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The 2011 Devil's Dining Awards

2011-12-12T12:48:00.100-05:00

Illustration by Natalie Dee

It’s time once again for my annual mapping of the peaks and valleys of Boston’s dining and drinking scene. Here, I summarize the research I’ve accumulated in the past twelve months writing my fine-dining restaurant review column for Stuff Magazine (as well as its annual Dining Awards), budget restaurant reviews for the Boston Phoenix (including my retrospective "2011: The Year in Cheap Eats"), and bar reviews for Serious Eats -- not to mention my own devoted, non-paying pursuit of good food and drink.

As another extraordinary year for Boston’s industry scene wanes, I come not only to praise the worthy individuals, dishes, trends, and venues, but also to highlight the lowlights: the frauds and the hucksters, the follies and fiascoes. Inspired by Ambrose Bierce and the bygone Esquire Dubious Achievement Awards, I present for the third year running my personal take on the awe-inspiring and the awful in Boston’s dining and drinking scene: the 2011 Devil's Dining Awards!

CELEBRITIES, MOGULS, AND MEDIA PERSONALITIES

Well-Scuffed Media Punching Bag Award: to Todd English. English’s travails with Olives Charlestown (which nearly lost its liquor license for English’s dithering on a post-fire rehab), Kingfish Hall (where he was $40K in arrears on his rent), the Sal DiMasi corruption trial (in which he was subpoenaed as a defense witness), the New York Post’s Page Six (for his telenovela-worthy love life) made him a tabloid staple this year. Even Boston Magazine, long a shrieking fangirl, tore down her Todd poster this year, writing an acidic “Dear Todd” breakup letter. Can’t a handsome, globetrotting, millionaire celebrity chef get a break? That would be a no: we’ll be back slinging the snarky cheap shots as soon as English, who once shilled for the execrable Michelob, proceeds with bruited plans to turn Kingfish Hall into a beer-geek bar.

Purple Heart on a Paper Napkin Medal: to Heidi Watney, NESN’s intrepid on-field reporter during Red Sox broadcasts, for her series on concession-stand specialties at ballparks around the country. Watney earned her combat pay during one standup segment at Cleveland’s Jacobs Field, where a bite of a disgusting-looking fried chicken and waffle sandwich caused her to painfully, visibly gag. “Not my first choice,” she diplomatically opined after regaining her composure, “But I got it down.” Just barely, it seemed. That’s taking a bullet for the squad. We hope NESN bought her a big shot of Fernet-Branca afterward. (Best of luck with the Lakers, Heidi!)

Yogi Berra Award for Fractured Food English: to Billy Costa, host of NECN’s weekly restaurant-review show TV Diner, for consistently mangling common food words. We’ll give him a pass on künefe, but how does a kid from East Cambridge mispronounce the Portuguese sausage chouriço as "chew-ree-ko"?

Charles Bukowski Award for Entertaining Literary Drunkenness: to Anthony Bourdain, whose late-winter No Reservations visit to Boston blended a three-day Southie dive-bar bender with a loving pastiche on overlooked Boston-lowlife crime novel and 1973 Robert Mitchum vehicle The Friends of Eddie Coyle. To the chagrin of local Chowhounds, Bourdain barely talked about our food, though visits to East Cambridge Azorean spot O Senhor Ramos and Eastie’s Belle Isle Seafood were appreciated. But by the abysmal standards of most food-TV programming, this episode was funny and original, a wide-lapelled, bleary-eyed travelogue of a grittier Boston that few tourists ever see.

Grand Mulligan Award: to Dave Andelman for his advocacy work on behalf of Massachusetts restaurants. Andelman owns The Phantom Gourmet, a local restaurant-review TV show whose ethos might best be summarized as The Deep-Fried, the Honey-Glazed, and the Ugly, one which suspiciously gives endless rave reviews to its advertisers. But we want to give Boston's Pay-For-Play High Priest of Lowbrow Foods a bit of a pass. After all, Andelman successfully campaigned this year for the Restaurant Rejuvenation Act, which legalized pre-noon alcohol service hours for weekend brunch, a profit booster for Massachusetts restaurants in a stricken economy, and is now advocating for a restaurant tax holiday. We believe it was Mary Poppins who sang, "A spoonful of good deeds helps the smarmy pimpin’ go down."

“Mariah Carey in ‘Glitter’” Award for Most Hilarious Vanity Project: to “The Strega Life with Nick Varano”, Nick Varano’s video love letter to all things Nick Varano, starring, you guessed it, Nick Varano. A monthly episode of Dirty Water TV, a phenomenally cheesy-looking NESN show that covers Boston nightlife, “The Strega Life” debuted with Varano narrating a mawkish tribute to his humble upbringing that segued into a wannabe Rat Pack-style look at the ring-a-ding swingingness that is his Strega Waterfront restaurant. The show devotes plenty of screen time to the sundry sports celebs that bob in Varano’s considerable wake (see the Anything for a Comp Award below). Along for the ride is gushing sidekick Christina DelGallo, a crossed-eyed, cantilevered, Real Housewives of Revere styled blond with a smoker’s rasp and a thick Chicago accent. Must be seen to be believed.

Anything for a Comp Award: to Red Sox captain Jason Varitek, who proposed to his new bride-to-be over dinner at the kitschy, Vegas-ish Strega Waterfront, which cultivates the custom of local sports celebrities with copious freebies. We hope the horse head scene or the various bloody assassination scenes (like Moe Green’s bullet through the eyeball) from The Godfather Saga, a DVD of which run on a continuous loop on Strega's many TVs, didn’t spoil the romance of the moment.

Cronus Award for Devouring One’s Own Children: to Charlie Sarkis, for firing his sons and daughters prior to the sale of his Back Bay Restaurant Group after they’d spent decades working for him, as outlined in a July Boston Globe feature.

Tobacco Institute Award for Dubious Science: to Roger Berkowitz of Boston-based megachain Legal Sea Foods, who jumped into the local fishery sustainability fray with a deliberately provocative “Blacklisted” press dinner in January that served many species currently considered overfished. Berkowitz used the event to evangelize Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing, a new technology for assessing at-risk seafood populations that is promising but hardly proven, leaving critics to wonder whether his attack on long-established sustainability science was driven by altruism or profit.

Most Anticipated Episode of Law & Order: Boston: the pending legal actions against highly-profitable gourmet pizza chain The Upper Crust, which was convicted in 2009 of ruthlessly exploiting its Brazilian ex-pat kitchen crews, resulting in a six-figure-settlement for unpaid back wages. This year, UC is the subject of a new US Labor Department suit for not only failing to pay the old settlement, but continuing to abuse its immigrant labor. Further, a separate action accuses owner Jordan Tobin of withholding the wages and threatening the life of a former manager turned whistle-blower. The result will either vindicate Tobins or earn him a first-ballot entry into Boston’s Asshole Restaurateur Hall of Fame. We’ve already set the DVR.

