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Guides
5 after-work drink spots near Copley Square
After-work drinks near Copley Square can mean a hotel bar with an 83-foot copper counter or a beer in a tavern built into a parking garage. Both are reasonable answers to the end of the workday. The useful question is which one your group actually wants. These five stops run from the square itself toward the Prudential Center and Dalton Street. Choose OAK if you want to stay close to Copley, Lolita for Mexican food with your drinks, or Bukowski if beer is the priority. If dinner is likely to follow, decide that before reserving: a dining-room table and a drinks-only visit are not always booked the same way. OAK Long Bar + Kitchen is inside the Fairmont Copley Plaza, right by the square. The long copper bar gives the room a clear focal point, while the hotel setting makes this a good choice when you want the evening to feel a little more considered than stopping at the nearest counter. The restaurant’s current information lists dinner from 4 p.m. on weekdays, with food orders continuing until 11 p.m. That makes it possible to turn one drink into a meal without changing addresses. Book a table if dinner is the plan, and contact the restaurant about a larger gathering rather than assuming a row of neighboring bar seats will be free. Earls Kitchen + Bar at the Prudential Center has a dining room, lounge and rooftop patio. It is the option here for a group that wants a choice of settings as well as something substantial to eat. The Prudential location page links its current menu and reservation system, so use that branch when organizing the visit. The restaurant advertises the rooftop as a year-round space, but ask about seating and weather arrangements for your particular date. A reservation for the restaurant does not by itself settle where you will sit. If everyone is arriving at different times, agree on the meeting area beforehand; “we’re at Earls” leaves a little room for confusion. Trifecta is the street-level lounge at Four Seasons Hotel One Dalton Street. Its cocktail menu uses Boston neighborhoods as its organizing idea. The Green Monster combines poblano tequila, citrus and cilantro oil; Mike’s or Modern uses vodka, espresso and cannoli cream. Several drinks have spirit-free versions, and there is a separate spirit-free option too. Prices place this firmly in hotel-cocktail territory, so look at the list before inviting the whole office. The lounge’s hours currently start at 3 p.m. on weekdays, with dinner available into the evening. It suits a planned drink or dinner more than an attempt to keep the bill as small as possible. Lolita’s Back Bay location is on Dartmouth Street, making it an easy choice when you want to stay near Copley and eat Mexican food alongside your drinks. Its menu includes guacamole, hot queso, tacos and quesadillas, so the table can start with something to share before deciding how hungry everyone is. Read the reservation policy before booking. Reservations are for full dinner service, and the restaurant seats a party when everyone has arrived. That is useful to know if half the group tends to get stuck at work. For drinks alone, ask about the bar arrangement instead of reserving a dinner table you do not intend to use. Bukowski Tavern at 50 Dalton Street gives this list its beer-first option. The bar is built into a parking garage, and its own FAQ lists rotating taps, a substantial bottle selection and wine. It does not serve liquor, so choose another stop if someone’s entire plan revolves around a martini. The food menu runs until 11:30 p.m., and the staff play vinyl from the bar’s collection and their own records. There are televisions for games, too. This is the place to choose when a beer and bar food are enough of an occasion, without needing the setting or cocktail menu of a hotel lounge. Make the plan easy to join Send the exact venue and location when inviting people. Earls and Lolita have other local branches, and the Four Seasons at One Dalton is a different hotel from the one on Boylston Street. If the plan depends on sitting outside, confirm the patio arrangement rather than assuming an ordinary reservation includes it. For a group with a fixed budget, share the current menu before booking. One person’s quick drink can become another person’s expensive evening once food arrives. Give everyone the chance to choose a beer, a cocktail or something without alcohol without making it a negotiation at the table.
