Does Boston Still Drink?

There was a time when Boston’s neighborhoods were defined as much by their bars as their ZIP codes. Southie had its Irish pubs, Allston had BU/BC hangouts, downtown had high-end steakhouses where power brokers sipped single malts. Before Hollywood gave us Cheers, the Bull & Finch was already serving up the original where-everybody-knows-your-name experience on Beacon Hill.

Photo illustration by Benjamen Purvis

Then came a spate of closings; the same neighborhoods once shaped by their drinking institutions could no longer sustain them. It happened so fast that a 2014 guidebook of Boston’s best dive bars now reads like a eulogy to old Boston.

I don’t have to go far for signs of change. Within the first block of my bar crawl, I pass my former Brookline haunt, O’Leary’s, a family-friendly Irish pub where a red-headed server with a brogue once served $5 drafts alongside a complimentary basket of homemade scones and soda bread. It lasted 28 years before closing in 2020. Now it’s a matcha café and an Indian takeout joint. The local barstoolers who once talked sports and politics over shots and pints have vanished. Tellingly, the only COVID survivor on the block is recent arrival Bar ’Cino—a mid-priced Italian spot in Newport Restaurant Group’s 17-venue empire—where graying professionals quaff $13 glasses of rosé alongside earnest grad students and their doctoral advisers.

You could blame soaring real estate prices, the spread of ride-sharing apps that encourage cross-neighborhood barhopping, and Boston’s Byzantine liquor-licensing process for the withering local bar scene. But there’s something else going on, too.

Gen Z simply isn’t into booze culture.

At youth-oriented Southie spots like the Playwright and the Broadway, sales have plummeted 30 percent in five years, according to Broadway Hospitality Group beverage director Jeff Boyer, who says, “I just think the drinking consumer has chosen to partake quite a bit less.” Over at Stephanie’s on Newbury and Saltie Girl, owner Kathy Sidell reports that zero-proof cocktails now make up 5 percent of beverage sales, up from zero since 2023, when the restaurant launched its mocktail program. Even more striking: At Equal Measure, bar principal Eliza Hoar says 30 percent of her Gen Z clientele orders spirit-free, and NA concoctions are “really popping off.”

To be clear: Gen X and millennials remain loyal to their craft beers, cocktails, and wines. They might abstain during Dry January or pregnancy, but alcohol remains an integral part of their social life. Unfortunately for Boston, though, many of them have moved to the suburbs, where restaurants and packy stores continue to enjoy brisk business. Boyer confirms that Broadway Hospitality’s suburban Tavern in the Square locations, which serve this older crowd, are thriving. Yet in the city, where bars and restaurants need reliable and committed clients, owners have begun to fret over how to attract newer generations that aren’t as dedicated to drinking culture.

Deciphering Gen Z’s consumer habits keeps high-paid analysts busy, but here’s the executive summary: The 2016 legalization of marijuana offered a cheaper way to catch a buzz, and then the pandemic normalized drinking at home, fueling an explosion in premixed cocktails—now a $3.1 billion global market and the fastest-growing spirits category in the nation. For younger Gen Zers, pandemic isolation disrupted social development, according to a 2021 poll. Add in the anxieties heightened by social media, and you have a generation acutely concerned with being in control at all times. While sparkling cocktails may tantalize on TikTok, one drunken gaffe can become a viral clip that haunts you forever.

Then there’s the health factor. While alcohol’s negative effects on sleep and overall wellness have long been known, in January, then-U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy announced that ethanol—pure alcohol found in all alcoholic beverages—was a no-more-fooling-around, straight-up carcinogen. If Gen Z didn’t have a compelling reason to cut down on cocktails and beer before, they certainly did after that.

Boyer confirms that most young adults are only going out once a week and entertaining at home more, or traveling, or “doing something else entirely”—perhaps, some bar owners say, dropping disposable income on sports-betting apps. The result is that an unreliable, weekend-only, destination-focused Boston bar has replaced the traditional night at the pub. Case in point: Last May, Broadway Hospitality shuttered their Allston outpost of Tavern in the Square because, Boyer says, college kids were bypassing the neighborhood bars and heading straight for the Seaport instead.