NOTABLE CHEFS, BARTENDERS, AND RESTAURATEURS

How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm? Award: to Tim Maslow, the new chef at tiny family-owned Watertown joint Strip-T’s, taking over from his veteran-chef father. To a solid but dull American menu (most popular entrée: plain grilled salmon), Maslow has added a range of far more innovative fare, like charred baby octopus in smoked-tomato / wasabi sauce, and grilled romaine with oxtail and poached egg. Turns out that Maslow Fils just came off a five-year stint in Manhattan superstar David Chang’s restaurant empire, most recently as chef de cuisine at Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Who could do just turkey tips, tuna subs, and quesadillas after that experience? Expect this extravagantly talented young man to get offers at bigger, shinier spaces in Boston very soon.

Nice Guys Finish First Award: to chef Jamie Bissonnette of Toro and Coppa Enoteca, who competed earlier this year on Chopped!, the Food Network's cooking-competition reality show, and refused to let its producers goad him into trash-talking his fellow contestants. (Compare with fellow Boston-area chef Stephen Brand of UpStairs on the Square, who came across in the same episode as kind of a hyper-competitive dick.) Biss won, then used his $10K prize to buy his wife the engagement ring he couldn’t afford when they got married. We were also gratified to see him win Food & Wine’s “The People’s Best New Chef” Award. Pretty good year, chef!

Jacoby Ellsbury Award for Most Welcome Comeback: to Michael Leviton of suburban Newton's Lumiere, for returning to the in-town restaurant scene with his new Kendall Square restaurant Area Four. (Leviton’s first crack at urban fine dining, the star-crossed Persephone, appeared to be slightly ahead of its time in the Seaport.) Fans are also ecstatic that he has revived the Persephone baked-to-order pretzel – now nugget-sized and served with pimiento cheese – a dish we once called the Bar Snack of the Year.

Light the Pyre of Saugus Wings Award: to the memory of William Wong, founder of unutterably tacky Route 1 eyesore and landmark to gloppy Sixties-vintage American-Chinese food that is The Kowloon. Wong went to that Great Steam-Table Trough of Moo Goo Gai Pan in the Sky this past summer.

Nice Work If You Can Get It Award: to Will Gilson, who retired from his role as chef of Garden at The Cellar to open a summer-long pop-up restaurant at Adrian’s, a waterfront motel restaurant in Truro.

Amen, Chef! Award: to Jasper White, for his loving appreciation of the soupe de poisson, a/k/a fisherman’s soup, at Jody Adam’s Rialto, as reported by Grub Street Boston. Local celeb-chef White is America’s foremost expert on the preparation of Homarus americanus (Maine lobster). Of Adams’s rendition – whose deep flavor she attributes to the use of codfish frames and lobster bodies -- he observes, “She just nails it. It tastes like you're in Marseilles.” We have no pretensions to Chef Jasper’s discriminating taste, but heartily concur, making an annual pilgrimage to Rialto just for this dish.

Bartender of the Year Award: to Scott Marshall, formerly of Drink, now behind the stick at the Hotel Commonwealth’s brand-new basement bar The Hawthorne. Like most of his brethren in the top tier of Boston’s craft bartenders, he has encyclopedic knowledge and amazing technical chops. What separates him from that elite company is a welcome sense of humor and lack of self-seriousness that the best of the best occasionally could use a little more of.

Tavern Proprietor of the Year Award: to Jeremiah Foley of J.J. Foley’s Café. Grandson of the original J.J., he’s a living repository of the Runyonesque history of the South End, and hard-working owner of its most egalitarian hangout, still a watering hole for cops, Herald and Weekly Dig staffers, Gillette factory workers, and residents of the nearby upmarket condos. If you find yourself being hustled bodily out the tavern’s side door by one of Foley's strong sons, you’ve been 86’d, and had better find somewhere else to drink for a few months. Foley's has served more gangsters, toughs, grifters, and sharpers than you’ll ever know, and Jerry knows how to keep an orderly public house (with surprisingly good food).

Iggy Pop, Godfather of Punk Award, Cocktail Edition: to master mixologist and musicologist Brother Cleve, whose pioneering work at the Lizard Lounge and especially the bygone B-Side Lounge spearheaded Boston’s craft cocktail revival. Youngsters who want to drink at the feet of the master should check out the old-school Tiki drinks and classic cocktails he's now slinging at Think Tank. (He still spins a mean DJ set, too.)

Welcome Diaspora of the Year: the ongoing migration of veteran bartenders from Drink, Boston's premiere craft cocktail bar, to new posts around town. For example, bartending stalwart and B.A.R. graduate Misty Kalkofen just relocated to Central Square’s new Brick & Mortar; Sam Treadway and Bryn Tattan surfaced at Union Square, Somerville's new Backbar. With his nonpareil training ethos, manager John Gertsen will backfill their ranks with fresh talent. This ongoing cross-fertilization of the city's craft cocktail revival has a happy result: expanding the number of bars where cocktail geeks can enjoy delicious, exactingly-made drinks. Now do your part, and bring a Extra-Dirty Grey Goose "Martini" drinking friend to one of them for a tipple upgrade.

FOOD WRITING AND INDUSTRY PR (NOT THE SAME THING, AT LEAST FOR NOW)

Brillat-Savarin Award for Meritorious Service in Restaurant Criticism: to Mat Schaffer, who took an austerity-minded Boston Herald’s offer of early retirement this summer. We long admired Mat for his honesty, efforts to remain anonymous, obvious pleasure in eating, penchant for the pithy turn of phrase, and aplomb reviewing everything from luxury fine-dining palaces to Chinatown dives. Friday mornings feel strangely empty without a witty Schaffer review to kick them off. The sharp old pro will be much missed. And no, having local industry celebrities contribute to the Herald’s Fork Lift food blog doesn’t quite fill the void.

Elvis/Beatles Award for Legendary Meeting We’re Sorry We Missed: to the May evening that Jonathan Gold dined at Craigie on Main, the day after Craigie’s chef/owner Tony Maws won the prestigious James Beard Award for Best Chef, Northeast. Gold is the brilliant restaurant critic for the LA Weekly and the only food writer in history to win a Pulitzer. (We think every aspiring food writer should be reading his work religiously.) Maws, as he had promised in his acceptance speech in New York the night before, was already back on the line cooking. Our hero dining at one of Boston's best? Wicked.

