opened two buttons down from his throat. Winchester is the brand ambassador for Tanqueray gin and a friend of Brother Cleve’s. He’d been helping me chase a lead I’d gotten from Beach Bum Berry—Charles Schumann’s Tropical Bar Book, published in Germany in 1986. So far, it was the earliest printed reference to the Periodista anyone had been able to find. Schumann is based out of Munich. Winchester knew him—he’s based out of everywhere.

I introduced myself. Winchester had something new for me.

“Have you ever heard of The Bartender’s Sixth Sense?” he asked. “It’s a sort of Cuban-y bartending book. I mentioned the Periodista to Michael Menegos. He’s Havana Club. Global ambassador kind of guy. He said that would be the book that he’d go to first, because it’s filled with a lot of Cuban recipes. It’s difficult to find, but Michael has it in his library. So Michael is sort of on the case.”

A shock of white hair announced the appearance of Wayne Curtis. Curtis writes on travel and spirits for The Atlantic. He’d also written a book called And A Bottle Of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. Guess which drink didn’t make the shortlist.

I excused myself from Winchester and approached Curtis for an introduction. Apparently I didn’t need one.

“While I was working on the rum book,” he said, “I collated all my facts and names and dates into one big hundred-thousand-word volume so I could keyword search it. I looked for the Periodista, but couldn’t find anything.”

Typical.

“I think you’re right,” he said, “that it probably appeared in connection with the Sandanistas in the 1980s. If you can’t find reference to the drink before then, that seems like a good theory to me.”

A good theory, maybe, but not mine.

“Oh,” he said. “Well, someone suggested that to me in connection with the Periodista.”

I felt suddenly as if eyes were boring into the back of my head. Who else out there was on the trail of the Periodista?

“I like this crew of people,” Curtis said. He was taking in the room. “I’ve done a lot of travel writing for the past twenty years, and I’ve never really liked travel writers. I find them a disagreeable group. But the drinks people, they’re just really a lot of fun. They all seem to carry with them some form of passion. It’s interesting. They all seem to focus on one thing. It might be a bitters, it might be a bourbon, it might be an era—you know, drinks of the 1910s or something—and they just get obsessed about that.”

He didn’t give me a pointed look. He didn’t have to. I finished my punch as a man approached and held out his hand to Curtis. He had a weathered face, long gray hair hanging loose around his shoulders, and stood a head taller than the rest of the room.

“You hookey-playing sonovabitch,” the tall man said to Curtis.

“Speaking of which,” Curtis said, “this is Ed Hamilton. He’s a rum expert. He’s put out a few books on rum. Ed, have you ever heard of the Periodista?”

“I do know the cocktail,” Hamilton said, turning to me. “But, I’m not a cocktail guy. I spent twenty years on a sailboat in the Caribbean. In the Caribbean a cocktail is, ‘Well, what do we got? Squeeze that, put some rum in it. Oh, it needs some sugar, okay. Oh, it needs more lime, okay.’ And away you go.”

I thought about a world where a cocktail was so simple. No obscure ingredients. No specialized tools. No origins. No histories. Just a cold drink on a hot day that steels the spirit. Then I remembered that most people live in that world. I had, too, not so long ago.

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Hamilton mentioned the Bacardis. In Cuba, the Bacardi name was synonymous with rum before Castro. “There’s a guy who’s written a book about it,” he said. “That might be a place to look. He’s part of the Bacardi family. I can’t think of his fuckin’ name. Little short sonovabitch. They’re still family-owned, but they really control any information that goes out about the company.”

Them and everyone else. That added up to a few solid leads—a few not so solid. Someone handed me another glass of punch. What did a guy have to do to pay for a drink in this town?

I drank punch until my head began to feel like something hanging in a butcher shop window, then got into a cab with Lantheaume. We rode across the city. Outside the cab, the residential blocks of New Orleans glided past. Stately old homes with painted shutters and wide porches, raised galleries with wrought iron railings. I thought about Katrina. I thought about BP. But it all just looked like a fairy tale.

To be continued…

Bonus recipe!

Charles Schumann’s Periodista

1 ½ oz white rum
2 splashes apricot brandy
2 splashes triple sec
Juice of ½ lime
1 tsp sugar
1 scoop crushed ice

Mix in a shaker. Serve in a Cocktail glass, with a lime twist.

From Charles Schumann’s Tropical Bar Book (1986, 1989).

Tasting notes: The most salient thing to notice here is the similarity between this recipe and the first Chez Henri recipe that Joe McGuirk adapted from his original source (note the addition of a small amount of sugar in both). Joe acknowledged that the recipe he discovered in that long-forgotten drinks pamphlet called for white Cuban rum, as does Schumann’s. It was only after McGuirk tinkered with it that he arrived at the current, dark rum version of the drink so popular throughout Boston. Joe claims that the recipe he adapted called for Rose’s lime juice rather than fresh, which may be an indicator of when that pamphlet might have been published.

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 1 — The Monteleone

By devhahn

On August 1, 2010

In Periodista, Tales of the Cocktail 2010

I was wrenched from sleep by my iPhone alarm clock. For a second I just lay there, my head throbbing in time with the electronic marimba beeping on the bedside table. My mind ached with alcohol and half-forgotten names. It was 9:30 a.m., I’d just gone to bed three hours earlier, and I was going to be late for my first seminar.

I’d arrived in New Orleans the day before. The Crescent City was playing host to Tales of the Cocktail, an annual conference celebrating all things drink. All the big shots were there—authors, celebrity bartenders, liquor company and brand representatives. It was the largest gathering of cocktail intelligentsia I could hope to find in a single place.