So how do these trends play out on a Saturday night in Boston? To find out, I’ve recruited my millennial neighbor, a biotech worker, for a bar crawl from Fenway to the Back Bay to Downtown. Like a millennial, my companion will happily sip tequila and mezcal all night, though I’ll be spirit-free because I’m on the job. The question for tonight isn’t just who’s drinking what, but who’s drinking at all—and what that means for a city that has long worn its barstool allegiance like a badge of honor.

Heading up Beacon Street, we duck into Equal Measure, the cocktail-bar companion to the new Eastern Standard just outside of Kenmore Square. It’s early, and Equal Measure has that pre-rush calm as Beyoncé’s “Drunk in Love” thumps over a mellow scene. Two millennial couples in flannel, jeans, and sneakers lounge on a banquette; at the bar, two younger millennial women in strappy tops sip martinis and scan their phones. We sit at the bar next to a Gen X couple hugging the corner, maybe on a date. She’s blond, he’s got a close-trimmed beard, and they chase their herb fries with sparkling rosé and whiskey on the rocks, respectively.

Every generation’s relationship with alcohol begins with their parents’ habits—to reject or repeat. Thus, this alcohol story begins with the baby boomers, though we’re not going to see many of them tonight, because if they’re out, they’re likely enjoying elevated cuisine at places like Harvest, among Cambridge’s finest and most established restaurants, where academia-adjacent professionals gather, ordering their Tito’s martinis like it’s muscle memory.

One person who really gets boomers is Ben Chesna, the beverage and wine director at Himmel Hospitality Group (Grill 23 & Bar, Bistro du Midi, Harvest). He’s spent his career working high-end dining rooms from Aspen to L.A. to Boston, and the one thing he knows about them is that they know what they want. He says they tend to order “the same cocktail they’ve had twice a week for the past 20 or 30 years.” Chances are, it’s a vodka martini (Grey Goose/Tito’s/Ketel One) prepared “a very specific way”—three olives, or one olive, or cocktail onions. “It’s sort of like a ritual to them before dinner,” he explains.

They’ll sip their go-to drinks while perusing the wine list, and when the sommelier arrives, they’ll warm to a nice bottle of Brunello di Montalcino ($140), perhaps from a town in Tuscany where they once rented a villa. “People in that 55 or so age group always read the cocktail menu, go through it, ask questions, and then fold it away and ask, ‘Do you have anything like an ‘Old Fashioned?’” says James Beard–nominated cocktail wunderkind Oscar Simoza (JM Curley, the Wig Shop). He suspects that the older crowd “feels a little intimidated by new ingredients and new flavors.”

Boomer Kathy Sidell, of Stephanie’s and Saltie Girl, agrees that her friends are “very specific about their alcohol and brand of choice,” though she notes that their preferences have changed dramatically since she opened the Metropolitan Club in Chestnut Hill in 2004. Back then, she says, “people were drinking very expensive, big, bold, red wines, and a lot of brown spirits. And then the world kind of fell apart in 2008.” Suddenly, everyone wanted to eat at the bar, and boomers began drinking less red wine and more vodka. These days, Sidell says, her female friends are barely imbibing; they’re “doing a lot of gummies” instead, to avoid the high sugar content of alcohol, though her male boomer friends haven’t surrendered their whiskey.

If boomers picked up their drinking habits from their elders, they were likely trained by the Greatest Generation, whose own intense relationship with alcohol was shaped by Prohibition, the Depression, and World War II—a triple threat to sobriety.

Passage of the 18th Amendment didn’t just help build a future president from Massachusetts’ fortune (Joseph Kennedy is rumored to have been a bootlegger)—it elevated cocktail culture to the nth degree. Prohibition in Boston was “just a massive, massive party,” said Stephanie Schorow, author of Drinking Boston, A History of the City and Its Spirits, in a WCVB interview earlier this year. Historians have estimated that 4,000 illegal venues popped up in the Greater Boston area to meet demand for illegal booze, served in teacups, hidden behind multiple locked doors, and camouflaged by legit business fronts.

Of course, as history tells, Prohibition backfired by turning the majority of good Americans into sinners. Overnight, most citizens became scofflaws—a term invented in Massachusetts during that era by two locals competing for a $200 prize for the best word to describe “a lawless drinker.” To evade raids and save his bar, Irish immigrant Jeremiah Foley, who’d sunk every dime into J.J. Foley’s, turned it into a shoe store (wink, wink, nudge, nudge). Apparently, locals couldn’t get enough of his, ahem, unique footwear.