Umberto Eco Award for Whimsical Restaurant Semiotics: to local food writer Jolyon Helterman, who offered a hilarious taxonomy of Boston restaurant menus in a December 2010 Boston Magazine piece. Do Boston restaurants really fall into only four basic types signaled by their menu typography and design: locavorish, Francophilic, gastropubby, and upscale-minimalist? No, but avid restaurant-goers had to chuckle in recognition of how much ground Helterman’s satirical archetypes covered.

Mitt Romney in Overalls Award for Flimsy Blue-Collar Shtick: to Alex Beam for a comically awful anti-foodie rant ("He's had his fill") in his Boston Globe column in March. In it, Beam took weird, off-kilter potshots at the sustainability movement, food-TV programming, and general foodie pretentiousness while bragging implausibly about his Panda Express intake. And here we thought Howie Carr owned the prep-school-alum-posing-unconvincingly-as-Joe-Sixpack beat.

Annoying Industry PR Buzzphrase of the Year: “farm to table”, essentially another way to mouthe that old hobbyhorse, “seasonal and local”. Our favorite ridiculous variants included “farm to fork” (used by Ken Oringer’s new Kennebunkport restaurant Earth) and “oven to table” (from Area IV’s new restaurant Area Four). For PR flacks running out of ideas for 2012, we’re here to help: how about “mud to maw”, “field to pharynx”, or “grange to gullet”?

No Shit, Sherlock Award: to the embarrassingly brain-dead October article in Forbes.com (“Restaurant Foods That Are The Worst Deals”) on allegedly overpriced restaurant food, which touted ten variations on the premise that restaurants mark up food over retail costs to make a profit. There’s some Upton Sinclair-worthy muckraking for you.

Tour Guide of the Year Award: to Luke O’Neil’s "Boston’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in Beantown", an entertainingly written and thoroughly researched crawl through the short hairs of Boston’s fetid underbelly. Thanks to O’Neil’s vivid and harrowing field work, you can experience the brain-numbing existential hell and threat to life and limb that is Parrotta’s Alpine Lounge in Chelsea without having to hazard a visit there yourself.

NOTABLE OPENINGS AND CLOSINGS

HGTV Award for Best Repurposing of a Hall Closet: to Avery Bar, a cozy small bar with gorgeous fireplace and comfy lounge seating that the Ritz-Carlton Boston Common installed in a formerly disused corner of the hotel’s main lobby.

About Effing Time You Showed Up, Godot Award: to Island Creek Oyster Bar, for providing a long-overdue counterpoint to the argument that -- outside of Neptune Oyster and Chinatown live-tank Hong Kong style joints like Peach Farm -- Boston has been seriously overrated as city with great seafood restaurants.

Saddest Closing Award (tie): to Ken’s Ramen, whose owner took Boston’s greatest bowl of noodle soup back to Japan; to Scup’s in the Harbor, a humble, charming eatery set in an Eastie shipyard, sunk by family medical difficulties; to Tawakal Halal Cuisine, a rare local outpost of Somalian food that only lasted an eyeblink; and to Don Ricardo's, a South End Brazilian / Peruvian / Mexican place that was modest, high-value, run by the sweetest old couple in the neighborhood, and criminally underpatronized by locals. R.I.P, all.

Most Anticipated Opening Award: to Guchi’s Midnight Ramen, the new pop-up venture (location still TBD) recently announced by folks affiliated with downtown luxury avant-Japanese restaurant O Ya. In addition to the obvious (it will serve Japanese noodle soup at odd hours), the owners are promising serious broths, tares, and handmade noodles. Might ease some of the pain from the closing of Ken's Ramen.

Top of the Bandwagon Award: to the South End’s El Centro, one of a dozen new restaurants that jumped on the year’s most overheated restaurant trend, upscale Mexican. El Centro created some separation between itself and the rest of the pack with an actual Mexican-native chef/owner and more traditional cuisine than most.

Amy Winehouse Memorial “Talent Ain’t Enough” Award: to Rocca Bar & Kitchen, the upscale South End Italian restaurant that had all the ingredients to be a long-running success -- a beautiful space, great patio, award-winning chefs, and veteran management -- but shuttered last New Year’s Eve, undone by an inability to deliver a consistent service experience.

Best New Gastropub Award: to The Abbey in Washington Square. Brookline will never have enough neighborhood joints with excellent upscale-tavern fare and good drinks that serve till 1:30am.

Don’t Let the Door Hit Ya Award: to Shangri-La, the oh-so-seedy Beacon Hill temple of terrible Chinese food, every underage Suffolk and Emerson student’s favorite place for a sure-to-be-regretted-tomorrow Scorpion Bowl. It was also notorious for allegedly hosting a brothel in its basement for years. Its replacement, the forthcoming Tip Tap Room, cannot help but be less unsavory.

Mobile Restaurateur of the Year Award: to Staff Meal Truck. In a year where Boston finally got a raft of worthy food trucks, Staff Meal served innovative, delicious, yet budget-priced food like head cheese sandwiches, Chinese sausage and choy in mu-shu wrapper, foie gras baklava, chicken paprikash sub with bacon jam and fried shallots, and trotters and sardo with preserved-lemon vinaigrette and spicy kale on a roll. Consistently original and astonishing. This ain’t your grandfather’s dirty-water-dog cart.

King’s Chapel Burial Ground Award for Most Interesting Ghosts: to The Wholy Grain, the South End bakery / café that opened this year in the former "social club" where notorious local mobster Philip "Sonny" Baiona held court for decades. With the once-thriving (and now also-defunct) Waltham Tavern down the block as his primary retail outlet, Sonny was doing a brisk business in drug dealing, bookmaking, and loan-sharking in 2006 when the DEA and FBI put him in MCI-Walpole on a five-year bid; the 83-year-old wiseguy died there a year later. We’re guessing that few of the yoga moms and other new South Enders who have quickly popularized this now-charming spot have any idea of its sordid history.

Manny Ramirez Award for Least Likely Future Comeback: to Anthony’s Pier 4, the Waterfront institution that was Boston’s It Place in 1976, but 35 years later has still not gotten the memo that the restaurant world has moved on. Slated for demolition to make way for another glitzy Seaport redevelopment project, it promises to relocate nearby. With its fly-in-amber menu, welter of fresh new Waterfront competitors, and longstanding troubles with the tax man, we’re thinking that ain’t happening.