I was there for one reason. For the past two months I’d been trying to track down the origins of the Periodista cocktail. I’d traced its route through Boston, from its discovery in a long-forgotten cocktail pamphlet, to its reinvention by a French-Cuban bistro, to its appearance on the menu of the city’s most influential cocktail bar. From obscurity to ubiquity in fifteen years. Then I’d hit a wall.

I needed to widen my search beyond Boston, and Tales of the Cocktail was the place to start. Brother Cleve, my man on the inside, had helped me compile a list of key players. The big guns were Dale DeGroff and David Wondrich. DeGroff is the elder statesman of the bar world—he was squeezing fresh juices when the current generation was playing peek-a-boo. Wondrich is the beverage writer for Esquire magazine and a walking encyclopedia of cocktail lore. Then there was Jeff “Beach Bum” Berry, Wayne Curtis, and Ted Haigh, all authors of books on cocktails, all friends of Cleve’s. The man knows everyone.

I arrived at Louis Armstrong International Airport early and sober. New Orleans was a furnace. My cab was a sauna. I needed a drink.

The home base for Tales of the Cocktail is the Hotel Monteleone, a grand old edifice that towers over the squat townhouses of the French Quarter. I stepped into the lobby and the smell of gin hit me. Someone handed me a drink in a plastic cup.

The cocktail people seemed to gather together in packs. There was the tiki set, mostly older men in straw hats and Hawaiian shirts. The hipster bartenders, younger folks coated in tattoos and skinny jeans. There were the Europeans—Brits and Continentals sweating in their expensive suits. Mixed in was a smattering of tourists who hadn’t been told about the conference. Most of them were already drunk.

Before I could empty my plastic cup I had seen three bartenders I knew from Boston, two famous authors, three bloggers, the head of a cross-continental speakeasy empire, and myself in a mirror, looking wrinkled and limp from the humidity. I escaped into the hotel bookstore.

They were pushing the typical selection. Imbibe! was there, alongside a reprint of the Savoy. But a new one caught my eye. Cuba: A History of Rum, by Anistatia Miller & Jared Brown. The story around Boston was that the Periodista was a classic Cuban cocktail. One of the ones Hemingway drank at El Floridita. But so far, no one had been able to prove it.

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I reached for the book and a woman carrying a stack of the same bumped into me and began laying them out. She had long salt-and-pepper hair, a floppy hat, and a name tag that said Anistatia Miller.

I asked her about the Periodista.

“Oh yeah, the Periodista,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a recipe in El Arte Del Cantinero. That’s a bar guide that was put out by the Havana Bartender’s Guild in 1948. I’ve got most of that scanned on my computer back in England. Give me your card and I’ll send you the pages when I get home from the tour.”

I gave her one of my cards. I’d made cards. She took it and went back into the lobby. Not a bad lead for the first five minutes on the scene.

The bar at the Monteleone is called the Carousel. I walked inside and almost fell down. A huge, slowly rotating carousel dominates the room, with a few tables scattered around it. The gradual motion seems designed to make the sober feel drunk and the drunk feel sober. There’s a large room behind the bar, where a local radio station was interviewing a gray-haired man wearing headphones. It might have been Dale DeGroff, but I didn’t stick around to find out.

I drank Pimm’s Cups and ate Muffaletta at the Napoleon House down the street until I felt almost human. Then I got on a red streetcar heading up Canal. An old man listening to a Sony Cassette Walkman played ghost bass on an umbrella. It didn’t sound bad. I got off the streetcar at South Lopez. I was two miles from the French Quarter and there were purple Mardi Gras beads in the gutter.

The Monteleone was a scene, but the India House Hostel had it beat for price. The place was lousy with Australians, but the AC worked and the sheets were clean. I dropped my bag and got back on a streetcar heading east, toward the Garden District and Cure.

To be continued…

Periodista Tales: Highland Kitchen—McGuirk’s Vindication

By devhahn

On July 18, 2010

In Boston Bars, Periodista

I was sitting at Highland Kitchen in Somerville drinking my third glass of water. I’d sweat my weight biking up Central Street to get there. On my right, an old man with a handlebar mustache was chasing a cucumber slice around his glass with a straw. On my left, three women were talking loudly with Boston accents. ighland Kitchen is your best bet on finding a good Boston accent and a good Aviation in the same room.

Joe McGuirk was behind the bar. I’d been watching him for an hour. The man’s a maestro. He pours spirits with a sixth sense and quarters limes like a ninja. He’s a big man with a ponytail and a light beard—the Mario Batali of the bar. His face is a mirror of his guests’ faces. Serious drinkers get a somber McGuirk, happy drunks get a smile. Women always get the smile.

One of the women next to me leaned across the bar and leered at him.

“I’m looking for something strong,” she said. “Do you come in a glass?”

McGuirk winked and refilled her water. He keeps his bar packed and happy.

McGuirk was the last piece of the puzzle. For the past 18 years he’d been at the vanguard of Boston’s cocktail evolution. He’d been on the opening staff of practically every bar in town—The B-Side Lounge, Toad, Salamander, Green Street, Game On, Bleacher Bar, Highland Kitchen, to name a few. Most importantly, he’d been there at the beginning, when Chez Henri first opened. When the Periodista first appeared on the scene.

Paul O’Connell had led me to expect a challenge. “Joe’s grumpy,” he said. “He doesn’t have a lot of patience for people who are that enamored of what he does.”

When there was a drop in the action I asked McGuirk if he could solve a mystery for me.

“I can try,” he said.

I asked about the Periodista.

“We usually have it on the menu,” he said, “under Highland Classics. But we can always do them. You want one?”

I said I did, and McGuirk swept out of earshot.

