Brother Cleve

The patron saint of the Boston cocktail scene.

Brother Cleve—born Robert Toomey in Boston in 1955—went by Brother Cleve almost exclusively, even on contracts, and spent most of his life in and around the city. He was a DJ, a multi-instrumentalist, a bartender, and an utterly encyclopedic cocktail historian who carried more obscure recipes in his head than most people carry phone numbers. He was also, in the words of one of his many protégés, the most generous teacher in American bartending.

His public profile started in the 1990s with Combustible Edison, the Boston-based lounge-revival band that helped fuel American interest in mid-century exotica music. Combustible Edison’s records (I, Swinger, Schizophonic!) were cult favorites among twenty-somethings rediscovering Martin Denny and Les Baxter, and the band toured widely. The exotica revival and the cocktail revival ran in parallel—both were rediscoveries of mid-century American aesthetic confidence—and Brother Cleve was one of the few people working both sides simultaneously.

The bartender’s bartender

By the late 1990s, Cleve was bartending in Boston. He worked at a series of small bars and supper clubs, becoming the go-to person any Boston bartender turned to when they needed to know what was in a 1948 hotel cocktail or how to source a discontinued amaro. The bar program he developed at the B-Side Lounge in Cambridge in the early 2000s—and later the cocktail programming he influenced at Drink, Eastern Standard, The Hawthorne, and Trina’s Starlite Lounge—became the model for the entire modern Boston cocktail scene.

He mentored, by widely accepted count, most of the people who matter in Boston bartending: John Gertsen (Drink), Misty Kalkofen (Drink, later Del Maguey), Jackson Cannon (Eastern Standard, The Hawthorne, Island Creek Oyster Bar), Tom Schlesinger-Guidelli (Craigie on Main, Alden & Harlow), and a long list of others who came up through Boston bars in the 2000s and 2010s. None of them were technically his employees; he just held court, generously, for decades, and the city’s bartenders came to learn.

What he knew

Cleve’s specialty was breadth. He knew the cocktail canon, but he also knew the obscure stuff: forgotten hotel-bar specialties, regional southern drinks, Trader Vic-era Polynesian builds, 1950s lounge-circuit oddities. He was one of the few American bartenders working in the 2000s who could discuss Donn Beach’s catalog from memory before Jeff Berry’s books made the recipes broadly available. His record collection—both vinyl and recipes—was an archive that lived inside one person.

He played at Tiki Oasis, the Hukilau, and other revival events as both DJ and presenter. The exotica DJ sets were part of how he made his living through the lean years; they were also a vector for spreading the music that underwrote the broader cocktail revival. You can’t separate the cocktails from the music in the revival’s history, and that was largely Cleve’s doing.

The death

Brother Cleve died in December 2022 from complications of a fall. The American cocktail community’s response was immediate and widespread. The Boston Globe ran an obituary. Bartenders across the country posted tributes. Tales of the Cocktail’s social channels filled with stories. He had no major book to his name and no signature bar that bore his name—just decades of generosity, a band’s worth of records, and a city’s worth of mentored bartenders.

What he made

He’s the rarest kind of revival figure: the connector. Berry wrote books; Cate built a bar; Kirsten built a scholarship. Brother Cleve built people. The Boston cocktail scene of the 2010s and 2020s—which has produced an outsize share of the country’s serious bartenders—is largely his shadow.

He’s also a reminder that the revival had multiple intellectual fronts: the books, the bars, and the music. The 1990s lounge-and-exotica revival of which Cleve was a part was a precondition for the cocktail revival that followed. Without people like him keeping the broader mid-century aesthetic alive in alternative-music subcultures, the cocktail revival might not have had the cultural ground to grow into.

To go deeper

• Music Combustible Edison’s I, Swinger (1994) and Schizophonic! (1996) are the essential records. Both available on streaming.
• Reading Brother Cleve never published a cocktail book. The richest sources are oral-history interviews and the tribute writing that followed his death—the Boston Globe obituary (December 2022), Punch Drink’s tribute, and posts from the bartenders he mentored.
• Successor bars Drink, Eastern Standard, The Hawthorne, Trina’s Starlite Lounge, and Alden & Harlow in the Boston / Cambridge area each carry some of his influence forward.