THE CITY

Franz Kafka Award for Nightmarish Bureaucratic Malevolence: to the City of Boston’s Inspectional Services Division, which has crushed eat-in business at South End Spanish deli/grocer Las Ventas by forcing it to remove its table seating. The reason? An opaque certificate-of-occupancy issue that ISD’s own inspectors apparently cannot explain themselves. Said one regular customer who must now find another place to eat Las Ventas’s excellent bocadilloes, “It sounds like a naked attempt by ISD to solicit some graft.” We suppose the good news is that owners Julio de Haro and Lara Gaffigan, who also own the popular Spanish restaurant Estragon next door, have not yet awoken to find themselves turned into giant cockroaches.

Cracked & Moldy NKOTB Lunch Box Award: to Helen Mont-Ferguson, longtime director of food and nutrition services for Boston Public Schools, who was removed from her post in May after it was discovered that frozen foods with 2008 expiration dates were being served to school children. “Thanks, but Mom wants me to eat healthy, so she brown-bagged me a Fluffernutter, Ritz Handi-Snack, and some Hostess Sno Balls.”

Better Five Years Behind New York Than Never Award: to Boston Mayor Thomas Menino, for finally getting behind the food truck trend, with very happy results for local eaters-about-town. Next on your to-do list, Your Honor: make that long-promised Boston Public Market, an in-city farmer’s market akin to Manhattan’s Greenmarket, happen next year in Boston.

NIMBY D-Bags of the Year Award: to the "North End Ten", members of the North End/Waterfront Residents’ Association, for getting the already BRA-approved Doc’s Restaurant on Long Wharf un-approved, after restaurateur Michael Conlon had spent years and tens of thousands of dollars developing it. Already home to a hulking, hideous Marriott, the tourist-trap-chain Chart House restaurant, a welter of vendor carts, and an otherwise-unused building that hides an emergency egress from the Blue Line (which Doc’s would have supplanted), locals complained the new burgers-and-lobster-rolls joint would have “eliminated prime public space” and “spoiled the view”. Another explanation? The neighbors are just control-freak pricks.

Hipster Jets vs. Sharks Award: to the Jamaica Plain residents who packed Neighborhood Council meetings to conduct unruly, rancorous debates on the merits of a Whole Foods replacing longstanding Latino-focused Hyde Square grocer Hi-Lo Foods. Turns out that even as diverse and progressive-seeming a community as JP can struggle unattractively with gentrification issues.

“Sam Bowie Drafted Ahead of Michael Jordan” Award for Tragically Botched Opportunity: to the City of Boston for awarding the Pink Palace, a long-disused Boston Common structure it offered for use as a restaurant, to dull airport-food-court chain Earl of Sandwich. Of all the things we might have done to show off Boston’s culinary uniqueness to tourists, this is the best we could do? As the kids say, Fail.

DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS

Cast of Jersey Shore Award for Most Hoped-For Early Death: to Groupon, the coupons-by-email phenomenon that has been the bane of many local restaurateurs. It puts butts in seats, but is a drag on profitability, and few coupon-clippers ever return to pay full price. Our prayers for Groupon to run out of cash before it could get to an IPO went unanswered, but at least its stock price has tanked, so it may yet meet its deserved fate.

Hooters on the Waterfront Award: to Seaport chain steakhouse Del Frisco’s, for its gimmick of maintaining a squad of comely female servers in fishnet stockings and micro-minis. Their primary role appears to be delivering highly profitable side dishes like $11 creamed spinach to tables of lecherous businessmen on expense accounts. Classy!

“Bite the Wax Tadpole” Award for Brand Blundering: to Back Bay restaurant Mass Ave Tavern. The space formerly known as Match relaunched under new owners in January simply as Mass Ave, which made it impossible to find online, then swiftly changed its name to 94 Mass Ave, then almost as quickly renamed itself as Mass Ave Tavern. As of press time, that last one has stuck, but don’t hold us to it. Pretty sure Restaurant Branding 101 these days opens with, "Think about The Google first".

Count to Ten Award: to Emma’s Pizza in Cambridge, which generated a mini-firestorm by engaging in a real-time Twitter flame war in August with an unhappy jerk of a customer. Probably felt good at the time, but this move earns a failing grade in Fundamentals of Restaurant Social Media.

PT Barnum Award: to the prankster who punked the Boston Globe’s biweekly online food chat by posing as Barbara Lynch and promising a free tasting at Menton, one of Boston’s costliest one-percenter hangouts. We love a deal as well as anyone, but our bullshit detector is sensitive enough to recognize that Babs and Free Food are two things that do not go together.

Donald Trump Award for Profligate Bad Taste: to David Schuler, a Massachusetts native now living in Mississippi, who drove 1400 miles to spend $1200 on 150 frozen pizzas from Stoughton’s Town Spa Pizza. Dude, seriously: we get nostalgia, but frozen pizza?

Silly Bandz Award for Fad That Was Cute for About Three Minutes: to Temazcal Cantina, the Seaport upscale Mex joint, for its iPad-based menus. Presumably these can be praised for making the kitchen live up to high plating standards (so the dish that arrives at your table looks as good as its food-porn menu photograph), but quickly wear out their welcome once you get to the cocktail menu and are forced to Peruse. Only. One. Drink. At. A. Time. Worst application of technology in a restaurant setting since the Keno feed.

Charlie Sheen Award for Grandiosity of Self-Delusion: to ancient North End tourist trap Joe Tecce’s Ristorante, which blamed its Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing last May on the Big Dig, which ended in 2007. It couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with Tecce’s menu of superannuated red-sauce-and-melted-mozzarella clichés, featuring specialties like batter-fried sweet and sour chicken and veal, could it?

As If! Award for Restaurant Futility: to Canadian pizza chain Boston Pizza, which temporarily changed its name to Vancouver Pizza as a show of support for the Canucks over the Boston Bruins in the 2011 NHL Finals. It didn’t help: the Bruins took the Stanley Cup in seven games anyway. If only Boston Pizza had changed its name to Somebody Wake Up the Sedin Twins Pizza.

Pu Pu Hot Pot Award for Dubious Restaurant Naming (tie): to Blue Inc., which begs the question, “Which marketing genius thought it would be a good idea to ask Herald readers for naming suggestions, and then actually use what they came up with?”; to Sweet Caroline’s, the Fenway-adjacent eatery which unwisely references Neil Diamond’s numbingly overplayed stadium anthem and creepy adult mash note to an 11-year-old girl; and to A @ Time (we’re not making that up), a new Thai joint in Allston that sounds like a pad gaprow-induced case of the hiccups.

Bull & Finch Award for Worst New Tourist Restaurant (tie): to Max Brenner’s, the Israeli chain whose chocolate-overload novelty concept might be more interesting if its food weren’t so uniformly mediocre; and to Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill at Patriot Place, which combines a theme based on a schlock-country anthem with a menu worthy of a Ninety-Nine, complete with potato skins and fried mac ‘n cheese. Pro tip: most restaurants with entertainment or sports figures on the marquee suck hard.