At the front of the bar, tall windows look onto Highland Avenue. A kid on the sidewalk smoked a cigarette and reached through a window to drink his beer. On the back wall, a steer’s skull was celebrating Christmas while Jonathan Richman played on the juke. A family of five had wedged themselves in the front entrance and were being led to a table.

McGuirk returned with a full shaker. As he poured my drink I asked him where the Periodista came from.

“It’s a Chez Henri drink,” he said. “We had it on the opening menu there. We were the first bar to serve it that I know of. At the time nobody knew what it was.”

McGuirk smiled.

“I remember,” he said, “I was drinking at another bar—it must have been ’95, ’96—and somebody ordered one. I laughed, because I watched the guy make it. He put in, like, sweet vermouth, triple sec. He was just making it up. But it was really popular at Chez Henri, especially among regulars. Around ’97 or so, one of the local magazines, Stuff at Night or the Improper Bostonian, gave it props as the Best New Cocktail.”

Before he could escape I asked him how the Periodista ended up on Chez Henri’s menu.

“Paul and I were kind of under the gun when we were opening Chez Henri,” he said. “We were putting together the cocktail menu—we knew we were going to do a Mojito, and we were looking for an up drink. We found a recipe for this drink called the Periodista in this little tropical cocktail book.”

I held my breath.

“It was a really small book,” he said. “Almost like a pamphlet. It looked like something put out by liquor companies in the ‘50s or ‘60s to try to sell Bacardi, you know what I mean? It looked like Hawaiian Punch drawings on the cover. I can’t remember the name of it.”

Why was I not surprised?

“But the recipe in that book called for white rum,” he said. “White rum, triple sec, apricot brandy, Rose’s lime, and a pinch of sugar. We tried it and we were like, ‘oh, it’s kind of insipid.’ It lacked character, it lacked body. It was sweet, but it didn’t have any depth. So I decided to try it with dark rum. Myers’s was the dark rum at the time, Gosling’s wasn’t really around. So we tried it with Myers’s. It had a nice viscosity, a nice mouth feel, a nice smoothness. We decided that was the best way to do it. And that’s the way it’s been made ever since.”

McGuirk smirked.

“It was kind of a source of mirth when the B-Side first opened,” he said. “I was working there, and Pat Sullivan would be like, ‘Oh yeah, Joe, you invented the Periodista.’ And I’m like, you guys can keep laughing, but at some point I’ll be vindicated. It is my drink. The drink that we served at the B-Side is from Chez Henri.”

An old-timer waved to McGuirk from the other side of the bar and he disappeared again.

That was it. The cocktail that Boston has been drinking for the last fifteen years, the one on the menu at Noir, at Eastern Standard, at Clio—it’s a Joe McGuirk drink. I should have felt some sense of triumph. I had my answer. Except I didn’t.

McGuirk didn’t create the damn thing from scratch. He reinvented it, but there was an original Periodista out there. A white rum drink with a story. Where did the first Periodista come from? Did Hemingway drink them? Was it even Cuban? I still didn’t know.

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McGuirk came back around. I asked him, just for the hell of it, if he had any idea where the thing originated.

“I would guess that that recipe is probably from the ‘50s,” he said. “We don’t get a lot of cocktail recipes out of Castro Cuba, so it must pre-date ’61. Of course, there’s La Floridita and the Hemingway Daiquiri, and everybody says the Mojito showed up at the same time—so I guess that’s the idea with the Periodista, too. But Hemingway talks about a lot of the drinks that he drank, and I don’t recall any Periodistas.”

He shook his head.

“It’s funny,” he said. “I don’t think any of us ever think, when we’re putting together a cocktail list, that anybody’s actually going to give a fuck. You know what I mean? We talk about how World War I history contributed to drinks like the Sidecar and the French 75. We should remember that someday, and maybe that day isn’t too far from now, people are going to want to know the history of these things.”

McGuirk ripped off a printout and started on an order from the restaurant. Mostly bottled beers.

“I would like to see that little book again,” he said as he popped the cap off a Bud.

So would I.

I biked away from the bar, letting the hillside on Central Street carry me back toward Cambridge. I thought about the people I’d talked to over the past two months. Paul, Scott, Dylan, Alice, Cleve, Jackson. I had all their stories. McGuirk had filled in the last part of the Boston puzzle. And after all that, I still didn’t know where the Periodista came from.

It was time for me to start knocking on some new doors. I needed to get at the heavy hitters of the cocktail world. The hard core historians. The true scholars of cocktailia. Fortunately, I knew where most of them were going to be…

Highland Kitchen’s Periodista

1 ½ oz Gosling’s dark rum
¾ oz Cointreau
¾ oz Leroux apricot brandy
½ oz fresh lime juice

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

Tasting notes: Joe claims that the Leroux apricot makes his Periodista taste the best. “The test for a Periodista is smelling it,” Joe says. “When I make them I smell it to make sure there’s enough apricot in there, because that really makes the difference in the drink—it’s that apricot flavor that wins people over.” With the same proportions as the Eastern Standard recipe, Joe’s Periodista makes for a nice comparison between the Myers’s and Gosling’s versions of the drink. Joe’s is a more intense, spicier cocktail than Jackson’s, but doesn’t taste as delicately balanced.

Bonus recipe! Below is the recipe that Joe used when the Periodista first appeared at Chez Henri. It underwent some modifications on that menu, including dropping the pinch of sugar, and eventually switching from Myers’s to Gosling’s (though that was after Joe had already left).