After the repeal, cocktails became synonymous with sophistication. Cash-strapped Americans flocked to the movies, where they could watch slinky starlets in furs and diamonds sipping on Manhattans and sidecars. Alcohol got its biggest boost, however, during World War II when millions of American soldiers, officers, and factory workers turned to booze for stress relief, bonding, and morale-building. When they brought those hard-drinking habits back to Boston, daily imbibing became the norm. After their shifts, ex-servicemen knocked back Boilermakers at Jacob Wirth’s, while Boston’s elite swilled French 75s at Locke-Ober and Old Fashioneds or whiskey sours at the Harvard, the Union, and the Somerset clubs.By the ’60s, the three-martini lunch was standard. Sidell says her father, a banker, was “very Mad Men–esque.” She tells the story of the time he was raising money to buy a certain bank and had to work with a big financier from New York, a notorious lunchtime drinker. “My father guzzled milk before the meeting so he could keep up with the guy and keep his wits about him,” she says.

Boston’s boozy culture once permeated higher education, too. Boston University professor David Jernigan, who has spent 40 years studying alcohol marketing and youth consumption, says that much of his Harvard education in the ’70s centered around teaching the next generation of elites how to hold their liquor. Every Thursday at 4:30 p.m., Jernigan recalls, his department would hold a mandatory colloquium for undergrads accompanied by sherry, paid for by the school. As a bartender at Harvard events, Jernigan served a guest speaker—the dean of education at another Ivy university—six “very, very dry vodka martinis,” after which the dean delivered a completely incoherent speech. Everyone was embarrassed for him; after all, he’d failed the most basic social test.

Fortunately for our livers, boozy work lunches and lectures went the way of the Combat Zone. Now, Bostonians are drinking less, so bars have shifted their focus from volume to revenue per head, ushering in a new era of insanely complex cocktails to justify the price and appeal to ever-evolving tastes. And speaking of tastes, customers are now coming in with unprecedented knowledge, says Hoar, of Equal Measure. She explains that when everyone was trapped at home during the pandemic, old standards like G&Ts—just a shot of booze and tonic—no longer cut it. In search of earthly delights, many of us turned to Instagram and YouTube, which transformed home mixers into semi-pros. That knowledge has forced creators like Hoar to “push the boundary.” To make Equal Measure’s Velveteen ($17), for example, Hoar wields six different bottles: Angel’s Envy bourbon, Amaro Averna, Licor 43, Lustau East India Solera sherry, Angostura, and orange bitters.

Despite the availability of exotic liqueurs, many bartenders report that the espresso martini still reigns supreme in this town, further proof that day and night, Boston runs on caffeine. At Equal Measure, the Harley Davidson–tattooed bartender tells me he’s already served ten $18 espresso martinis that night (advertised with the tagline “wake me up and f*** me up,” it features Ketel One, Mr Black coffee liqueur, and Braulio vegan whipped cream). He slides me a $14 mocktail shrub called “Get Stoned” while my companion gets a $16 “Down the Rabbit Hole” (tequila, Aperol, lime, turmeric honey, carrot greens, olive oil) because she likes tequila and is intrigued by turmeric honey. Typical millennial.

Surprisingly, nonalcoholic spirits can cost as much as the real stuff, though you wouldn’t know it from Boston’s drink menus, where mocktails are priced around 25 percent less. Because customers expect boozeless quaffs to be cheaper, the high production costs of alcohol-free alternatives have forced some bars to rethink their pricing strategies across their entire beverage service. As we’re paying up, the bartender asks us where we’re heading next. When we tell him Hecate, he asks us if we’ll “boomerang” a cocktail over to the staff there. A few minutes later, my ungloved fingers are rapidly freezing to a plastic container wrapped in tape marked in Sharpie: “From: Jace + Faith @ Equal Measure. We ❤ you!”

Walking through Kenmore past the Hotel Commonwealth—once the site of the Rathskeller, or “the Rat,” where the Pixies, the Cars, and Dinosaur Jr. played—I recall my recent conversation with Bill Janovitz, the local musician and rock historian who settled here after graduating from UMass Amherst in 1989. Janovitz came of age on Long Island, where, he says, booze was everywhere. As a teenager, he and his friends could drink a 12-pack of Meister Brau, “the shittiest, cheapest beer possible, and be up the next morning and maybe have a couple more.”In the ’80s and ’90s, rock and alcohol fueled each other, Janovitz says, pointing to the iconic photos of the Rolling Stones nursing bottles of Jack Daniels. Janovitz’s band, Buffalo Tom, was influenced by “this neo-noir beatnik thing that romanticized alcohol…all those early Tom Waits songs were about drinking.” In ’86, Janovitz saw the Replacements at the Channel in Fort Point and says they were so intoxicated, they could barely get through their set: “It was really shambolic, but it was teetering on very good.”

