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Booze
It's been 16 months since the vivacious Joan Verratti knocked on our, door toting a distilling license (the first female in the country to do so since Prohibition, allegedly) and a Crown Royal bottle filled with limoncello. Now, she and partner Tom Cavaliere are untangling the very last of the red tape required to launch their Pollyodd line of preservative-free 'cellos, a process that's taken the couple more than three years.
Thanks to Friend of Meal Ticket Mike K. for sharing this snap with us — a liquor store in his hometown of Olyphant, Pa., a little less than three hours north of Philly near Scranton, offers slushies made with Boone's Farm for the low-low price of $3.50. While we're pretty sure you can get a straight-up bottle of the putrid neon-colored booze-for-kids stuff for less than that (shoutout to the corner store called "Cold Beer" near La Salle University!), we're cool with paying a premium for abject slushification. Eat your sneaky-strong heart out, frozen mint julep at Khyber Pass Pub.
Anyone else out there cranking Boone's slushies? Let's go if so. You drive.
Photo: Coutesy of Mike K.
Stephen Starr's newest endeavor, Route 6 (600 N. Broad St.), is hosting the first of three special happy hours tonight to benefit Teens 4 Good. For the second year in a row, Starr employees are participating in the Broad Street Run with T4G as their choice charity — it's an organization that helps teens turn vacant city lots into gardens that grow healthy, accessible food for their communities. Tonight's happy hour, which goes from 5 to 7 p.m., is a fun way to help out without actually running anywhere (except maybe to the bar). Yards and Victory have donated beer and they'll also have a not-yet-named pomegranate/orange/vodka cocktail available. One hundred percent of sales from the select beer and booze will benefit T4G; you can also donate on their FundRazr page.
Photo: Neal Santos
Han Chiang, fresh off opening a Manayunk location of Han Dynasty just before Christmas, has honed in on the vacant U-City Science Center restaurant space at 3711 Market for an 88-seat Handy location. He hopes the restaurant, which also has room for about 40 outside, will be open for Penn graduation in May, which thrusts pretty much every reservationist in the city into pastel-clad pandemonium. Chiang, who regularly accommodates large parties from Penn at his Old City restaurant (he's already got 200 on the books for graduation here), feels confident he can make a successful go of it in the space that formerly housed Daniel Stern's MidAtlantic (pictured), which shut down in late February after three-plus years.
Here's hoping that Jeremy Lin reads Meal Ticket. Mike Naessens, owner of Eulogy (136 Chestnut St.) and the new Bierstube (206 Market St.), has his fingers crossed — nothing would please him more than for the upstart Knicks point guard, who's in town to take on our Sixers, to make an appearance at his German bierbar today, drumming up interest in his fundraiser for the Asian Arts Initiative. For $9 at the door, folks get a glass of Russian River's cultish Pliny the Younger between the hours of 2 and 5 p.m. today. All nine of those bucks will go to the AAI. If you're stuck at work, you can still try for some Pliny at Eulogy after 5 p.m. No door charge there, but all Pliny profits will benefit the Old City Civic Association.
Photo: Drew Lazor
View galleryThe Local 44-associated bottle shop we first mentioned nearly a year ago is ready for action — Brendan Hartranft and Leigh Maida will open the doors to the long-in-the-works addition, just a few feet east of the Spruce Street side of L44 (4333 Spruce St.), today at 3 p.m. To incentivize: One free cask pour of Yards ESA per visitor.
"People think of Local 44 when they think of beer in this neighborhood," says Maida, so opening a retail space was a logical move for them. Their cold case features upward of 500 mix-a-six choices, and beer geeks will flip over the library-style large-format selection, situated up a short set of stairs in the back. (We spy Jolly Pumpkin La Roja, Dogfish Head Noble Rot, Kriek de Ranke, Lost Abbey Serpent Stout and Aventinus among the options.) There are a few bar seats up near the register for drinkers to crack open their purchases, or have a few glasses off the Local 44 beer engine, which has been routed this-a-way to provide shoppers a fresh-poured respite.
The bottle shop will be open Sunday to Thursday from noon to 10 p.m. and Friday and Saturday from noon to midnight. The phone number, awesomely, is 215-222-CANS.
North Broad's Alla Spina (1410 Mt. Vernon St.) already has a serious craft-draft situation on its hands, but beverage manager Steve Wildy is furthering the draft-pulled Italiano effect by throwing Negronis — the sneaky-strong straight-booze cocktail loved by many, including former Inky scribe Rick Nichols — on tap. They're mixing up 15-liter batches of Bluecoat, Campari and Cinzano sweet vermouth, plus a bit of bitters, and pulling glasses on the rocks for $11.
It's been a Negroni-centric week here on Meal Ticket — you see Adam Erace's piece on the made-from-scratch version at South Philly's Stateside?
Photo: Courtesy of Alla Spina
Though unlisted among the mixers for the Early Riser, the Clover Club, the Movie Star, the cocktails at Stateside (1536 E. Passyunk Ave.) all feature one important ingredient: patriotism. "We feature only American-distilled spirits," says Jenn Conley, who designed the drink list for the restaurant. The gin is Bluecoat and Tub, the vodka Death's Door, the absinthe Vieux Carre, so on and so forth. But "about a month ago, the owners approached me to do an additional nine classic cocktails for the menu," says Conley. "As I started compiling the list and figuring out the menu, I began to really realize the limitations we had."
For starters, Conley wanted to add a Negroni. "[It] has made such a comeback," she says, but the bracing, bittersweet Italian tonic's principal ingredient, Campari, is not made in the U.S. "I didn't want to leave it out, so I decided it would be really cool to follow what our kitchen is already doing and make whatever possible in-house," says Conley. "Doing some research on the internet, I found some recipes, tried, failed and tried a few more times before getting the result I wanted."
As if The Trestle Inn (339 N. 11th St.) didn't already provide you with enough incentive to dance about it, they're adding tonight's festivities with Jim (Beam) and James (Brown). Starting at 7 p.m., you can git up offa that thing and shake your gravy boat to the tunes of the Godfather and his colleagues while sipping Beam specials. You'll have your choice of Jim Beam Black or Jim Beam Rye in the form of shots, Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and other staple cocktails to release the pressure.
The long lines outside the National Constitution Center yesterday had nothing to do with its ongoing Bruce Springsteen exhibition. Once inside, the dense crowds of beer drinkers had zip to do with the continuing St. Patrick's Day preview. OK, not exactly zip.
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