Edgy new bar thinks Bostonians ready for some homeless-alkie chic

Why does he not have a companion drink called "cardboard box"? A whiskey-based beverage consisting of three different types of whiskey with a shot of tequila and where the imbiber drinks in said box while people throw quarters at him or her?

Another clueless hipster douchebag who thinks flaunting the privilege in this town will help him make money.

Except...hey....

A little further research into this little nitwit yielded this interesting passage from the Zagat Thirty under Thirty in Boston in 2015.

" Peter Szigeti, 26
Beverage Director, Committee

Budapest-born Szigeti pursued a passion for photography before catching the bartending bug. He was hitting the global cocktail competition circuit by age 19, and now at the Seaport hot spot, he approaches mixing drinks like composing a photo, filling unique vessels (think shark-shaped stemware) with lusciously layered spirits, seasonal housemade tinctures (brown sugar and butternut squash purée, anyone?) and attention-grabbing garnishes, from candied bacon to dehydrated fruits set aflame before guests’ eyes. His dream: to found a bartending school that teaches the unique histories of cocktail cultures from cosmopolitan cities around the world."

The guy plays with booze and seems to know shit about anything outside his little comfort zone of hipster idiots and their enablers in the press.

Does Boston really need another bar?

I've been waiting for someplace to wear my Derelicte by Mugatu clothes!

I find this offensive. Vodka is by far the most boring spirit.

How is that cosmopolitan? This is for the 508 crowd. What they call bridge and tunnel in NY.

This will become the hot new thing to take Snaps and Insta selfies with.... Circle swings? Check!
Swigging from a bottle in a brown paper bag in swanky new bar? Check!

This makes me not sad I moved out to the suburbs last month. Guess I'm officially old and out of touch if I don't think this kind of thing is cute nor funny.

I'll save you the Googling: Combier is nothing more than a fancy-shmancy name for Triple Sec.

Sammy's Follies was a Bowery bar with a "Gay 90's" (as in 1890's) theme that opened in the 1930's. Owner Sammy Fuchs hired former vaudeville performers and circus-like folk and well-heeled uptown folks came down by the busload to "slum" it with real bums. No quotes needed for bums, they were enabled by this bar, though Sammy would feed them and buy them clothes once in a while.

It's been done before. But would this new bar at least even buy clothes for the needy?

Sammy's Follies closed in the 1970's. Recently, the Paulaner Biergarden was there.. not sure, now.

Because we all know poverty and alcoholism are hilarious parts of life. Is he going to create a drink celebrating rape too and call it the roofie?

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!

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.