Twelve Tarot Cards, Twelve Cocktails, No Reader

The drinks list at Gypsy Sol is organized by element. Fire, earth, air, water — four columns, twelve cocktails, one per zodiac sign, each paired with a tarot card.

Aries gets Mother of Swords, nineteen dollars, built on a cucumber-lemon gin. Virgo gets The Devil, twenty, vodka and Hennessy and espresso. Capricorn gets Mother of Pentacles, twenty, bourbon infused with bacon. Gemini gets King of Swords — blended Scotch with a splash of Laphroaig and actual wood smoke — for twenty-two.

Libra gets Justice. Justice costs thirty-eight dollars, which is eighteen more than the next drink over, and contains Don Julio 1942, Grand Marnier Cuvée du Centenaire and Luxardo Amaretto. Whether a cocktail called Justice ought to be the expensive one is a question the menu declines to engage with.

Somewhere on the property, according to a single sentence published in May, there are also tarot readers.

Here is what the hotel schedules, publicly, with times and links: yoga on the lawn Sunday mornings at eight-thirty, running through October 11. Pilates Saturday mornings at eight-thirty, through October 10. A sound bath every Wednesday evening from six to seven, June through the middle of September, held — and this is verbatim — in the indoor pool area. There was a Thursday-night series called Class & A Glass that paired an hour of yoga on the waterfront lawn with a glass of wine afterward; it ran from late May to the middle of July and is finished for the season.

All of that is bookable. All of it has dates.

The tarot readings have never appeared on a calendar. Not on the hotel's website, which has no events page at all. Not on the ticketing platform where every other class is listed. Not on the music series' schedule. The hotel's own event-organizer bio promises "tarot-inspired gatherings and mystical experiences" and attaches no date to either. The only place a tarot reader has ever been documented at this property is one line in a Boston.com piece from the week the restaurant opened.

There is a reasonable explanation, and it isn't a scandal. The parts of a mystical concept that a bartender can execute — twelve cards printed on a drinks list, a cocktail that arrives in a smoking cauldron — are running nightly. The parts that require finding, scheduling and paying a person who reads cards are apparently still theoretical. First seasons are like that.

The same room does two entirely different jobs.

At seven in the morning it is Café Arcana. Drip coffee three-fifty for a sixteen-ounce, three even for a twelve. Latte five and a quarter. Bagel with cream cheese five-fifty, egg and cheese seven, bacon egg and cheese nine on a bagel or a croissant. It runs four hours and closes at eleven, seven days a week.

Gypsy Sol opens at four. On Tuesdays that's a five-hour gap in which the room is neither thing.

The food, when it does open, is scaled for grazing rather than for entrées. Clam chowder twelve. Oysters twenty the half dozen, forty the dozen. A mezze board at forty-six, charcuterie at thirty-eight, corn ribs and seared halloumi and truffle fries at fifteen apiece. Smash burger twenty-two, culotte steak frites thirty-four, a lobster roll at market. The kitchen is run by Mark Cina, who came from Yvonne's in Boston and Proprietors on Nantucket.

And there's a section the menu calls Communal, which opens with a paragraph somebody clearly enjoyed writing: "Some spirits are not meant to be summoned alone. These are libations of communion — crafted for shared hands, offered across the table like a card drawn for two."

Two drinks at forty-eight dollars for two people, one at sixty-eight for two to four. Wheel of Fortune arrives, per the menu, "presented tableside in a smoking cauldron." All That Glitters arrives in a cauldron that does not smoke. The third is served as a ceremonial tea service and is printed on the menu as The Deviner's Pour, which is not how that word is spelled and has been that way since the file was made in May.

The two menu PDFs on the website are also filed under each other's names. The restaurant menu is saved as the café menu and vice versa. Also since May.

The Tidewater Inn's website is still online. It describes a family-owned place on three and a half acres, "serving visitors to Cape Cod for almost half a century," abutting Mill Creek — the salt-water estuary that runs down into Lewis Bay — with a seasonal breakfast diner called Helen's out front. You can still look at the pictures.

That property is now a hundred-room hotel done in 1930s Marseille, part of a small collection that also runs the Freebird Motor Lodge at 553 Route 28, which was the Hunters Green Motel until 2023.

None of this is happening by accident. Yarmouth wrote an overlay district whose stated purpose is "to encourage redevelopment of some of our aging motel stock," and layered on a Growth Incentive Zone that encompasses roughly thirty-five motel properties along the Route 28 corridor, so projects can proceed without triggering a regional review. The Uncommoner is one version of what that redevelopment can look like. The Yarmouth Gardens Motor Lodge at 497 is another — it came down for forty apartments of affordable housing. Same road, same policy environment, two entirely different answers to the question of what an old motel lot is for.

The best argument for driving over is also the cheapest. Gypsy Sol Sessions puts live music on the patio and the lawn over the water from two to five in the afternoon, free, walk-ins welcome, fire pits lit when it turns. It's programmed by Cape Symphony Presents as part of a series they call Summer Sessions on 28, and the same series runs up the road at the Freebird.

It is not every weekend, though. There's no session on August 23 and none on the 29th. What's left with a name attached: Ocean Breeze this Saturday, Kathleen Parks on Sunday, Jordan Renzi on the 22nd, Lily Mae Harrington on the 30th. The ticketing page says the series runs through September 12. Nobody has announced who's playing.

Four afternoons, then, and after that the calendar is as speculative as the tarot.