5 Boston pet hotels for when your besties just need to get away
Boston dogs can get a suite, daycare and even a bedtime snack. Cats have rooms too. These five boarding spots include a South End dog hotel, a Charlestown stay and a West Roxbury resort with cat villas. The dog still needs a bed, and the cat has not agreed to any of this. One Boston pet hotel will not board a new dog until it has done three days of daycare. Another stops drop-off at noon. MSPCA-Angell will not take a pet it has not already seen. A new dog cannot book The Urban Hound the week of the trip. The hotel, at 129 Malden Street in the South End, wants a full-day temperament test on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, then three full days of daycare, and only then a boarding reservation. Staff stay in the building overnight. The lobby does not. The rooms are a standard 4-by-6 and a larger 6-by-10. Posted non-holiday rates are $105 and $135 a night, daycare included. The solo rate drops the group play and substitutes four walks. Half the stay is due up front, and that deposit does not come back. Cancel inside 72 hours and the card is charged for the whole reservation. Holiday weekends want 10 days’ notice. Food has to arrive in a labeled bag for each meal. A small blanket is fine. One toy is fine if it is quiet. Dogs older than six months have to be spayed or neutered. The vaccine list includes both rounds of the canine flu shot, so a last-minute booking can die there. Suite Escape puts dogs in glass-fronted suites at 200 Terminal Street and walks them in the Charlestown Navy Yard. It is taking new clients. The tour is by email, not by wandering in off Terminal Street. Drop-off ends at noon every day, Sunday included. Pickup runs until 8 p.m. A flight that lands after lunch does not get the dog in the door that afternoon. At Red Dog on 274 Southampton Street, a dog stay is either social or private. Social means daycare and two potty walks, after the dog passes a daycare evaluation. Private means no other dogs, and four potty walks. Cats have separate rooms, meals the way you wrote them down, and a report card at pickup. Half the bill is due when you book. A dog or cat that is 10 or older needs a senior questionnaire before the stay is confirmed, and Red Dog will not give that older pet an injection. The care team is there overnight. The lobby is not: weekdays 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Sunday 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. It is also closed for check-in and check-out on New Year’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, the Fourth, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The Boston price list includes a bedtime tuck-in with the Presidential Patio and the Seasonal Suite. On a cheaper room, the tuck-in is an add-on, and so is a pup cup or a mid-day snack. Luxe Pet Resort, at 1220 VFW Parkway in West Roxbury, will sell a cat a Beachfront villa for $100 a night. Garden View is $50. A standard villa is $45. Food and the litter box sit in separate parts of the room. Two cats from the same house can be joined through a porthole. Dogs get their own crate-free suites, daycare included, at a posted premium rate of $90 a night. Peak dates add $10 for a dog and $5 for a cat. Luxe says someone is on site all night. The hours for walking in the front door do not match from one part of the site to the next, so ask for the pickup time before you pay. Grooming and dog hikes are extra. Dry food has to be portioned by meal. Wet food can stay in the can. MSPCA-Angell boards healthy dogs and cats at 350 South Huntington Avenue, and only if that pet has seen one of its non-emergency veterinarians in the past year. An emergency visit does not count. The suites are separate from the hospital wards. Dogs get four private walks a day, and photos go out twice a day. If the animal gets sick, the vets are in the same building. Pets that need more care than a healthy stay can be booked as medical boarding instead. Bathing is available before pickup. Drop-off and pickup run 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. A boarding assistant can be reached from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. After that, nobody at the boarding desk is picking up. Get the tour. Ask which vaccines they want, whether a new dog has to pass a trial day, who is in the building after the lobby locks, what time pickup actually ends, and what the stay costs once the deposit and the holiday rate are on the bill.
Get to know Boston
Bostonians are generous and loyal but it goes both ways
Outsiders might read the generosity as a performance on the way in and coldness on the way out. Wrong. It’s an account. Reciprocity is expected in this town. When you skip your turn you say something about you. The first round The bar is the easiest place to see this. Someone raised here, especially in the neighborhoods, will fight to get the first round. We will argue for the privilege because that’s how we show we like you, but if you don’t buy one back, it’s an insult. What, so you don’t like me? Or worse, you’re a cheap motherfucker. Most of us won’t say that, although some will say the last part, joking/not-joking. Either way, you’re on the outs. Irish pub culture has the same rule written more tightly. The Irish Times describes the round as a system, not an act of generosity. Mess it up and you can damage a reputation or a friendship. Irish Central is blunter: nobody reminds you when it is your turn, and people will talk. Bostonians are the same way with conversation. Only talk about yourself, never ask a question, and show no interest in the other person, and it’s over. We also have strict rules about family and friends. For neighborhood Bostonians, family is always right and the people we have known since kindergarten are family. In the schoolyard we backed them no matter what, and we still do. New friends are judged the same. Pass and you have a friend for life. Galway House is one of the oldest Irish bars in Boston. Photo by 4300streetcar