Best of Boston

There are some who believe that a bartender should be neither seen nor heard—that he or she should be a pair of hands floating mimelike in the ether, deft with the empty glass and silent unless rattling out a martini. Not so Greg Griffin, one of the many fine bartenders at Saint. A master of strainer and bottle, Griffin is a briskly professional maker of both cocktails and good conversation—NHL hockey, travel, the accents of Santiago versus Barcelona. Griffin is one of the rare breed of bartenders who’s neither grossly snooty nor wincingly effusive, and he can easily prop up a heated Red Sox argument before ducking out, ghostlike, his job of host fulfilled.