Chez Henri’s Periodista (1995)

1 ½ oz Myers’s dark rum
¾ oz Leroux triple sec
¾ oz Leroux apricot brandy
½ oz Rose’s lime juice
A pinch of sugar

Shake over ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

Periodista Tales: Eastern Standard—Lifting Hemingway’s Prints

By devhahn

On July 11, 2010

In Boston Bars, Periodista

It was 3:25 in the afternoon and hot as hell. I should have been at work. Instead, I was racing down Commonwealth Avenue and breathing exhaust. I had an appointment to make. Jackson Cannon, the bar manager at Eastern Standard, had agreed to an interview. If I could do it that day.

I crossed into Kenmore Square sweating bullets and pulled my bike up in front of Eastern Standard. Beneath the red overhang, people in polos and shades were dining al fresco. I felt like a barnyard animal. I wiped my dripping forehead with my shirttail and went inside.

Cannon was sitting at the corner of the long marble bar, talking intently with a man in a suit. I let the AC dry my face before interrupting. He asked for fifteen minutes. I ordered a drink. It was a Wednesday.

While Hugh was filling my order, I looked around. Eastern Standard’s back bar is a metropolitan skyline of bottles, like something Hector Guimard would have dreamed up in a drunken slumber. At scale, it goes for miles. A row of high tops separates the bar from the restaurant proper. I’ve never been on the other side.

Cannon wrapped up and I joined him. He has hair from the ‘50s, glasses from the ‘80s, and his finger on the pulse of the drinks industry. He talks about things like “regulating depletion levels” and “shifting the landscape on the Old Fashioned.” He’s also created some of the best original cocktails in Boston.

I remembered Scott Holliday telling me about Cannon getting the cocktail religion hard. I asked him how that happened.

“Cleve and Misty,” he said. “Without a doubt. I was working as the assistant to the booking agent at Lizard Lounge when Brother Cleve started Saturnalia. And of course Misty was bartending. Misty unlocked a lot of this world for me. She and I lived together for many years leading up to my opening this place in 2005. We shared a house with Cleve—he and his wife had the top floor, we had the bottom floor. There were a lot of late night, bartender-centric meetings in that house. That’s how the Jack Rose Society started. Me, Cleve, and Misty are the founders. Gertsen came along pretty shortly after. But I think it’s safe to say that as far as the Boston bar scene goes, if there was no Misty, there’d be no Jackson.”

That was sweet, but not why I was there. I asked about the Periodista.

“Our first menu had six cocktails,” he said, “and the Periodista wasn’t on it. I think my first order for a Periodista actually had to go unfilled. You know, when you open a bar this size, you order several tens of thousands of dollars of liquor, and I think we had a pretty robust ingredient list at the time, but I didn’t order an apricot brandy right away. I just didn’t like the products that were available. So I couldn’t make the drink.”

So people were ordering the Periodista at Eastern Standard before it was even on the menu. Boston had already discovered the drink by the time Cannon came on the scene. There was no question in my mind where: the B-Side Lounge.

“At a certain point a higher-quality apricot brandy came on the market,” Cannon continued. “The Marie Brizard Apry, which I enjoyed mixing with, and so I decided to do a Periodista. I remember the day we started to get our recipe together. Andy McNees was here, and I think he was doing the mixing, and I was calling out the ratios—”

Ratios of what, I asked him.

“Most cocktails are based on pretty simple formulas,” he said. “The ‘classic’ formula is 2:1:1. Like, a daiquiri is two parts rum, one part simple syrup, one part lime juice. I have another formula called the ‘set,’ which is six parts base spirit, three parts fortified wine, two parts sweet liqueur, and one part bitter—it sounds more complicated than it is. And these formulas are tools for bartenders.”

Cannon pointed at Kit. Kit was shaking a cocktail and talking loudly to two women about a book he’d just read. Apparently it was about oysters.

Cannon continued, “I want Kit to be able to get into a dialogue with you about what you like, and to create a cocktail for you that’s of the moment. Well, he has to have some tools to do that, and an understanding of the underlying formula of cocktails will allow him to indulge your current interest in—”

Cannon’s eyes flicked up to the back bar, taking in the skyline.

“—Macchu Pisco, say. He can take that as a base spirit and plug different things into the other fields based on what he knows about complementary flavors. Using a reasoned judgement, he can do what we call ‘mix by assignment’—you know, you’ve assigned him an ingredient—and create something of the moment that achieves our standard of quality. It’s living mixology.”

Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was because I was skipping work, but I’d heard enough on ratios. I was there for one reason. I grabbed a cocktail menu and told Cannon to tell me what it said there under Periodista.

“Oh,” he said. “‘Rum for the intrepid reporter.’ Yeah, I mean, I come from a family of journalists and historians. Hemingway was a big presence in our household growing up. My dad was from the generation that—you know, when he was cutting his teeth as a reporter, the old-timers could tell stories of overlapping with Hemingway. I still remember when I was a kid, my father was reading The Sun Also Rises to me out loud. I guess I wasn’t showing a lot of interest, because at one point he turns to me and says, ‘You enjoying this?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ He’s not convinced. He tosses the book at me. ‘Well, you’re on your own now, kid,’ he says, ‘Finish it yourself.’”

Cannon grinned.

“And I did,” he said. “And it was great. So Hemingway was an iconic personality to me even when I was really little, and then more so as I grew.”

Again, sweet. But what did it have to do with the Periodista?

“Hemingway is someone who’s pretty dear to mixologists,” Cannon said. “When you look at the 20th century, I don’t think any other non-practicing person has as many fingerprints all over our trade as he does. He invented the Bloody Mary. That’s a fact. When he was living in Cuba, La Floridita changed their ‘No. 3 Formula Daiquiri’ to the ‘Hemingway Daiquiri.’ And of course it sold off the charts. And I think it was during that same period in Cuba when the Periodista was created for him. But, honestly, I’d have to hit the books to remember if that was it.”