At the Rat, Janovitz says, Buffalo Tom’s fans were “meathead-ish dudes looking for a place where they could express themselves. And a lot of that expression was drunken falling and fighting,” though he says his fans weren’t quite as debauched as fans of Dropkick Murphys or the Bosstones. Buffalo Tom often got paid in drink tickets—“and if you were lucky,” he adds, “a six-pack of booze and some pizza.” Even today, the Gen X rocker says he can’t imagine watching a live band without something in his hand.

Not a scrap remains of the storied Rat, which closed in 1997, so we blow through Kenmore, scurry under the elevated Storrow on-ramp, and turn right on Hereford Street in search of Hecate. It’s styled as a speakeasy, and we spend a few harrowing minutes shivering up and down Public Alley 443, trying to find the entrance. Finally, we spot a guy carrying an adding machine heading toward the service entrance of Select Oyster Bar. He recognizes our confusion and gestures to an unassuming black door.

Hecate’s moody bar. / Photo by Joe St. Pierre, Adam Detour

We descend into the Hecate cave, where five millennials blink up at us from the nearly pitch-black waiting area. As my fingers thaw, I’m grateful to hand off what I’ve started calling the “urine sample” to the host. She’s a bit confused by the boomerang cocktail but graciously takes it, nevertheless.

A metal-chain curtain separates the tiny, cave-like bar from the equally tiny waiting area. Seats at Hecate are near impossible to get; you can try nabbing a spot on the waiting list in person the day you hope to come, then wait for a text. Through the curtain, I see it’s inky black inside with gold accents. EDM is climbing the walls, and though I love the cooler-than-cool vibe, once our butts are in the banquette, I feel a smidge anxious, as though we miraculously landed in the Celtics owners’ box during the NBA Finals, and we’d better make the most of it.

We’re handed a booklet where each cocktail—“crafted with intention, enjoyed with curiosity”—gets its own page and elaborate storyline (printed in such small type that my companion has to use the candle to read it; I don’t even try). She orders the “Ixtlan” (Vago Elote mezcal, Ocho Reposado, Piloncillo, ancho chili, toasted rice, cinnamon and Xocolatl bitters, and clarified corn milk). Squinting but not actually seeing, I randomly point to something on the menu and ask for it spirit-free.

Hecate beverage director Lou Charbonneau believes social media is one thing that differentiates Gen Z drinkers from other generations. Whereas millennials and Gen X imbibers might know what they like, he says, young adults are constantly being “bombarded with a ton of things, a ton of trends, a ton of videos” on TikTok. “They don’t have to necessarily seek information out organically.” Charbonneau says that that information overload translates to a different kind of intentionality: People come to places like Hecate seeking a specific experience—a setting that can be strategically documented and shared in their social media feed.

Charbonneau proves prophetic when we sit next to three Gen Zers—two marketing professionals based in Cambridge and a friend visiting from Baltimore. They’ve finished their destination cocktails and are looking for something else to do. So they talk to us. They say they first saw Hecate cocktails on TikTok and tried to get a table here four times prior to tonight. The guy, who’s from the Cape, says he loves beer, mezcal, and dive bars. He name-checks the places he frequents: Wusong Road, 21st Amendment, and Earl’s at the Pru.Hecate’s marketing is on-trend, offering “an unparalleled experience that embodies the essence of mystery and intrigue.” That copy might be catnip to Gen Z, but the appeal is fleeting. Now that they’ve checked Hecate off their list, I get the sense our new friends are ready to move on. And therein lies the quandary for Boston bar owners: How to turn these experience-seekers into regulars?

The Gen Zers admire our drinks but don’t order anything else; I admire their restraint. When I was their age, I’d have walked into a place like this and thought, “I’m not drunk enough for this,” then played catch-up by shotgunning whatever cocktail was on offer. Yes, I’ve blacked out. Yes, I’ve asked people why they missed last night’s party only to find out we’d talked for hours. Yes, I’ve puked in my own bathtub, even though the toilet was right there. (Bigger bowl? Easier aim?) I say all this by way of explaining that sometimes intoxication is useful. Like right now, when the initial excitement of the evening is ebbing.

