In Western Massachusetts, Gigantic Explores Cocktail History
A tiny mountain town east of The Berkshires is home to a cozy neighborhood bar serving precisely made classics alongside a collection of vintage spirits.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: In Easthampton, Massachusetts, Gigantic is a jewel box of a bar that also happens to serve some of the best drinks in the state.
June’s Free Field Guide: Get all our recommendations for the Southern Coast of Maine, which stretches from New Hampshire to Portland, by downloading our Field Guide to the Southern Maine Coast. It’s a 40-page dining guide organized into a four-day itinerary with 20+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s free this month for paid subscribers!
The Order: Stock up on fresh seafood and tinned fish at Sportsmen’s Cannery in Seaview, Washington.
Weekend Reading: A documentary follows the opening of a South Carolina restaurant, chef Luke Zahm talks about his rural Wisconsin restaurant and popular PBS television show, plus Phil Rosenthal takes his Netflix series to Orlando.
A Neighborhood Bar with a Vintage Spirit
EASTHAMPTON, MASS. — People have been drinking cocktails like Old-Fashioneds and Martinis for well over a century, and menus regularly feature pre-Prohibition cocktails like Sazeracs, Last Words, and Mint Juleps. But there are many other great drinks created in the 19th and 20th centuries that rarely appear on cocktail lists. If you go to Gigantic, a cocktail bar in Easthampton, a small town in Western Massachusetts, you’ll find lots of them. There, a team of bartenders led by co-owner Ned King serves updated Montana Clubs, Pisco Punches, and Cobra’s Fangs along with vintage spirits like 1950s Benedictine and Tippecanoe Bitters from 1885. Last year, we happened to be in town on Chartreuse Day and King shared a pour of 1960s Chartreuse to celebrate.
At Gigantic, King is joined by bartender Al Culliton, the former general manager of Brooklyn’s Fort Defiance, who also writes a terrific series for Punch about historic cocktails. (I recently sought out an absinthe suissesse in New Orleans because of one such story. They also made us a fantastic Stinger while working behind the bar at Gigantic one night.) “Al and I nerd out about all kinds of old classics,” King says. “Sometimes Al will write an article and we’ll use it as inspiration for another drink, like the Kiss the Boys Goodbye. We made a version of it for our spring menu that used pisco because we liked it with lime.”
King and Culliton also dig into old cocktail tomes through an online resource featuring historic cocktail books dating back to the days of Jerry Thomas. Some of these classic drinks have become Gigantic mainstays, like the Gem, a cognac-rum daiquiri. “We do our version of the New York Sour, and we have our 1900 Manhattan,” King adds. “That’s an equal-parts late 19th-century-style Manhattan that’s a little bit smoother since it has more vermouth than the average one these days.”
I’ve had a few of these Manhattans over my visits — it has a lot of depth thanks to a couple of key tweaks. “We do an ounce and three-quarters of Rittenhouse Rye, an ounce and a half of Cocchi Vermouth Di Torino, and then a quarter ounce of Grand Marnier,” King explains. “That adds smoothness to it. It was a classic thing a lot of bars used to do back in the day, which is to add a little liqueur.” It’s finished with three dashes of Angostura bitters, a dash of Bogart’s bitters, and a lemon twist.
These historic cocktails share menu space with drinks created by the bar team. On the current menu, you’ll find offerings like the Dinner Jacket, a martini variation with London dry gin, French vermouth, gentian liqueur, brine, and orange bitters, and the Sugar Shack, made with blended Scotch, amontillado sherry, Sfumato, Pasubio, and local maple syrup. “We approach it as a seasonal thing,” King says of the menu. “We do 10 to 14 originals, which are designed to fit with whatever we have in season. Then sometimes we do menus that are themed; we do a tiki one in the wintertime and in the summer we do an aperitivo-influenced menu. Each bartender comes up with a few drinks and we have meetings to bounce those drinks around. We pare down the drinks to distill what the best version of the menu is.”
Gigantic, which occupies a small space on the main strip in downtown Easthampton, opened in 2018. It’s a jewel box of a bar, with small seating areas in the front and back, a pressed tin ceiling, painted portraits, and stained glass lamps set on the bartop – it feels almost like a little antique shop that also sells drinks. That this bar even exists almost feels like a fluke. “My trajectory is very strange,” King says. When he got into cocktails, he was studying history at the nearby University of Massachusetts and working at a Stop & Shop gas station. “I didn’t even really drink,” he recalls. “But I found this YouTube channel with Robert Hess. It’s very cheesy, but he was making cocktails and would show what book he was using to make the drink. A lightbulb went off with this connection between cocktails and history and American history in particular. There was a liquor store across from the Stop & Shop and I would buy a bottle every week and make these drinks. It became an obsession.”