Right Idea, Wrong Place Award: to pop-up restaurants in hair salons. Ew.

You Can Dress Them Up Award: to Mike Andelman of the Phantom Gourmet, for engaging in an ugly public spat in January with a Grill 23 hostess who refused to seat him in the dining room before it opened. On the Phantom’s weekly radio program, Mike petulantly referred to the “dumb hostess” as a “little monkey” and a “never would talk to me in high school type girl”, then slagged all hostesses as attractive incompetents. When the story drew wider media attention, the restaurant issued a press release expressing dismay at the personal attack and defending their employee. Under pressure from civility advocates like Server Not Servant, brother/boss Dave Andelman forced Mike to issue a public apology, which lamely excused his rant as “satire”, not the bitterness of a grown man still smarting over teenage dating humiliations.

Tuxedo-Print T-Shirt Award: to Locke-Ober, for dropping its storied dress code and letting shlubbily dressed tourists into its dining room. This marked the inglorious end to an era of civility in Boston fine dining, as L-O was the last room in town to insist that gentlemen don jackets for dinner. Heaven forbid you should ever have to leave the sweatpants at home.

Orange-Stained Underwear Award: to the Boston restaurants that were revealed in a Boston Globe exposé ("On the menu, but not on your plate") in October to be mislabeling cheaper fish as fancier ones for profit, e.g., selling escolar, known for some very unpleasant side-effects, as “white tuna”. Others were caught selling farmed tilapia as wild red snapper and frozen Pacific cod as fresh and locally-caught. Even exurban celeb-chef Ming Tsai was red-faced, having to explain that technically it’s okay for him to call the humble sablefish in his signature $41 entrée at Blue Ginger by the loftier “Alaskan butterfish”, even though the FDA considers it misleading and illegal to use vernacular names for fish as market names. (Apparently, the embarrassment stung: Blue Ginger’s menu now reads “Miso-Sake Sablefish a.k.a. Butterfish".)

How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away? Award: to Gargoyles on the Square, the beloved Davis Square fine-dining restaurant that announced its closing after 15 years in September, causing a rush of tearful farewell dinners, only to keep reopening each weekend until nearly November.

Sisyphus Finally Crushed By Giant Boulder Award: to Joe Cimino, the would-be operator of Back Bay’s Saratoga Restaurant. “Never heard of it”, you say? It’s the one that recently was on the verge of losing its liquor license after failing to open in its Fairfield Street space after 12 years – that’s right, 12 years -- of wrestling with building wiring, ADA access requirements, groundwater, and other issues. Sorta makes the food truck thing look pretty sweet, don’t it?

NOT-SO-DUBIOUS ACHIEVEMENTS

Foie Gras Poutine Award for Culinary Excellence in an Unlikely Setting: to Victor’s Italian Restaurant, a tiny, family-owned restaurant with the look of a plain-Jane sub shop, tucked away in a residential corner of Saugus, for its scallopine. Pounded, breaded, and sautéed to order (even for subs), they’re a minor epiphany for anyone who has ever ordered a cutlet and been unable to tell what animal it comes from. Veal parm that tastes like veal? Revelatory!

Fenway Park Award for Most Overdue Facelift: to the bar at Clio and Uni, Ken Oringer’s acclaimed fine-dining tandem in the Eliot Hotel, which had long been stuck in a mid-90s, Sex and the City, flavored-vodka rut. Then Oringer hired idiosyncratic, innovative bar manager Todd Maul, who quickly elevated the bar into the top tier of Boston’s craft cocktail purveyors with a history-hopping, 100-entry, modernist-cuisine-inflected specialty cocktail list. About frickin’ time. (The pending physical-plant makeover is pure gravy.)

Ephemeral Pleasure of the Year Award: to the lightly-pickled fresh local herring, a rare and extraordinary delicacy, only available for a few days this past spring at The Gallows in the South End.

Eagles of Death Metal Award for Misleading Name: to Thailand Café, a Central Square restaurant long known for sub-mediocre Thai food that got a new owner and concept a few years ago but didn’t bother to change its English-language sign. What’s entirely easy to miss from the curb is the new half of the menu, an array of sensational, very traditional Sichuan dishes. Now slated for eviction (its landlord is redeveloping the building), we hope it finds a new home soon.

Titans of Industry and Street Food Award: to Boston Speed Dog, purveyor of what the Wall Street Journal called the best hot dog in America back in 2008, and which recently so impressed third-richest-man-in-the-world Warren Buffett that he jokingly threatened to buy the company. Not bad for a humble wiener cart usually parked in Roxbury’s dusty, industrial Newmarket Square. (Awesome side note: owner Greg Gale told the Boston Globe that he didn’t recognize Buffett, but that he "love[s] his music.")

Dish of Year (tie): a simple soup of broth, crouton, poached egg, cheese, and white Alba truffles at Erbaluce; handmade burrata with shaved vegetable salad, pistachio vinaigrette, and aniseed tuile at Bondir; roasted apple salad with corned beef tongue, horseradish, and beet broth at Strip-T’s; crudo of striper collar at Coppa Enoteca.

Manny Pacquiao Award for Disputable Championship: to Menton, which in eighteen short months may have achieved Barbara Lynch’s goal of unseating L’Espalier as Boston’s best-regarded luxury French restaurant. Menton’s recent accolades include Boston's only five-star restaurant rating in the Forbes Travel Guide, the highest service and décor ratings in the latest Zagat Boston Survey, and inclusion in Gayot’s 10 Best New Restaurants in America. It’s also rumored to be up for a coveted designation as a Relais & Châteaux property, which would be a first for Boston. We’d rate the contest a draw: both restaurants have deservedly-lauded food and service, and L’Espalier’s superior desserts are matched by Menton’s better cocktails. But both get our booby prize for cold, charmless, colorless dining rooms. (We never got over the old L’Espalier.)

My sincere thanks to Boston's many great food journalists who make tracking the local industry scene so easy and entertaining, including: Devra First and the Dishing bloggers of the Boston Globe (also deserving of special kudos for its crack investigative reporting this year), Kerry Byrne of the Boston Herald's Fork Lift food blog, Marc Hurwitz of the indispensable Boston Restaurant Talk & Boston's Hidden Restaurants, Kara Baskin of Grub Street Boston, Adam Gaffin at Universal Hub, Aaron Kagan at Eater Boston, Dan McCarthy at Urban Daddy Boston, Lauren Clark of the much-missed Drink Boston, Leah Mennies and Donna Garlough at Boston Magazine's Chowder Blog, Jacqueline Church of The Leather District Gourmet, the folks at WBUR's Public Radio Kitchen, Patrick Maguire of Server Not Servant, Richard Chudy of Boston Burger Blog, Gary of BBQ blog Pig Trip, Penny Cherubino of BostonZest, Kitty Amann and the other lovely ladies of LUPEC Boston, the iron-livered Cocktail Virgin gang, the brilliant amateurs of the Boston board of Chowhound, and my esteemed colleagues at the Boston Phoenix (notably the magisterial Robert Nadeau), Stuff Magazine, and Serious Eats. Extra-special thanks to the great Natalie Dee of the webcomics Natalie Dee and Married to the Sea for her amazing illustration.

