Craigie on Main is the Hotness

As for the menu—well, we felt slightly foolish after the bill for a few drinks, a sardine salad and a Macomber turnip soup (potage, darling, my dining companion reminded me later, with irony) added up to the total of our last grocery bill. And the portions were small. Very small. Like, gone in a few beautiful bites small. But the food was admittedly top-notch, conceived with inventiveness and flair, and sourced sustainably and locally; it's certainly worth trying once, or even twice if someone else is paying.

But back to the bar. The bar is where it's at here at Craigie. The drinks are priced at $10-11, which is fairly standard in this town, but the experience you get when Schlesinger-Guidelli is slinging shots is one that is as good or better than the one at Barbara Lynch's much-ballyhooed Drink. We'd supply a few adjectives to one of the servers constantly buzzing around the bar, like "salty" or "citrus", and moments later Schlesinger-Guidelli would appear, tumbler in hand, to tip a mysterious liquid mixed to our specifications into a perfectly chilled glass, all without a word.

Some drinks had a name and a history, like the Dancing Scotsman, while others were original inventions, like the deliciously bastardized Bloody Mary we tried, made with vegetable-infused liqueur and ginger as well as tomato juice. Like some kind of Rain Main for cocktails, Schlesinger-Guidelli didn't seem to always know or remember if or how he'd done it, but the results were undeniably impressive. (Seeing as his first gig was working the Back Eddy under his uncle, Chris Schlesinger, the James Beard award-winning chef of East Coast Grill and All Star Sandwich Bar, we're not surprised that genius runs in his genes.)

This Bostonist will definitely be back for another drink: the Central Square location makes it convenient to other quality watering holes, music venues and reasonably-priced dinner spots, and we always seem to run into old friends here. And since neither we nor Schlesinger-Guidelli knows what that addictive tomato cocktail was called, we'll have to come back if we want to try it again.