King began making drinks for himself, then for events, before getting a job at Amherst Coffee, which has a whiskey bar. While working there, he met his business partner, James Stillwaggon, who had purchased the Gigantic space and was looking for a bartender to partner with. “From not knowing how to make drinks to opening a bar, it was five years,” King says. “The people I ended up bringing on, like Al, had already managed cocktail bars, and I relied on them a lot. I’m glad my ego isn’t so big that I can’t allow myself to be taught by other people.”
What King lacked in experience, he made up for with his innate palate for cocktails. I’ve made half a dozen visits to Gigantic over the last couple years, and I find the drinks exceedingly well-balanced and thoughtful. Whether I’m having a classic like the Montana Club, an early, sweeter version of the Martini, or an original drink, like the holiday special milk punch with coconut-washed corn whiskey, PX and oloroso sherries, spiced date syrup, cold brew, and lemon, the cocktails have a clear point of view and know exactly what they are trying to be. “I prefer simplicity in a lot of ways,” King says. “The guiding principle I tell my staff — and this sounds like a dig but it’s not — is that I believe that all the best drinks have already been created. There’s always going to be people ordering Manhattans, Margaritas, Mai Tais. Every once in a while a drink pops up that takes over for a while — there are obvious ones, like the Paper Plane — drinks that are new but fit a basic template. Simplicity is the key, I think, to creating a great cocktail. Nobody comes back to drink the nine ingredient drink. I think a substantial part of a great cocktail list are ones everyone knows and loves but you do them in a way that’s exciting for people.”
While no one would call tiki drinks simple, the cocktail genre is one of King’s favorites. “I like that with that style of drink-making, you can get a 10 ingredient drink that tastes balanced and is delicious,” he says. Each February and March, Gigantic hosts Escape the Northeast, a two-month-long tropical pop-up during the grayest New England months. While at Amherst Coffee, King ran a Sunday night tiki pop-up, where he’d pick up pebble ice from Sonic and make a mix of classic and original drinks. He brought that event to Gigantic, where he expanded it into a two-month-long extravaganza. “We have the heat cranked and it feels tropical,” King says. “It feels like you’re getting out of the dreary cold of New England. Every year I get more decorations. The menu is a replica of a Don the Beachcomber menu. We sell our own branded mugs and have surf bands. It’s our busiest two months of the year.”
Besides the cocktail program, Gigantic has an extensive vintage spirit collection with more than 70 bottles, including 1910s Fernet-Branca and 1970s Appleton Estate Special Jamaican rum. “Some places focus on high-end bourbons, but that kind of stuff is generally not in our price range,” King says. “I focus on things a little more odd and unique, like amaro, liqueurs, old Chartreuse. We try to find things that are priced at a point where people in our community can try them. It’s an exciting way to expand the bar program.”
This part of Western Massachusetts is called the Pioneer Valley (I grew up here, a 10-minute drive from Gigantic), and it’s known for its many colleges as well as farms. Both those things lead to great food scenes (we wrote about where to eat and drink in nearby Northampton last month) and Easthampton’s is quickly growing. But I can only think of a handful of other very small town cocktail bars, like Bar Muse in Oxford, Mississippi, that are serving exceptional drinks to such a small population. So how does a town of 16,000 support such a forward-thinking bar?
“The first year was just me and one other bartender, Liam, and we sat at the bar playing cribbage waiting for people to come in. But it slowly developed a very good foundation of people in the town,” King says. “That was the key to making it successful. Building trust with people in town was the most important factor and letting them know that it was worth spending a little bit more for a good drink. The other factor is that because we don’t have food and there are so many restaurants around us, we were the natural place to go after dinner. It’s remained that way since.”
Some of Gigantic’s success is in adapting to the needs of the community. “In a small community, you can do what you want to a certain extent but you have to find out what the town wants and likes and what the community is missing,” King says. “Weird things became apparent, like that Easthampton loves mezcal. Our best-selling drink always has mezcal in it.” And for a lot of locals, the bar fills a hole in the social scene. “There are great places to get a beer, but if you want to go and have a cocktail without the pressure to order dinner or you want to go out with friends or sit and read a book, it fills a lot of nooks for people,” he says. “Because of bartenders like Al and Molly [Gajdosik, the assistant manager], who are queer, it’s become a space for people who are queer and we have our own queer night. I think it’s important as an ally, since a lot of gay bars have disappeared. We have a very dynamic and diverse staff and I think that lends itself to being a better place for the community. We’re as happy to have the farmer from Southampton as the poet from Northampton. It’s a good crowd and everyone seems to get it.”
