Expatriate

EXPATRIATE is an engaging, atmospheric, and freewheeling place for drinking and eating just across the street from Naomi Pomeroy’s Beast. Conventional wisdom considers it a cocktail lounge, and while Expatriate is run by Kyle Linden Webster, a noted bartender in his time, it is careful attention to the rituals of hospitality that makes this room hum. The offerings from the bar, and from Pomeroy’s menu of drinking snacks—far-flung in origin and adhering to tradition only if it yields delectable results—makes finding a sense of place both easy and impossible, depending on your point of view. Expatriate drinks are timely, without neglecting what makes a cocktail a classic. Similarly playful, unafraid of pleasure, enlivening the senses as peak flavors resonate on the palate and in the mind, Expatriate food encourages a certain tolerance of ambiguity, and of course, sharing. It’s in that spirit, in the balance between the implicit and explicit, that Expatriate works as a whole, as a place for drinking and eating other than the sum of its parts.