By adamg on Fri., 4/27/2018 - 8:35 am
UPDATE: It's not even all that edgy. The Bukowski Tavern had the same idea a few years ago, only with a 40 of malt liquor in a bag.
The Herald interviews the general manager of a new Theater District bar that is trying to give Bostonians the "cosmopolitan and worldly" feel of New York, through drinks such as the "Hobo Experience:"
A vodka-based beverage with Combier, papaya, basil and lime - all combined, rebottled and brought out in a brown paper bag, so you sip as if you were hanging on a street corner.
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Comments
They stole my idea
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 11:46am
My new bar was going to be outside a T entrance or a 7-11 & I was going to serve Listerine based drinks in a plastic CVS bag. We would pass out synthetic Marijuana and use the people that OD as step stools. Fights would break out over drugs every few minutes & there would be a guy who could barf to the tune of whatever Cardie B song was hot at that time. It was going to be so cool. Just like NY!
Listerine drinks!
By Daan
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 12:10pm
On top of the free outdoor entertainment they could have ourtre and avant guard drag performances featuring the fabulous Listerina.
Sounds like
By Marco
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:03pm
Newmarket Sq at Mass ave stole your idea a long time ago!
This place sounds like somewhere Stefon would go!
By ScottB
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 6:33pm
If he'd even be seen dead in Boston.
Boston's hottest club is Ghost! Inspired by a Shakespearean revenge fest, this place has everything: Bourbon and chocolate wine topped with popcorn, camera lenses filled with banana-infused tequila, Derelicte by Mugatu, and the Hobo Experience!
What's the Hobo Experience, Stefon?
It's that thing where hipsters drink a $50 cocktail in a brown paper bag and wake up at the Pine Street Inn eight hours later.
HEY!
By anon
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 9:48pm
WORLD CLASS, BABY !!!
Hobo Experience
By anon
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 11:24am
I guess they called it "The Hobo Experience" because calling it "The Homeless Experience" would really have been beyond the pale and "The Lying In My Own Vomit On Canal Street After Shooting Up Experience" is too long.
ok, ok
By cfp
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 11:44am
I'm going to give the guy a break here because he's a bartender and also he's clearly an idiot.
Someone smarter than him should be assisting with any and all of his interviews. He needs some maturity to learn how to speak to people in ways that sell his products without offending his customers before they walk in the door.
That being said, this is a terrible idea. I see where he's going: he wanted something new and interesting rather than the same old...Boston has a ton of cocktail bars and a ton of places where you can get a great drink. But he took it too far and made it a gimmick, which isn't going to work for more than a month or two, at best. AND he made it worse by sounding like Bostonians are out of touch and crass, sitting around with nothing but our Bud Lights and too stupid to know that there are finer drinks out there. I'm not going to touch the Hobo stupidity of a cocktail in a brown paper bag. Not even going to go there.
He thinks he's being original but went too far. It's a shame. I bet if he had just one of those things there (I'd be interested to see what a champagne vending machine was like), it would have been ok. Everything else is too over the top. Also I would bet money that all of these crazy drinks are going to be impossible to execute well in any high volume environment.
Not even original for Boston
By adamg
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 12:09pm
The Bukowski Tavern has been doing the same basic thing for several years, only with malt liquor instead of vodka and frou-frou flavorings.
Decline of Civilization
By Daan
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 12:13pm
Didn't Douglass Adams write in one of his books that a sign of the decline of civilization are celebrity chefs. He was close but perhaps the real sign are celebrity bartenders.
They will be going
By SamWack
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:09pm
with the telephone sanitizers, in the first wave.
I'm having trouble getting outraged
By Irma la Douce
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 12:14pm
"Homeless alkie chic"-seems a bit oversensitive - that's one drink out of the overall "experience" concept. It's not like he's encouraging meth addict cosplay.
Exactly.
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 12:22pm
The internet nerd brigade who've never owned a business let alone a bar /restaurant love getting outraged. Except the Hobo Special at Bukowski never bothered anyone nor should it.
Aw, tanks.
By whyaduck
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:01pm
Actually, I fondly refer to myself as a "nerd" so I consider your comment a high compliment.
It has nothing to do with owning anything. There is a level of tastelessness acceptable by society (or perhaps your bar (no pun intended) is so low it does not really matter to you) that no one should venture near. And this bloke just hit it.
And, ya, anything named the "Hobo Special" is still offensive (and I am about as low PC as one can get).
Well.
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:37pm
I'm sorry you're offended. I sincerely hope you get over it and have a wonderful weekend. The Hobo's in DTX told me to tell you thanks.
And Lord Hobo?
By boo_urns
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:37pm
With "Hobo Life" as one of their craft offerings? I agree this isn't a great look, but a the same time, it's not like he's the only offender in this regard, he's just the only one we're bothering to get worked up over.
This couldn't be more of a crock of nonsense
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 2:38pm
If you want to be outraged take a look at real homelessness in this country. Take a look at drug addiction. Take a look at Big Pharma or the Healthcare industry. This Hobo thing is just more fake internet bullshit outrage and those whom do nothing for the homeless people you see every day yet are ready to boycott a bar over a drink are hypocrites and morons.
Eh
By boo_urns
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 3:13pm
I don't think that it takes too much effort to at least acknowledge that it's at best a bit tacky.
Ok ok
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 3:50pm
Ok ok
By Cappy
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 3:51pm
Exploitation Marketing — Portray Homelessness As Adorable Fun!