Five years in, King says that he’s been thinking about this question of how to build a craft cocktail bar outside of a city. “I think that’s something that is not only doable, but it makes a lot of sense, especially for people living in a big city who want to move home but want to keep doing what they’re doing,” he says. “Rent is so much cheaper, and there’s a lot of room to do something interesting. We’re trying to maintain this balance between formal and casual. Dress how you want, but we’re trying to do the most elevated versions of these drinks that we can for a neighborhood crowd.”
78 Cottage St, Easthampton, MA 01027 | @gigantic_bar
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A True Hidden Gem for Tinned Fish
SEAVIEW, WASH. — I love to hit local food shops when I travel, even if I don’t have the ability to take everything home with me. When in Seaview, located on the Southern Washington coast, we immediately pulled over when we spotted Sportsmen's Cannery. This shop offers fresh seafood like clams, crabs, and salmon, along with frozen fish, salmon jerky, smoked items, and tons of seafood they tin themselves. I grabbed cans of Chinook salmon, tuna, and smoked oysters, which they offer in flavors like lemon, teriyaki, and habanero. Tinned fish is the perfect souvenir since you can just throw it in your suitcase, but if you’re staying nearby, Sportsmen’s offers custom fish processing, so you can bring your clams to be cleaned after a day of digging at the beach.
1215 35th St, Seaview, WA 98644
This week’s reading list is actually more of a watchlist, with a James Beard Award-winning film, an Emmy-winning PBS program, and a new episode of a popular Netflix travel show. Enjoy.
SOUTH CAROLINA
Greenville’s Winsome New Restaurant: If you were monitoring the James Beard Awards earlier this month you may have noticed that the Short Form Visual Media award went to a documentary film called Great Wall. The film is described as “a short documentary of a Chinese-American woman who comes from a line of restaurant owners two generations deep that immigrated to America from Eastern Asia in the early 1980s. Growing up scarred by the restaurant industry, the once successful chemical engineer couldn't help but discover her true calling, opening her very own dim sum restaurant.” That engineer is Khailing Neoh, an energetic and engaging chef whose restaurant, Sum Bar, opened last year in Greenville, South Carolina. We met Neoh at an event earlier this spring and her new restaurant looks excellent. Watch the film when you have a chance and then maybe we can all road trip to Greenville together.
WISCONSIN
A ‘Force for Connection’: “Food is such a powerful tool for connection. If we open ourselves and can be a little vulnerable, with our ego and our fragility and our sense of not knowing, it can be uncomfortable and really scary and daunting, but food provides a fantastic medium to let some of those boundaries go and allows us to really engage with each other.” That’s Luke Zahm speaking to Robin Scheines in a recent interview with The Great Discontent. Zahm is the host of Wisconsin Foodie, an Emmy Award-winning PBS series about restaurants and agriculture in Wisconsin. Many of our Wisconsin road trips have been inspired by his work, so give the interview a read and watch a few episodes of his show.
FLORIDA
Traveling All Across the Sea and the Land: You don’t need us to tell you to check out Somebody Feed Phil, the popular Netflix travel show hosted by TV writer Phil Rosenthal. But if you haven’t watched any shows from the most recent season, check out Episode 1: The Real Orlando. Rosenthal is joined by American Weekender Internet Friend Amy Drew Thompson, who writes about food for the Orlando Sentinel. Together, they visited East End Market where they stopped by Hinckley’s Fancy Meats and La Femme Du Fromage for sandwiches, sat down at Bib Gourmand-recognized Domu, and more. If you’re headed to Disney World this summer, this episode will give you plenty of Mickey-free options if you’re looking to escape the Disney orbit for a meal or two. I have only been back to central Florida once since I worked at the St. Pete Times as an intern many years ago — so long ago that I refuse to call it by its current moniker, the Tampa Bay Times — but I’d probably also plan to hit up Norman’s for dinner and stop by Papaya Club for a Oaxaca Colada. And probably a Kingston Negroni too. Cheers!
— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
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Loved seeing the mention of Sportsmen's Cannery! I haven't actually stopped in myself, but I did spend a weekend in nearby Long Beach, WA and loved the area. I'll have to make another jaunt soon and check out the cannery while I'm there!