Getting the tone of a cocktail bar just right
By BRIAN DUFF | October 26, 2011
As the recent Ken Burns documentary Prohibition revealed, the woman-led movement to eliminate alcoholic drinks was fueled by a desire to eliminate a certain kind of masculine behavior — loud, abusive, irresponsible loutishness. The long-term failure of this effort is on display every weekend in the Old Port, as is Prohibition's legacy of allowing young women to indulge in some loutishness of their own. Gingko Blue, a jazz and cocktail club just adjacent to the Old Port's bar crawl strip but run by the owners of neighboring Walter's, seems intent on minimizing loutishness themselves. They have found an effective strategy: charge $12 or so for cocktails.
Those cocktails are so handsome they nearly seem worth it. The thick-stemmed martini glasses seem almost sculptural, and they arrived brimming with gorgeous varieties of liquids — some spookily luminescent, others intriguingly cloudy and dark. The whole space is great-looking, starting with a blue glass rendering of a gingko tree in the front window. A curving bar dominates the front half of the space. Plush blue chairs face the stage in the back, where bands play every night but Wednesday. The high backs of the chairs make it pretty hard to see and hear the music from the bar side of the room — something that seems to have been done by design. In the back folks attend to the band; in the front they drink and talk.
Patrons don't seem to do too much eating in either back or front. But Gingko Blue does offer a menu of small plates and slightly larger ones, and they are mostly more reasonably priced than the drinks. In the Jazz Age bars kept a jar of hard-boiled eggs on hand for hungry patrons, and our favorite snack at Gingko was an upscale version: a trio of deviled eggs — one with a vinegary tuna, another with a sharp creamy curry mustard, and a sweet/hot sesame sriracha. The cheese plate, with variety-box crackers, was pretty pedestrian. Truffled popcorn comes at movie-theater prices. Its salty-musky flavor called to mind an upscale version of those strange flavored powders they have at the Nickelodeon Cinema up the block (which are apparently addictive — I saw a woman huffing the cheese flavor from a paper cup after a showing of Tree of Life).
It would be easy to get addicted to the well-rendered cocktails at Gingko. A drink called the "noble experiment" combined whiskey and limoncello to create something like a sublime whiskey sour. Honey dripped down the rim at a calming glacial pace. A French 75 — gin, lemon, and champagne, was light and refreshing. The wine list has some nice glasses to go with food, like a dry, peaty zinfandel by Project Paso. We enjoyed it with a panini that was a bit too dry. It was filled with a nice fatty bratwurst and a kraut that could use more zing. There was plenty of kick to the étouffée. It was the culinary equivalent of the fire scene in The Little Mermaid: a few sweet white shrimp in front of a wall of red fire.
Related:
Prohibition drinking game!, Review: The Rum Diary, Let's try it without puking, More
- Prohibition drinking game!
Leave it to Ken Burns and PBS to crash our romantic Boardwalk Empire fantasies with a scholarly five-and-a-half-hour, sepia-tinted tome about the rip-roaring Twenties.
- Review: The Rum Diary
It's neat seeing Depp, more than a decade after his balding Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , as the younger Hunter S. Thompson, softening mannerisms later made brittle with cocaine, even if the performance is all surface.
- Let's try it without puking
So, what do you want to do later?
- Review: Fluke Wine, Bar & Kitchen
"Now I know why they call it 'fine dining,' " Bill said, as we drove away from a recent dinner at Fluke Wine, Bar & Kitchen. "Fine indeed! Wunderbar!"
- City to revisit its late-night venue policies
Stock up on Red Bull: It might soon become more possible to stay out past 1 o'clock in the morning in Portland (without being crammed into someone's house party).
- Hater-Ade pub crawl
The plan was simple: pub crawling, drinking beer, and watching March Madness basketball games with friends.
- Shelf life: Building the Best beer store
I spend a lot of time in liquor stores (hey, it's in the job description).
- Photos: Boston Beer Summit 2012
Boston Beer Summit attendees had only two days to sample from the annual craft beer showcase, held at the Park Plaza Castle on April 13 & 14, 2012.
- In post-drinking death, is anyone responsible?
Conflicting reports about why exactly Nathan Bihlmaier was asked to leave RiRa on the night of May 19 — whether he was drunk, whether he was behaving inappropriately toward another patron, or whether he stumbled over some musical equipment — leave questions about responsibility on nights out in the Old Port.
- A beginner’s guide to the city’s best heat-beating drinks
There are only two things that make us feel better when our legs stick to the seats on the T, or when a five-minute walk down the street leaves us drenched with sweat in the most embarrassing places.
- Review: Drunkboat
Despite a title taken from Rimbaud's poem, Bob Meyer's debut has less in common with the wunderkind symbolist than with David Mamet and the Coen Brothers.
- Less
Topics:
Restaurant Reviews
, Ken Burns, drinking, Prohibition, More
, Ken Burns, drinking, Prohibition, alcohol, Less