By Elmer
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 4:02pm
[img=300x419]https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/b/little-hobo-adorab...
[img=300x300]http://www.emmaraeshalloween.com/wp-content/upload...
It's not like boycotting a
By JJ3
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 5:03pm
It's not like boycotting a bar drains your energy for other endeavors. You just...don't go there.
PR lesson
By Rostonian
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 1:37pm
When the article leads with an insult to Bostonians (ie potential clientele) - it is not a good look.
"They love their sports bars, vodka sodas, and Southie parties." - That may be the most intelligent summary/generalization I have ever read.
OK fella, now I definitely want to check out your enlightened hipster bar.
This spot has been many under many names (and styles) over the years. This will be the latest version, and will likely meet the same fate.
gimmicks fade quickly in this town - now where did I put my vodka/soda?
It's certainly bad PR, but I am also wary of reverse
By MC Slim JB
Tue, 05/01/2018 - 9:27am
snobbery. There's plenty of room in every bar scene, from shot-and-a-beer joints to places serving pricey, historically-accurate pre-Prohibition cocktails served in antique glassware and built with thoughtful choices of ingredients, garnishes and ice, and everything in between. You can favor burgers, bar pies, wings and nachos without thinking lavish multi-course tasting dinners are stupid, and vice versa. We're blessed with rich diversity on both the dining and drinking fronts. How dull life would be if it were all one thing.
Were I this guy's media consultant, I'd encourage him to make the place seem welcoming to everyone, but ready and able to lead vodka/soda drinkers to exciting, novel experiences. The location suggests he's going to need the custom of the nightclub crowd, which skews young and fairly simple in its tastes. Not every one of those customers will want to take that journey, but not insulting their current preferences is a better place to start.
My favorite craft bars in town do this beautifully: they'll serve you what you want, but are always ready with an enthusiastic, non-condescending suggestion of something not far off from your usual that you might just love, and maybe could open up a new world for you.
"Reverse Snobbery" ? — Did I Miss Your Example Of Such A Thin
By Elmer
Mon, 04/30/2018 - 11:04pm
Not attributing that to you, necessarily, but
By MC Slim JB
Tue, 05/01/2018 - 1:35am
but there appears to be plenty of that sentiment in this thread. It's a common reaction to fanciness in food and drink here. We're Bostonians, wary of pretension, proud of our salt-of-the-earth, common-sense ability to spot pricey bullshit and laugh at it. It sometimes bleeds over into a kind of culinary anti-elitism, a myopic underappreciation of sophistication in technique and intention in food and drink. Sometimes we mistake craft for puffery.
I've long said that our scene is only properly understood across the range of its types of restaurants and bars, high to low. I often slag the self-styled foodie types who spend all their time chasing after the latest trendy downtown spot and ignoring the more modest neighborhood hangouts and places where immigrant chefs are cooking for other immigrants, not dumbing it down for longer-situated locals. To appreciate the richness of our scene, you have to go high and low. The analogous mistake I'm warning against is shunning sophistication.
My usual at my local, which I'm at at least weekly, is whiskey neat with a beer back, but I also frequent places like Drink and backbar and The Hawthorne. Be open to the virtues of both, is what I'm saying, even when one schmuck's ideas about promoting his own fancy place are risible and even repellent.
Hobo
By cybah
Fri, 04/27/2018 - 6:55pm
Gee this is kinda tasteless.. "hobo" is a slur that I was told eons ago wasn't very appropriate (or as we say now..."not PC")
Technically it isn't directly a homeless person, but poor migrant worker or a homeless vagrant. Just someone with no home on purpose going to place to place. Typically working odd jobs or begging enough to have income to eat and travel and get by.
Verses a Bum, who doesn't work or Tramp, who only works when forced.
All of these terms were popular post Civil War US (1860s) as the railroads expanded.
But these days, most equate it to a homeless person, the same as bum or tramp.
That's in really poor taste: dumb and offensive. But the
By MC Slim JB
Mon, 04/30/2018 - 8:59pm
rest of the cocktail menu's high-conceptness doesn't particularly bother me -- if the drinks are actually delicious. I recently had a cocktail at Bar Le Lab in Montreal that was served in a Chinese take-out carton, which might be stupid if the cocktail weren't a delectable, original riff on a 30s-vintage Tiki cocktail, well worth the C$14.
This GM's previous stint was running the bar at Committee in the Seaport, where he hoed a slightly less outré row with drinks. I had two issues there: I didn't like most of his original specialty cocktails (they looked interesting on paper but were usually too sweet: rookie-drinker concoctions in craft-cocktail drag); and his lieutenants were mostly sub-par, lacking solid technical and hospitality chops. I suspect they were hired more for their looks.
At this new place, he's starting with a really solid veteran in Moe Isaza as his bar manager, so maybe he learned something. Moe is also known for training his underlings well, unlike some places where you'll get a stellar drink if you sit in front of the star, and maybe a dud from anyone else.
But the, ahem, bar in this town is a high one if you want to be creative and charge big-ticket prices for cocktails. Boston went from zero craft-cocktail culture 20 years ago to a pretty rich, diversified one with a much cannier audience today. If your drinks aren't as well-balanced as they are flashy, and if your staff isn't uniformly both technically polished and able to make any customer who walks in feel welcome and loved, you're going to be a flash in the pan. Nothing wears off faster than flimsy novelty at $15-$17 a pop.
I'm going to try this place, because I have to try every place. I'm keeping an open mind, despite this initial misstep.
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