What books, I asked.

Jackson shrugged. “I’d probably start with the reproductions of the recipe books from La Floridita. And Sloppy Joe’s—that was another major bar in Havana.”

I told him it wasn’t in them. Brother Cleve had done my homework for me. Jackson rattled off the names of a number of classic cocktail books in which I was likely to find it. All the same books Cleve had checked. It wasn’t in any of them.

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“Well, they got it from somewhere!” Cannon was a little flustered. “I mean, periodista. It’s Spanish for ‘journalist.’ Hemingway was the journalist. There’s no question about it. It’s a rum drink, you know what I mean? I mean—that’s—that’s just good marketing—whoever came up with it.”

Kevin Martin, the assistant bar manager, appeared behind Cannon and said something about refrigerators. Cannon excused himself. He was a busy man. A busy man who sold a lot of drinks.

I looked around some more. Hugh was at the register, counting out bills and muttering to himself. Nicole was pulling a beer for an old man in a Red Sox shirt. Kit was still talking over the sound of his own shaker. Bar backs swept to and fro. Jackson’s army.

Cannon came back and sat down. He looked at me. I looked back at him.

“It’s funny,” he said. “People might look to me as a bit of an expert on certain historical things. Hemingway in particular.”

He paused.

“But I don’t have the connection you’re looking for.”

I didn’t say anything. Down the bar, Kit emptied his shaker into a frosted coupe. Golden amber, like sunset in a glass. I could just smell the apricot.

“I will say this,” Cannon said, after a moment. “Hemingway was called the ‘Periodista’ as a nickname, that’s a fact. And the minute I saw that drink.” He snapped his fingers. “It connoted all the stuff I just told you about. And I’ve been selling with that ever since.”

He sat back and looked out over his bar. Maybe he saw the same things I saw. Maybe a thousand others. He smiled.

“When my brother comes in here,” he said, “He always orders a Periodista. And he goes, ‘Oh there’s this great drink my brother invented for me.’ And I’m always like, ‘That drink’s as old as dirt,’ you know? It’s become our own little mini oral tradition that we’ve invested a certain romance in.”

He shook his head.

“But we had to get the spark,” he said. “There’s a spark somewhere.”

There was. I didn’t know where. But maybe I knew who did.

I thanked him and started to leave. As I was pulling my bike bag over my shoulder, Cannon put his hand on my arm.

“I just got this weird feeling,” he said. “What was the Cuban place that the guy who did the Four Seasons opened up in the ‘60s in New York City? Joe Baum’s place. Joe was putting things like the Pisco Sour on the menu in like 1962. He’s was a keeper of the flame. If anyone had had a Periodista on the menu back in the day…”

I’d never heard of him.

“That might be a question for Dale DeGroff,” Cannon said. “Dale had all these original menus from Joe Baum’s restaurants. The only problem is, they were in Windows on the World when the Trade Center went down. Cocktail menus from everyone for decades in New York City. They disappeared with the towers.”

Eastern Standard’s Periodista

1 ½ oz Myers’s dark rum
¾ oz Marie Brizard Apry
¾ oz DeKuyper triple sec
½ oz fresh lime juice

Shake with ice, strain into a chilled coupe glass. No garnish.

Tasting notes: If you want to hear a story involving pomegranates and Ernest Hemingway, ask Jackson why there’s no Rose’s in his Periodista. Eastern Standard’s Periodista is one of my favorites. Myers’s is not a challenging rum, but the Apry and fresh lime complicate the drink just the right amount. In Jackson’s words, “Dark rum with orange liqueur and apricot—it’s a rich, sweet drink, but I think it’s complex enough to support it, and it’s sour enough that it works.” Works for me.

Periodista Tales: Brother Cleve—The Godfather

By devhahn

On July 6, 2010

In Boston Bars, Periodista

In a Harvard Square basement, exposed-filament bulbs burned golden beneath steel housings, Arcade Fire rumbled in the eaves, and a man in a straw porkpie hat and a beard sat alone at the bar. Outside, it was ninety-five degrees and the 4th of July. Down there, the AC had already started to dry my throat. I was at one of the newest fixtures of the Boston cocktail scene, Russell House Tavern, to meet with one of the oldest: Brother Cleve.

I’d heard whispers about Cleve since I started drinking cocktails in Boston. Some call him the Godfather of the cocktail scene. He was there when the B-Side Lounge opened. He’s a musician. He’s an influence. His name appears in print alongside all the notables: Kalkofen, Gertsen, Cannon—a familiar list by now. He’s mythic.

I introduced myself and took the seat next to him. Cleve knew the story thus far.

“I have, like, two hundred and fifty bartending books,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to look through every single one of them, but the Periodista’s not in any of Trader Vic’s books. It’s not in the La Floridita guide and it’s not in Sloppy Joe’s—those are the two most famous bars in Havana. It’s not in any of Jeff Berry’s books, it’s not in Ted Haigh’s book, it’s not in Paul Harrington’s book, it’s not in the Savoy, it’s not in the Waldorf, it’s not in David Embury’s book, it’s not in Bottom’s Up. It’s not in any of the classics.”

We were off to a great start.

“I never thought about this until you brought it up,” he said. “It’s really fucking weird. Now I’m fascinated.”

Cleve sported large, round glasses and a blue silk kimono-print shirt. Plus the hat. I felt like drinking a Mai Tai. Aaron Butler, the bar manager of Russell House, asked for our order.

“I’ll have a ginger beer,” Cleve said.

I raised my eyebrows, then ordered the same. We drank our ginger beers. I asked Cleve how he fit into the puzzle.

“I was really the guy who introduced the whole classic cocktail thing to the city,” he said, matter-of-factly.

