A Story from the Bar

The other day I went with my girlfriend, Sarah, to Locke Ober, a famous Boston restaurant founded in the 1870s. It's the third oldest restaurant in the city. We didn't go there to eat. We went to drink. Two years earlier I had been introduced to a cocktail named the Ward 8, which had been created at Locke Ober. For those two years I had been out of the Boston area and had been yearning to experience the drink in the place it was born. We walked inside early on a Saturday evening and strolled up to the bar. The atmosphere was classy and dark with quiet music playing from the Gilded Age. This was the era after the Civil War, with great industrial growth, and fierce politics. P.J. Kennedy, JFK's great-grandfather, was a prominent Boston politician. This is when the temperance movement started, which eventually led to Prohibition. It was a time of change and turbulence, not unlike other per...
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