And thanks most of all to the Greater Boston industry folks -- the chefs, line cooks, garde-manger, pâtissières, dishwashers, hosts, servers, backwaiters, busboys, bartenders, barbacks, managers, phone attendants, PR people, as well as the fisherman, farmers, foragers, distillers, winemakers and brewers who supply them -- who made so many nights in 2011 memorable for me.

Here’s hoping that 2012 finds that everything on your plate and in your glass was locally and sustainably produced, trucked into town in gossamer hybrid vehicles fueled with recycled argan oil, and brought to you by a server willing to pretend to believe in your fictional food allergy, overlook your date's sorry dress sense, and ignore that blob of sage pesto in your teeth. Một hai ba, yo!

The Stuff Magazine 2011 Dining Awards

2011-10-04T08:46:00.025-04:00

[Photograph by Conor Doherty]

For the fifth year running, I got to write the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards cover feature. Longtime readers (of the 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 editions) will remember that my take on this hoary old standby of food journalism aims for irreverence, drawing inspiration from sources like Esquire's bygone "Dubious Achievement Awards". There are no traditional best-of categories, and I assiduously try to avoid self-seriousness as I recognize some of my favorite chefs, venues, dishes, drinks, charities, farmstands, trends and moments from the past twelve months of Boston's ever-evolving dining and drinking scene. (Editorial director Scott Kearnan wrote a funny introduction to the issue here.)

The biweekly Stuff Magazine focuses on Boston nightlife, fashion, food and drink, and is the home of my recurring Food Coma column on Boston fine dining restaurants. I'm grateful it gives me the leeway to recognize both the refinement of a fabulous new chef-owned fine-dining establishment like Bondir, as well as the humble charms of its neighbor Camie's Bakery, a modest Haitian restaurant. I'm pretty sure Stuff will be the only local publication to hand out awards for fried bologna, insects served as food (on purpose), Salvadoran sopa de mariscos, and Australian meat pies this year -- and of course, the annual Biggest Balls Award for a bit of questionable audacity on the part of a local nightlife operator.

The balance this year is more laudatory than critical, but fear not; I save the most antic snark for my annual Devil's Dining Awards (as I did in 2010 and 2009), which I'll publish on this blog in December.

Many thanks to photographer Conor Doherty, who lent me one of the outtakes from his hilarious cover shoot for the issue. Left to right, that's chefs Louis DiBiccari, Will Gilson, and Jamie Bissonnette (in the lucha libre mask), winners of my "Kia Soul Giant Hamsters Award for Funniest Ad" (rendered by my editors as the "Clio-Goes-Culinary Award for Funniest Ad".)

Enjoy!

Defending Boston's Restaurant Scene (Part 1)

2011-09-22T09:09:00.039-04:00

[Photograph by MC Slim JB]

If you don’t think that most online “Which city has the best restaurant scene?” arguments are idiotic, consider Travel & Leisure Magazine’s recent list of “Americas Best Cities for Foodies” (yeah, I know, they said “foodies”). In it, Boston comes in it at #23, behind such culinary meccas as San Antonio, Texas and Savannah, Georgia. While I claim no authority in such matters, I spend a fair amount of time traveling around the US on business, and I rate this list as dubious at best, more like a crazy bit of hokum.

In fairness, it’s just a survey of Travel & Leisure readers, most of whom are over 50 and pretty prosperous. I doubt they’re the kind of adventurous eaters who would visit Boston food-nerd haunts like Angela’s Café, Baraka Café, or S&I Thai. Nope: they’re going to whichever Barbara Lynch place the hotel concierge is taking the graft to steer them to. (No aspersions on Babs’s restaurants, which I mostly think are pretty fine, but they hardly offer a proper sample of the Boston scene: they’re glossy, expensive, and known for the kind of high-touch service that wealthy tourists tend to favor.)

But slagging this list and its ilk isn’t really my point: such arguments are boring to food geeks. Sure, New York is an amazing restaurant town compared to Boston – I’m grateful it’s so close, so easy to gastro-tour -- but at 13 times Boston’s size, with a top two percent that is way richer than most of the country, it ought to be a lot better. The fact is that food nerds are capable of unearthing the culinary gems hidden in any city, however small, remote, or unpromising.

My purpose here is not to praise Boston at the expense of other cities. Rather, I want cite a few positives beyond the usual tourist-guide gaggle of celeb-chef joints, places with historical interest but bad food, and chainy slingers of clam chowder and lobster rolls. Herewith is a non-exhaustive list of a few of our important but lesser-known strengths in dining and drinking:

A plethora of ex-pat communities served by modest restaurants doing the traditional cuisines of their homelands, largely for their fellow immigrants, so not dumbing down the food for Americans. Consider that Bostonians can enjoy Afghani, Albanian, Algerian, Argentine, Armenian, Australian, Azorean, Brazilian, Burmese, Cambodian, Cape Verdean, Chilean, Colombian, Cuban, Dominican, English, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Greek, Guatemalan, Haitian, Hungarian, Irish, Israeli, Jamaican, Korean, Lebanese, Malaysian, Mexican, Moroccan, Nepali, Persian, Peruvian, Polish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, Russian, Salvadoran, Scottish, Serbian, Spanish, Syrian, Thai, Tibetan, Trinidadian, Tunisian, Turkish, Venezuelan, and Vietnamese cuisines, among many others. It’s nice to see real Sichuan making a resurgence in town, and the new presence of Egyptian and previously little-seen African cuisines like Senegalese. These represent a hugely important strain of Boston's culinary richness, the treasure most often overlooked by casual observers.

Many independent chef-owned small restaurants doing New American with a seasonal, local emphasis. This is probably our greatest wellspring of creativity and value in fine dining.

A solid assortment of regional French cuisines.

A handful of well-regarded small restaurant empires headed by semi-famed chefs like Barbara Lynch, Ken Oringer, Jasper White, Lydia Shire, Michael Schlow, and Todd English (though English has mostly abandoned Boston to build a much larger national empire).