I told him I was going to need a little more than that.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s do this in chronological order. Back in 1985 I was on tour with this band. One night we were at this diner in Cleveland, and on the back of the dinner menu was a cocktail menu. I started looking at the names of the drinks, and I was like, ‘Whoa! Grasshopper? My grandmother used to drink those. Ward 8? My aunt used to drink those.’ I left the restaurant and on my way to sound check I went over to a bookstore and bought an old Mr. Boston Bartender’s Guide. I said, I gotta get to the bottom of this. What the hell is a Ward 8?”

I knew the feeling.

“What you have to understand,” he continued, “is that at that time in history, in America, there were people of a certain age who were seeing parts of their culture disappear for the first time in their lives. Things like drive-ins, Tiki bars, spy movies, certain types of ’60s fashions. Cocktails were part of it. You know, shots were the thing in the ’80s. But things like martinis and Manhattans, nobody drank them.”

He looked at his ginger beer for a moment before taking a drink. Jackie Wilson’s “Your Love Keeps Lifting Me” had started playing in the bar. I thought about Ghostbusters II and the things from your past you let go of at a certain age. If you let go. Cleve continued.

“In Boston, things really coalesced in the early ’90s,” he said. “There was this band called Combustible Edison. They started playing down at Green Street Grill in Central Square, back when it was John Clifford’s place. They would play the kind of stuff you’d get on vinyl for fifty cents at a record store because nobody wanted it. It was the musical equivalent of the drive-ins and Tiki bars. Spy scores, lounge, exotica. Mancini and Esquivel. Elevator music. Space age bachelor pad music. The first time I saw Combustible Edison I was standing there with my jaw on the floor. Like, these guys broke into my house and stole my records and were playing them back to me.”

Cleve’s eyes glinted behind his spectacles. I could see the picture, sun-bleached, like a record left too long in the window display: Cleve’s fingertips flipping deftly through a stack of records. Vintage sunglasses perched on his ears. A thrift store pinstripe on his back. Looking for outsiders to be outside with.

“When the first Combustible Edison album came out,” he said, “it was bigger than anyone ever imagined. The Combustibles were on Sub Pop, and they were their highest-selling band next to Nirvana. When it came time to go on tour, the Millionaire—he was their front man—the Millionaire approached me and asked if I wanted to go on tour with them as their keyboard player. I said, ‘Sure.’ So we went out there in the spring of ’94, not knowing what the reaction was gonna be.”

Cleve grinned.

“But people were so ready for this it was unbelievable,” he said. “There were like-minded souls in cities across the country. Across the world, really. I would say that it was a movement, it really was.”

I asked him what this all had to do with cocktails.

“Our fans were called the Cocktail Nation,” he said. “Cocktails were a huge part of it. At a time when everyone was wearing flannel shirts and drinking Rolling Rock, we wore vintage suits with flowing ties and ascots, we drank martinis on stage. It was kind of a punk rock moment. We had a signature cocktail, the Combustible Edison cocktail. It was flaming brandy, Campari, and lemon juice. At lots of our shows you’d get a free cocktail with the price of your ticket. We eventually got a Campari sponsorship. Entire venues would be sold out, and at least half the crowd would totally get it and be completely dressed up, and everyone in there would be drinking some kind of cocktail. Much to the dismay of bartenders, who didn’t know how to do this stuff, especially in rock clubs. The best one was in Philadelphia. I remember this, when the older bartender looked at me toward the end of the night, totally exasperated, and said, ‘Why can’t you people just drink beer like everybody else?’”

Cleve laughed.

“When I got back to Boston I was a celebrity,” he said. “My picture was on the front of the Globe Arts section, with a two-page interview inside. I’m sitting there drinking a martini, looking like one of those ‘What sort of man reads Playboy?’ spreads. There was an Esquire magazine cover story, GQ, all these different major major publications at the time.”

I thought about the man on that Globe Arts cover meeting the man flipping through records in that thrift shop. A like-minded soul? Maybe.

I still hadn’t heard how the Periodista came into play. I asked about the B-Side Lounge.

“Patrick Sullivan and I opened the B-Side in the winter of 1998,” he said. “Back in ’95, Patrick had been bartending at a place called Flat Top Johnny’s in Kendall Square. I had my fortieth birthday party there, and I was going up to the bar and ordering all these drinks. Sidecars, Negronis. Patrick didn’t know what any of them were. I was like, ‘Can I tell you?’ ‘Sure!’ he said. So I showed him how to make all these drinks. That was his moment, his version of that Cleveland cocktail menu.”

Cleve took a drink of his ginger beer. I thought about asking, but didn’t. I’d finished mine, so I ordered a Coke.

“Fast forward to 1997,” he continued. “I’m back from the first Combustible Edison tour, and the Lizard Lounge is just opening up in Porter Square. The booker there asked me if I wanted to do a night. I said, ‘Sure.’ I called it Saturnalia. My idea was to play a bunch of lounge and exotica records and have classic cocktails.”

He gave me a wry look.

“This is where it starts,” he said. “This is where it really all begins, because the bartender at the Lizard was Misty Kalkofen. So, I brought in my cocktail menu—it had eight or ten classic drinks on it—and Misty was like, ‘I don’t know anything about this. I know how to pour beer.’ This is why when you read interviews with Misty now, she calls herself my protege, because I showed her, ‘Look, here’s how you do it.’ And the rest is history. All credit goes to Misty. She took that ball and ran with it. Saturnalia was huge. It was written up in the Globe, the Phoenix. We were sold out every night, lines down the block—and nobody drank beer, everybody ordered cocktails, and Misty made every drink. It was trial by fire. She learned how to do it, and she learned how to do it fast.”

