First Foot in the Water

Newtowne Grille - 1945 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge

It was my first week in Boston and it wasn't a particularly good time for me to move. Though I had only become actively interested in basketball in general this year, it was the year that the Celtics decided to not only be good, but to be the best in the game, headed into the playoffs. I have always been a Red Sox fan and the season had essentially just begun, two weeks not being nearly enough time to become grumpy and embittered towards the team as is almost always the case come June. But this was May, and the new job had already started.

The couch I was riding in that time did have access to the games and my friend's roommates were interested in sports, but not as interested as I. If I had already staked claim to the television and was in the act of watching, they would be too nice to ask me to kindly go screw so that one or the other may watch whatever she wished, but I needn't be away for longer than ten minutes for them to assume complete control. It was their right after all; I was paying them with goodwill alone.

Inevitably, this meant that I'd have to find a place to watch the games. Porter Square is an interesting little place, immediately encircled by bars and low-to-mid-scale eateries, a nice little shopping plaza with requisite hardware and liquor stores. This one even has an independent book store, even if its floor plan had been laid out with the height of Barnes & Nobles sterile accessibility in mind. All-night supermarket, two regional chain Mexican joints, strip mall dentistry, the works. After that on one side it looses a battle with the commuter rail and fades into urban stagnation strip and on the other it shruggingly gives up and lets Somerville and Davis Square handle any further attraction. There are some little places tucked away, but they're described as near Porter Square, not a part of it.

The exception is Mass Ave, which stretches on into an expanse of old-fashioned (here to mean, post-glory ages 70's) highway ephemera before fading itself into the interstate. There's the bordered up KFC! Three gas stations separated by vacant lots? Why not! Hey, a sushi bar! We must be near Davis Square at this point. A hole in the wall family Mexican place? Must have missed the Davis turn.

Straddling the line of essentially isolated commercial development, residences, and the almost exurban beyond is the Newtowne Grille.

* * * * *

Cambridge is a city of intellectuals. On one side is MIT, the other side, Tufts, and in between is Harvard, a hub for people all over the North Side to varying degrees. It's marked by the Red Line subway, and to the uninitiated, veritably thousands of differing bus routes leading out to Allston and beyond. Porter Square and its immediate surroundings are something of an oasis, beckoning you to Somerville's vast residential sprawl, or Davis' conglomeration of bar culture and satellite other, minor squares. Everything is accessible, everything is alluring. But there ain't a damn sports bar in the place.

Most of these places are not very well suited to watching the Game, though will more than suffice in a pinch.I had walked up and down Mass Ave the previous afternoon and the afternoons alone on the previous weekend, looking forlornly into the darkened or barely-occupied caverns of just opened bars pubs and taverns that dot the landscape, hoping to find walls decked with jerseys, athletic equipment wallpaper and framed photos of past heroes framing banks of high definition televisions. Invariably, there were televisions. Just as likely they were either off at those hours or tuned already to one generic sports program or another. But these aren't sports bars, even if their halls are packed with green or red or both come game time; a sea of yelling or forlorn faces. These are places to participate in the more low-key more traditional bar-going behaviors. Unless desperation or a fevered pitch reigned, the clientèle will behave like that too.

I had seen the Newtowne Grille on on of my expeditions and it seemed a comfy enough place. Full pub style, one-half sit-down restaurant, the other, smaller half a bar. But it wasn't until I went inside (I entered the pick-up section first by accident and had to traverse the dining area) before I knew that this was going to be my kind of place.

No pretzels on the bar but who needs em? Depending on where you sat at the bar, you had good sight lines to at least three televisions without having to strain your neck. Sure, you might have to sit facing away from the bar to see the best condition HD TV, but if you're front and center at the bar you're close enough to the two smaller TVs that it doesn't matter, and the rear-projection screen is right behind you. And what's this? PBR on tap. The people in the bar and the readily available American-style pub food right at the bar cast the words "local" all over the stools, the empty buckets plastered with beer logos, the one screen high at each corner of the bar on Keno, the comfortable banter with people of seemingly all walks and income levels with a pixie bartender always quick with a smile. These were all the pretzels one could want.

I got a burger and fries -- decent enough and not very expensive -- with a draft Sam Adams and paid very close attention to screens showing black men in green shorts run up and down a well-lacquered wood floor. To my left was an old guy absorbed in his Keno game, at the end was a Cleveland fan cheering for the wrong side in the face of his apparent friends, to my right a guy engrossed in his beer, his pizza, and the Game. By my guess there were six college students and maybe a few other of at least college age, the rest were of my dad's generation, but the atmosphere was so calm and welcoming I felt like we all were regulars. As I eased into idle sports-related banter -- heckling sometimes the Cleveland fan while at the same time updating him happily as Cleveland in a different sport was beating New York -- I found that the bartender began regarding me too as just another regular. It didn't seem to matter that this was the first time I had ever been here; all that mattered was that I was wearing a Celtics t-shirt, sat more or less quietly, and had, I'm sure, the beaming face of one well-satisfied with where he is.