I nod to my millennial, our glasses full of nothing but crushed ice, and we head toward the exit. Our next stop is Grill 23, the classic Boston steakhouse where, I’ve been told, there’s an “interesting” bar scene. This time, I order a Lyft before my phone frosts over.

At the Stuart Street entrance, we hold the door open for a rare gaggle of boomers, all of whom look very nipped, tucked, and polished. Then I blink in wonder at the brightly lit bar. Bartenders in the 50-plus range wear white coats and ties, lording over a standing-room-only crowd. They serve espresso martinis to mostly young females while Cardi B snarls from a dozen ceiling speakers. For the first time tonight, we’re seeing heels, more makeup, more blondes wearing creamy hues instead of basic black. There are so many women and so few men that I begin to wonder whether this isn’t a lesbian hot spot. My friend observes that “it smells like food.”

Kevin the bartender, who has presided over Grill 23’s bar for some 20 years, hands us a dictionary-size wine and spirits list, but we’re just here for soda and cranberry juice. He’s fine with that. He says that the nighttime crowd went from 43-year-old men to twentysomething women a decade ago after the owners revamped the bar, adding windows to the street. Now Kevin serves lots of espresso martinis and cosmos. He adds that the place really blew up when they started serving cocktails in glasses rimmed with crushed ice—which look great on TikTok and Instagram.

We feel bad taking up coveted seats at the black-marble bar sipping soda, but then Kevin hands us a $13 bill, which makes me feel smarter than any martini could. We make a quick stop at the Oak Long Bar + Kitchen, a venue catering to the Back Bay hotel crowd. I’ve always had a soft spot for this place—it’s simultaneously warm and cozy, grand and elegant. The host informs us that this can be a sugar-baby spot, as in, the place where older men with means meet their junior mints over Bee’s Knees and Old Fashioneds. So now you know.

The Wig Shop’s exterior looks like, well, a wig shop. / Photo by Rachel Leah Blumenthal

“Alcohol is a suck drug,” Dori Ghrey, 36, tells me a few weeks later. A real estate professional who also works at the Central Square location of Dray, a nonalcoholic bottle shop, Ghrey spends his time researching the deleterious effects of booze. Ghrey says he came from a heavy-drinking Jamaican family and worked in an industry where nightly boozing was part of the gig. Eventually, he saw how much alcohol slowed him down.Ghrey says there are lots of better drugs out there. With sativa strains of cannabis, for instance, he wakes up “with a nice little wave,” instead of a crushing hangover. Now, he’s trying to get his friends to kick the habit: “I see other dudes with shades on drinking Pedialyte, and I say, ‘Y’all are bozos.’”

A Gen Z Dray customer, age 25, agrees that alcohol’s time has passed. “My brain is my best asset,” he says. “I don’t want to be out of control. I don’t want someone seeing me drunk. If the alcohol doesn’t add flavor, I don’t need it.”

For Simoza, of the Wig Shop, that outlook is part of a bigger trend. “I feel like as the generations progress, they want to be more in control of what they put in their bodies,” he says. “And alcohol being alcohol, they know it will ruin their diets and their sleep patterns.” Saltie Girl’s Sidell, meanwhile, concurs that a new focus on being able to “function” precludes getting buzzed.

This need to be ready for…something…keeps coming up again and again, and I’m reminded of a guy I met at an NA event at Formaggio Kitchen during Dry January who showed me his Oura Ring data on his phone going back three years. The app monitors sleep, heart rate, temperature, and recent physical activity, and when you wake up, it gives you a “Readiness Score”—a scale from 0 to 100 of how prepared you are for the day. After a night of drinking, he showed me, he was running on a very sub-optimal system down in the 40s. Now that he’s dating a recovering alcoholic and abstaining, he’s scoring consistently in the 90s. In other words, he’s ready.

This is the vibe now, and it makes sense. More and more, young adults today aren’t drowning their sorrows, blacking out, or stumbling into strangers’ beds—because they can’t afford to. In an increasingly unstable world, they want to stay sharp, prepared, and alert. Whatever disaster looms—biblical flood, government collapse, financial meltdown—Gen Z will be ready: hydrated and locked in.