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The making of a star. These days Misty is nominally bartending at Drink, when she’s not being flown to cocktailing events all over the world by tequila companies. I met her once, but that’s another story.

“After that, Misty pretty much became my personal bartender,” Cleve said. “We ended up down on Lansdowne Street—everyone does, eventually. I was DJing at Bill’s Bar and Misty was making drinks. One night Pat Sullivan comes in. He’s like, ‘You don’t remember me—.’ He tells me the story of that night at Flat Top Johnny’s. Now he was opening up a new bar. He’d bought the old Windsor Tap, which was this real lowlife kind of dangerous bar that you only drank in if your father and your grandfather had drunk there before you. He was re-dubbing it the B-Side Lounge, and he wanted the focus to be classic cocktails. He asked if I would come on to create the menu. I said, ‘Sure.’”

Cleve sat back in his chair. At the rear of the restaurant, black-clad staffers were anxiously tugging curtains, blocking the view of a long table. At the front, a large group of men and women in rolled sleeves and sundresses were tapping their feet, cracking their knuckles, and one of them was giving the hostess a piece of his mind. Such as it was.

“You know the rest,” Cleve said. “The B-Side was a huge success pretty much from the beginning. And all the folks that are the leaders of the bar scene in Boston now—Misty, Jackson, Dylan, McGuirk, Rob at Chez Henri, Dave Cagle over at Deep Ellum—they all came out of the B-Side.”

The prophet and his disciples, spreading the cocktail gospel across the land.

“And here’s the B-Side’s first menu.” Cleve opened a black folder and pulled out two narrow, beer-stained sheets of paper. There it was. Periodista.

“We knew the Periodista from Chez Henri,” he said. “Joe McGuirk had been working at Toad, and he knew I was into cocktails, so when he opened at Chez Henri he told me, ‘Hey, you gotta come check out this new place. We’re going to be doing real cocktails.’ And they had the Mojito, and they had the Periodista. That was the first place I had one. We knew it was a great drink, and they sold a lot of them, so Patrick and I put it on the menu at the B-Side.”

Talk about the story thus far. What about the Hemingway connection, the American reporters during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the whole Havana thing?

“It’s probably all bullshit,” Cleve said. He laughed. “It’s not in the books. But when you see it on menus, sure enough, it’s always tied to the Cuban thing. Puts it up there with the Mojito or even the Daiquiri—which are famous Cuban drinks. The Mojito is in the La Floridita guide. The Daiquiri is named for the beach in the town in Cuba where it was created. The Periodista—”

He shook his head.

I thought about the legend behind the drink, the stories on the menus. All those Periodistas Joe McGuirk sold at Chez Henri, all the ones Jackson Cannon sold at Eastern Standard. Did you need a story to sell a drink? If so, how bad did you need it?

I’d been putting it off, but I knew who I had to ask.

Brother Cleve’s Periodista

1 ½ oz Appleton rum, 12-year or 21-year (depending on your budget)
¾ oz Rothman & Winter Orchard apricot liqueur
½ oz Cointreau (or Bols dry orange curaçao)
½ oz fresh lime juice
1 barspoon (⅛ oz) simple syrup

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. “A lime garnish,” says Cleve. “A wheel if you’ve got it or a wedge if you don’t.”

Tasting notes: Cleve is an advocate of Jamaican rum, and his friend Jeff “Beach Bum” Berry claims that the Appleton 21-year is the closest you can get to the old Dagger’s rum, which is no longer produced. If you can’t afford that, the 12-year (or Reserve, even) will do as a substitute. He observes that there is no Cuban dark rum, which is why he recommends a Jamaican spirit here. (A classic Cuban cocktail with a non-native base spirit? Hmm…) He’s also an advocate of another unavailable product, the Bols dry orange curaçao, but Cointreau will do in a pinch. Cleve uses only fresh lime juice and adds a bar spoon of simple syrup to balance the sour. (NOTE: A big thanks to Aaron Butler for indulging Brother Cleve and I and making this delicious Periodista to Cleve’s specifications)

This week’s post also comes with a bonus recipe. Brother Cleve brought with him the original B-Side Lounge menu, and the recipe cheat sheet he would hand out to all his bartenders. The instructions for constructing an original B-Side Periodista, the first Periodista for many a Boston imbiber, is as follows:

The B-Side Lounge Periodista

1 ½ oz Myers’s dark rum
¾ oz triple sec (generic bottom shelf)
¾ oz apricot brandy (generic bottom shelf)
1 splash Rose’s lime juice
G: lime wedge

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a wedge of lime.

Tasting notes: Cleve is certain that Joe McGuirk would have brought this recipe over from Chez Henri. His comment on using bottom shelf brands: “That was the other thing with cocktails, and why a lot of places got into it: the markup on these things was incredible. As far as what it actually cost in ingredients. Because cocktails were never made with top shelf ingredients. These drinks were cheap to make. We sold them—you can look at the prices, I mean these drinks were mostly five or six dollars, and most of them cost about 85 cents to make.” Yum!

Periodista Tales: Noir—A Mystery in Print

By devhahn

On June 27, 2010

In Boston Bars, Periodista

If you’re lucky enough to be biking past the Charles Hotel in Harvard Square at 1:30 in the morning, you might begin to hear a dull roar. It’s summer, and the patio at Noir is a dense, throbbing mass of loosened ties and fallen-strap dresses. From one until two in the morning, Noir is your last chance for a last call in Cambridge.