Some might call this a dive bar, but I think that's disingenuous. Perhaps people used to bar menus featuring $8 appetizers and thirty beers on tap would call this a dive, but it isn't by my standards. It's just a normal bar, completely standard. When you're surrounded by bars like these on a regular basis, sure, they can become tedious, they can begin to blend together in a homogeneous haze, minor price differences and food qualities obscuring over time. This can be the price for honesty. But when the place is as straightforward in its abilities, its offerings, and its services as Newtowne, it transcends these standards, if ever slightly. It ceases to become another in a long line of indistinguishable American pubs and stands out, not as a beacon of exception, but as an exemplar to all of its ilk. In twenty years, its distinguishing characteristics will have faded into the same haze. But I know when a place like this hits all the expected marks so truly, it will combine itself with the best of its ilk: the windswept outposts on rural roads in Scotland; the honest establishments just far enough out of the way for an Upstate New York town's college population; the lyrical, idyllic simple pub, always just around the corner.

And if all else fails, they're guaranteed to always have the Game on.

*****

Waitstaff: 7 (can be occasionally slow, but very grateful for patience)
Pours: U/K (didn't get any liquor, will provide supplementary post in the future)
Price: ~$20 (for food and drink; note: was given a free pizza for tipping well on second trip)
Atmosphere: 6

Introduction: Shipping Up to Boston

One of the first things I've discovered since becoming a permanent resident in Boston Outlying (specifically Somerville) is that it is massively easier to move about in by car than my Northern-New England childhood indoctrination had drawn me to believe. In a way, this is a sad revelation. In previous trips traveling to variously Somerville, Cambridge, Malden, and other of the urban suburbs of Boston I had become, during night and day, constantly, hopelessly lost. At one point, I had to rely on a friend to be a living GPS for me, and it was her house I was trying to find. But now, having finished couch-hopping, I find it easy to poke my way about town in my car; streets are immediately identifiable, despite the notorious generally Massachusetts and particularly Boston habit of lamentable under-signage; even the barest observed landmark is seared into my brain: more than ample guidance to a central guiding road. It may not be the quickest way, or the most direct, but in a town crowded so with a wealth of roads at every opportunity, I believe that it rarely makes a difference. Even Boston's proclivity to countless and contradictorily-placed one-way streets seem a mere trifle.

I say this is lamentable because I am a rare person that has a car, who lives in the greater Boston area, and who has no desire or, often, need to drive. Why is this? Though MADD has become a representative of absolute prohibition -- much to the chagrin of its usurped founder -- there is one tenet of their's I as absolutely believe: drinking and driving are poor combinations. In moving down to Boston, I planned to do one hardly ever and the other with utter, shameless profligateness. The title of this blog should more than tip you off as to which is which.

It's not much of a temptation to drive here, despite how surprisingly easy I find it to get around. Naturally there's the desire for the autonomy granted only by car imbued in all people who grew up in an area twenty minutes' drive from anywhere, so ignoring the pull is great -- especially since I inadvertently discovered how easy it is to get from my new apartment to my job. It's just another thing to resign oneself to, and resignation for the drunkard in this city is something best learned quickly.

People say it's expensive to live here. I haven't seen what data backs it up, if there is any, but if it is little more than a perception, still I can see how that perception arose. The bars in this part of town are usually pretty pricey, or have bad food, or both. It's not allowed in Massachusetts, it should be noted, to have "happy hour" as most people would term it: reduced price booze only between certain hours on certain days. But so far, the drinks I've had haven't been overpriced, necessarily. Since I'm new to town, and if Maine and New Hampshire's economic opportunities for the recently graduated continue their respective trajectories I won't by any stretch be alone, my goal is to set out and find the best drinking holes for the inebriatorily inclined.

My requirements are very simple: what's on tap, how's the staff, what's to eat, and, of course, how are the prices. There will be some side quests, such as finding an appropriate local dive, finding out whether there exists a true sports bar outside of Fenway, and finding as always the cheapest and oddest bars available, as well as whatever other quests I set for myself. I'm also open to set missions, either through the comments or by emailing me.

But the mission statement is simple: the best bars, the best places, the best booze.

Some basic guidelines:

The reviews will be set up very simply. I will go to a bar twice, no drinking beforehand so I'm not lulled into thinking a bar maybe has better pours than it may actually have. At the end of each segment, I'll list the bar's "stats;" that is, what I drank, how much each drink cost (if available), the exact location of the bar, if I don't mention it in the segment proper I'll indicate whether there is food available at the bar (and I literally mean at the bar), and a rating of 1-10 of the waitstaff, my perception of the pours, and the atmosphere. In this way, I hope to make this as informative for you as I hope it will be educational for me.