Local seafood restaurants. Frankly speaking, Boston has long been a bit overrated on this score, but that's improving with the opening of several mid-priced places that are neither chain outlets nor faux clam shacks. This is in addition to our usual overlooked good-seafood spots: Portuguese, Azorean, and Brazilian restaurants (of which Cambridge Street in Cambridge has a useful concentration) and Chinatown’s Hong Kong-style live-tank seafood joints.

An improving breadth in regional Italian cuisines, including at Emilia-Romagnan, Tuscan, Roman, Campanian, Sardinian, Abruzzese, and Sicilian. This new focus on traditional Italian cookery is a welcome counterpoint to Boston’s longstanding reputation for Italian food, which is built on the kind of safe, tourist-friendly, red-sauce-heavy Italian-American fare that dominates our famous North End neighborhood.

A mini-boom in the gastropub movement, mid-range places taking American tavern fare to a higher level with old-fashioned care and craft: in-house pickling, smoking, curing, charcuterie-making, whole-animal butchery, etc.

A pretty strong Chinatown, though there are some regional Chinese cuisines that could be better represented.

A wide range of sub-continental cuisines, including Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and especially regional Indian cuisines, including Punjabi, Mughal, Hyderabadi, Mumbai, Tamil, Bengali, and Indian Chinese. For this, we can thank our universities and local biotech, high tech, medical, and other industries that draw many students and H-1B workers here from South Asia.

New strength, quality and diversity in the food truck category, a boomlet only abetted by our mayor’s decision a couple of years ago to cut down a longstanding thicket of municipal red tape that was hostile to mobile restaurateurs.

Vegetarian and vegan options that are improving steadily, as well as more restaurants that accommodate folks with other dietary preferences or restrictions: gluten-free, seafood-free, halal, etc.

A strong craft cocktail movement led by a solid core of serious Golden Age revivalists. A second generation that trained under these folks is fanning out, spreading the wealth to other bars and restaurants. There are still way too many flavored-vodka concoctions flowing about Boston, but we've come a long way in ten years. Our elite craft cocktail bars rank with the best in the country.

A pretty good and improving set of restaurants and bars that cater to beer geeks.

A small but growing number of cafes featuring artisanal, hand-crafted coffee.

Boston still has some soft spots: Jewish deli, diners, regional Mexican, Austrian, German, Czech, izakayas and ramen stands, Indonesian, Laotian (unless you count the city of Lowell 30 miles away), Scandinavian, soul food, slow-smoke barbecue, many African cuisines, and so on. We lack world-class high-end dining; our best-regarded luxury restaurants might rate a single Michelin star. Nobody has gone all-in on modernist cuisine, though there's some molecular dabbling here and there. We could do with more and better wine bars.

We have far too many expensive chain steakhouses, fake Irish pubs, upscale Yanqui-Mex joints, and national casual-dining chain outlets. Worthy family-run places like Tawakal Halal Cuisine, a fine little Somalian restaurant in East Boston, close after only a few months in business, while lines still form out the door of our several Cheesecake Factories. P.F. Chang’s draws crowds of customers who have never set foot in the real Chinese restaurants that sit a stone's throw away in Chinatown.

But those are quibbles, or reflections of a corporatization of restaurant culture that is epidemic in America, not unique to Boston. When you look at the entire spectrum from high to low, I believe we have a tremendous dining scene for an American city of our size. It helps that Boston’s dining populace has come a long way in adventurousness and sophistication from the bad old days of 20 to 30 years ago, though we still have some headroom there.

Spend some time traveling around North America, to cities that are within five or ten spots of us in the population ranking, and it's easy to be grateful you live here, especially if you're willing to go a little bit out of your way to dine out. You just have to be just slightly more daring and catholic in your tastes than the typical Travel & Leisure subscriber.

In Part 2 of this essay, I’ll offer specific examples of restaurants I think represent Boston's lesser-known dining and drinking assets well. In the meantime, check out the links to my professional reviews in the column at the left. I also recommend searching and posting specific queries to the Greater Boston Area board of Chowhound.com, where many of Boston’s most sophisticated and wide-ranging amateur restaurant reviewers hold forth.

Green Street in Cambridge, MA: Sterling Cocktail Craft in a Plain Brown Wrapper

2011-08-09T10:10:00.020-04:00

[This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for Serious Eats, originally published on May 23, 2011. All photos by MC Slim JB.]

Acolytes of Boston's craft cocktail revival periodically bow in the direction of Cambridge's bygone B-Side Lounge, which in 1998 debuted the area's first modern bar program focused on lovingly-made pre-Prohibition cocktails and modern drinks inspired by them. Equally significant, the B-Side trained a generation of bartenders that have since fanned out to evangelize the craft cocktail movement at bars all over the city. One of its first true progeny was Green Street, a venerable old haunt in Cambridge's Central Square that B-Side alumnus Dylan Black bought in 2006 and thoroughly reinvented. Green Street still attracts a local crowd that reflects the remarkable diversity of its Cambridgeport neighborhood, but also now ranks as one of Boston's foremost places to get a serious drink.

Green Street's weathered brick façade nestles between an ancient Greek-American club and a featureless parking garage on a nondescript block just off Mass Ave. Nothing about its exterior suggests it might compete with swank Boston craft-cocktail kingpins like Drink and Eastern Standard. Granted, its current interior is handsome compared to its prior incarnations: the funkily run-down bar / live-music venue / tropical-food joint Green Street Grill, or the gritty workingman's tavern Charlie's Tap. But it still has the casual, inviting feel of a local hang: a long, narrow, dimly-lit bar that leads to a bustling open kitchen at the back, with a quieter, more spacious dining room a few steps up and to the left. At its face, you'd never guess its bar program might be remarkable. Ask the barman for a bourbon cocktail, watch him stir up a beauty like The Hague ($8.50: W.L. Weller Special Reserve, green Chartreuse, French vermouth), and you might start to wonder otherwise.

Another reason that Green Street flies under the radar is that craft cocktails aren't its only draw. The kitchen turns out a popular menu of mid-priced, updated New England cuisine with plenty of local seafood ($8-13 starters, a terrific $11 burger, $17-24 mains.) There are also fine simple bar snacks like housemade potato chips and dip ($4). The geeky beer list favors small artisanal producers: ten on tap ($5.50-$7) and another couple dozen in bottles and cans (mostly $4-$6), including some large-format and high-ABV entries ($10-$21). Wines are well-suited to the straightforward food: four whites and four reds by the glass ($8-$10), a dozen whites and another two dozen reds by the bottle ($31-$56), plus a few sparklers and dessert wines. Green Street wants all comers, not just the cocktail nerds.