Parish, neighborhood, round This culture is thickest in Irish Catholic working-class neighborhoods of Boston like Jamaica Plain, South Boston, Roslindale, and Dorchester, or JP, Southie, Rozzie, and Dot. People who leave those places tend to take the culture with them, and new people notice even if they can’t name what they are noticing. None of this came from nowhere. Rural Ireland ran on neighbor labor as well as kinship. A meitheal was a working party. Neighbors helped with a harvest or a turf cut, then expected the same help when their own work came due. The Irish Independent describes it as neighbors helping each other in turn, with no wages, on farms of roughly equal size so nobody cleaned up at everyone else’s expense. That is not a romantic clan from a movie. It is a practical rule: you show up, then they show up. Boston gave that rule a parish and a street. Irish Catholic immigrants built churches against real hostility. In Dorchester, a church under construction in Lower Mills burned in 1854, a fire many believed was set by Know-Nothings. St. Gregory’s followed. Later, people from the neighborhood still asked what parish you were from, because the parish was the map. Global Boston notes that Irish Americans left more slowly than some other groups in part because Catholic parishes could not pick up and follow them to the suburbs the way a synagogue could. A study of South Boston’s Irish enclave, drawing on Thomas O’Connor and on residents, put it in plainer language. People identified themselves by parish as much as by Irish county. In South Boston you learned silence and loyalty. Those are not opposite traits. They are the same system seen from two sides. You take care of your own. You do not advertise the terms. Call it clan if you want. The useful word is still the round. Help is supposed to come back and loyalty is supposed to be answered. Conversation is supposed to have a return. People who grew up in it think it’s normal, but people who didn’t think we’re a harsh bunch. They don’t realize our generosity is not charity, it’s membership. If you want in, buy the next drink, ask a question, and show up when it is your turn. If you don’t, you just won’t be asked back.
Bostonians call drinking fountains ‘bubblahs’
Ask for a bubbler in parts of New England and someone may point you toward a drinking fountain. Ask in Wisconsin and the same thing can happen. Boston does not have this word to itself, even when it pronounces the ending differently. “Bubblah” is a written attempt to capture the local pronunciation of “bubbler.” The object is familiar: a fixture that sends up a stream of water for someone to drink. Its regional name has generated a surprisingly persistent origin story involving a plumbing company and a trademark. A bubbler is a drinking fountain Merriam-Webster identifies “bubbler” as a drinking fountain. The word is not a joke invented for visitors or a different kind of beverage. If someone tells you there is a bubbler down the hall, they are giving you directions to water. The name is descriptive enough. Water rises from a small outlet, making a short bubbling stream. “Drinking fountain” describes its purpose; “bubbler” describes what the water appears to do. Neither name requires a complicated explanation to be useful. That does not mean every Bostonian uses it. A family’s vocabulary, where someone went to school and the people around them all help shape which words feel ordinary. Hearing “water fountain” from a Boston resident is not evidence that they are secretly from somewhere else. The Kohler story needs a correction One popular account claims that Kohler invented the fixture, called it the Bubbler and watched the brand name become a general term. Versions of the story even identify an inventor named Harlan Huckleby. WUWM investigated that account with historian Beth Dippel, who had worked with Kohler’s archivist. The company records did not establish the supposed employee, and the dates in the story did not fit the business’s manufacturing history. Kohler did later make a design called a bubbler. But the word was already in use. That is the important distinction: a company using a name does not establish that it invented the name. Dippel discussed an older attachment on school water containers as one possible explanation. She presented it as a theory. The reporting does not replace one tidy invention story with another proved beyond doubt. Why the final R sometimes disappears The spelling “bubblah” moves the discussion from vocabulary to pronunciation. In the traditional Boston accent, an R after a vowel may disappear before a pause or another consonant. That is the pattern people are trying to represent with the “ah” ending. It does not mean a speaker removes every R from every word. R’s at the beginning of words remain, and an R can connect a word to a following vowel. The same person can sound different when saying a word alone and when using it in a sentence. The word and the accent also travel separately. A speaker can call a fixture a bubbler while pronouncing its R. Another can have a strong local accent and call it a drinking fountain. Treating those choices as inseparable makes a caricature out of ordinary speech. Other words that can trip up a visitor A frappe is another useful example. The dictionary records the thick-milkshake meaning and the pronunciation “frap.” Recognizing the word helps you order; copying the server’s accent adds nothing to the transaction. Then there is “wicked” used to mean very. It changes the strength of a description rather than naming a different object. These are separate features of regional English, not a script that everyone in Boston follows. A bottle-filling station may stand beside a traditional drinking fountain, but the fixtures serve different actions: one fills your container, while the other lets you drink directly from the stream.The next time you hear “bubblah,” you do not need to settle a trademark dispute or demonstrate your local credentials. You just need to find the fountain.