If you show up during daylight hours, it’s a different story. I locked my bike by the Legal Sea Foods, walked through the hotel lobby and past the beaded curtain into Noir. It was happy hour, when you can drink at any bar you want. Most people were drinking elsewhere. Inside, a small staff of young women in black uniforms shuttled beers from the bar out to the patio. On the sound system, James Brown was singing about it being a man’s world. I couldn’t argue the evidence.

I took a bar seat and asked for the menu. There it was, under “classics”—Periodista. I ordered one.

Noir has the curious honor of being one of the only bars to have a recipe for the Periodista attributed to them in print: Food & Wine magazine’s Cocktails 2006. For all posterity knows, the damn thing cropped up at Noir one night in a frenzy of misplaced bottles.

As Alice Rodriguez made my Periodista, I told her what I was up to. Her reaction was typical.

“Really? Not even in New York? That is so strange!”

A row of martini glasses sat upended in a bed of crushed ice. Rodriguez flipped one over and filled it. I asked her how the Periodista found its way onto their menu.

“The whole classic cocktail revival really started around here with this bar called the B-Side Lounge,” she said. “And one of the guys who quit there and came here brought the Periodista to our classics list. Yep, a guy named Paul McGowan. He doesn’t bartend anymore, he teaches.”

The name was new but the story was familiar. I asked her about the recipe.

“I think I have that book around here,” she said, and disappeared under the bar for a minute. Across the room, a black and white film flickered blearily on an exposed brick wall. I couldn’t tell if it was Cagney or Sinatra.

Rodriguez emerged with the book, dog-eared and water-warped, and flipped to the page. “Yep, here it is,” she said. “I really don’t know how this recipe got into the hands of Food & Wine. It was so many years and so many managers ago. Just a sec.”

Rodriguez went to consult with a group of waitresses gathered around the cash register. I watched the couple sitting three seats down from me sip languidly at piles of olives wet with vodka. I drank my Periodista.

Rodriguez returned. “I think I was the only one here who would have been around for that,” she said. “I’m honestly not sure how it happened.”

I nodded. A dead end. I finished my drink and ordered another. It’s what Cagney would have done. Or Sinatra.

As Rodriguez made my second, I flipped through Noir’s menu. A solid selection of classics. Some inventive originals. I began to wonder why no one ever mentioned Noir in the same breath as other craft cocktail joints around town. I asked Rodriguez.

“Well,” she said. “It’s probably because we’re really known for being an after hours bar. We’re open until two every night, so lots of restaurant industry people come here, but it’s right when they get out of work, so they can only just get in here before we close. And by that point in the night every other person that’s been drinking is here, too. The place is jam-packed—it’s crazy, we move all these tables here out of the way—and it’s just, like, High Lifes and Fernets, High Lifes and Fernets. I can easily double my sales in one hour.”

One of the waitresses had been listening in. “Never a dull moment,” she said, laughing.

“And everyone is just wasted, too,” said Rodriguez. “I can understand cocktail people not wanting to come here, and that’s too bad—I do enjoy having a conversation like this, instead of just ‘youyouyouyouyouyouyouyou,’ late-night.”

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Rodriguez smiled. “But I love that, too. It’s like my hour when I get to do whatever I want.”

I smiled back. It was a fine story, but I began to see a list of interconnected names—McGuirk, Gertsen, Cannon, Kalkofen—with Rodriguez’s name not on it. That told a different story. Maybe the wrong one, but I wondered.

A chill breeze washed through the open patio doors, carrying with it cigarette smoke and the promise of rain. I thought about the B-Side Lounge, which by all accounts had that same manic, late-night energy and still managed to make a reputation for its cocktails. I asked Rodriguez if she used to go there, knowing the answer.

“The B-Side was such a hub for all of us,” she said. “You never had to call anybody, you could just show up and someone you knew would be there. A bartender you knew would be there—no matter who it was, you loved them. And it was such a weird place because it was just a little bit out of the way, you know? It was good food, but it wasn’t exactly outstanding. It wasn’t super cheap. It was kind of dingy. It smelled. But it was fantastic.”

Lightning in a bottle, I thought.

“Pat was actually here today,” she said. “Yep. You pretty much just missed him.”

I raised my eyebrows. Patrick Sullivan, the former owner of the B-Side Lounge. Add that name to the list. I ordered another drink. Rodriguez was kind enough to oblige.

Back at my inbox that night, a little foggy from Rodriguez’s Periodistas, I found a message waiting from another name I recognized. Ben Sandrof, former bartender at No. 9 Park, Drink, and former manager of—coincidence?—Noir. I thought that maybe Alice had enlisted him to clear up the Food & Wine situation. I was wrong. His message was four words.

“Talk to Brother Cleve.”

Noir’s Periodista

1 ½ oz Myers’s dark rum
½ oz Marie Brizard Apry
½ oz Cointreau
½ oz freshly squeezed lime juice

Shake over ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a small wedge of lime.

Tasting notes: These proportions are the ones published by Food & Wine. The brands were scouted at the source. Myers’s is a much rounder, sweeter rum than Gosling’s, and the Marie Brizard is one of the sweeter apricot brandies. However, using only fresh lime (Alice: “I don’t like anything with Rose’s”) keeps the drink from getting cloying. A solid combination.

Devin Hahn

Multimedia Storyteller, Writer, Cocktail Blogger

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 6 — Brian Rea

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 5 — Mixography with Dave and Jeff

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 4 — The Bar Room Brawl

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 3 — The Mixoloseum

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 2 — Clues at Cure

Periodista Tales: New Orleans, Part 1 — The Monteleone

Periodista Tales: Highland Kitchen—McGuirk’s Vindication

Periodista Tales: Eastern Standard—Lifting Hemingway’s Prints

Periodista Tales: Brother Cleve—The Godfather

Periodista Tales: Noir—A Mystery in Print