But cocktail aficionados will quickly notice the presence of craft touchstones like the 30s-vintage Zombie, an authentic Tiki drink, and the Golden-Age classic Monkey Gland ($8.50: gin, absinthe, fresh orange juice, house-made grenadine). Cognoscenti know to ask for the "Big List", which features 100 entries. (Changed a few times a year, it's actually a subset of an even-larger master cocktail list.) The range here is staggering, covering the length of the quality-spirits waterfront, showcasing Black's globetrotting interest in rum but also touching every of-the-moment craft-bartending staple.

There's pure-agave tequila and single-village mezcal; American straight rye, bourbon and applejack; British gin and blended Canadian whisky; monastery cordials and bracing bitters; interesting aromatized and fortified wines. There are hot drinks, Champagne-topped drinks, and drinks with raw eggs, like the refreshing fizz that is the Taxco ($7.50: silver tequila, fresh lime juice, agave nectar, orange bitters, egg white and seltzer). The Big List runs the gamut from the Colonial period through the Golden Age right up to the modern moment. It's a wonderland, an imbiber's amusement park with too many rides to explore in a month, let alone a weekend.

In addition to simpler snacks, the bar menu reflects the old-time kitchen craft of the gastropub, as evidenced by nightly-changing $5 plates of offal (like one evening's Buffalo-style fried chicken livers) and charcuterie (like gorgeous pork rillettes with rhubarb chutney). As important as quality drinks and food, Green Street embodies a humble hospitality ethos that makes it an excellent venue for introducing the uninitiated into the sometimes daunting world of craft cocktails. For example, it carries a decent selection of vodka, a hugely popular spirit that many craft bartenders sneer at as too featureless to merit shelf space. You can peruse Green Street's short cocktail list in a couple of minutes, finding plenty of accessible if not familiar choices, like the Bohemian (gin, St. Germain, fresh grapefruit, Peychaud's bitters), Stone Fence (bourbon, cider, Angostura bitters), and Aqueduct (vodka, apricot liqueur, Cointreau, fresh lime juice). Non-beer-geeks can comfortably order $3 Buds and High Lifes.

Even the most pedestrian cocktail order is filled with precision, quality spirits and fresh ingredients, as in the Margarita Bermejo ($8) of pure-agave silver tequila, Cointreau, and fresh lemon and lime juices. Green Street's bartenders are serious and scholarly, but they won't try to shame you out of your regular tipple, or regale you with an unsolicited lesson in cocktail history. This is first and foremost a neighborhood bar; it just happens to select and pour its drinks with extraordinary care and creativity, as in Avery's Arrack-Ari ($8.50: Batavia arrack, fresh lime juice, simple syrup, and a rinse of Talisker 10-Year-Old single-malt Scotch.)

You don't have to be a connoisseur to appreciate this place, but there's a reason you'll spot many of the city's best bartenders drinking here on their own time. In creating a bar program that is at once ambitious and highly accessible, Black had done both the neighborhood he grew up in and his B-Side roots proud. Cloaking its reverence for cocktail craft in unpretentious conviviality, Green Street is slyly advancing the movement, reaching a cross-section of customers that might never patronize its tonier peers across the river. It's a lively tent-revival meeting, not a grand cathedral—a welcoming place to bring your cocktail-skeptical pals, where Green Street's gifted staff can work their understated, friendly proselytizing. Say amen, somebody.

Green Street
280 Green Street, Cambridge, MA 02139- (near Pearl Street; map)
617-876-1655; greenstreetgrill.com

Drink: Boston's Single Most Essential Craft Cocktail Bar

2011-05-18T12:02:00.013-04:00

[This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for Serious Eats, originally published on March 31, 2011. All photos by MC Slim JB.]

Walk half a mile from Boston's South Station, over a bridge into the Fort Point section of South Boston, and you'll happen upon a bleak former warehouse district that is slowly being rehabilitated into an upscale residential and destination-dining neighborhood. Enter a door marked Sportello, an Italian eatery in local celeb-chef Barbara Lynch's empire, and head not upstairs to the restaurant, but downstairs and through a door, and you will arrive at Drink.

This spare, industrial-looking room still has much of its warehouse-basement skeleton of exposed brick, big wooden beams, and rough-hewn granite intact. Three U-shaped, connected bars line the front wall, forming three service and five seating/standing areas. With large soapstone workspaces behind the bars (recalling chem-lab tables) and bottles stowed out of sight, the space is remarkably uncluttered, a spanking-clean mise en place. Aside from bowls of fruit and fresh herbs, there's little to distract the eye beyond a collection of vintage barware and tools along the back work counter. Customers sip cocktails from unique vintage glasses and mugs.

I'm greeted by Misty Kalkofen, one of the star-studded team of bartenders here that boasts names like Josey Packard and Scott Marshall. (This includes most of Boston's BAR certifications, the profession's most coveted credential.) There's no cocktail list, though a letter board on the wall lists recently-popular drinks, few of them likely to be familiar (ever tried a Maximilian Affair?) "What are you thinking tonight?" Misty asks.

"How about something with mezcal?" I reply, knowing she loves this spirit and has created many originals with it.

"Have you tried Nux Alpina? It's a walnut-based liqueur from Austria."

I'm game.

Misty precisely measures and stirs up one of her own creations, In Vida Veritas ($11), which combines Del Maguey Mezcal Vida, Zirbenz (an Austrian liqueur with the scent of pine resin), the aforementioned Nux, Benedictine (the sweet/herbal French monastery cordial), a dash of The Bitter Truth's Xocolate Mole Bitters, and a spritz of orange oil. It's mahogany-toned, smoky from the single-village mezcal, and reveals layers and layers of herbal complexity, something different hitting the palate with every sip. I've never tasted anything like it. This is exactly what I come here for.

Where on earth did this place spring from? Its origins lie in manager John Gertsen's prior stint at Lynch's restaurant No. 9 Park on Beacon Hill, where he combined polished bartending skills with a subtle showman's hospitality. What really distinguished Gertsen's program at No. 9 was his nerdy technical obsessiveness: sourcing high-quality spirits, bitters, and other ingredients from around the world; always using fresh juices and produce from No. 9's larder; studying and relating cocktail history and origin stories; reviving 19th-century classics and creating new cocktails in their mold; fretting over tools and garnishes and glassware and ice. No. 9 took Boston's then-embryonic cocktail renaissance up another level, and did it in very tight quarters with just a handful of seats. When Lynch embarked on an ambitious three-venue expansion plan in Fort Point, she opened Drink to give Gertsen a bigger, shinier stage.

Misty asks my companion what she's thinking.

"Something fresh and springy, like a Mojito?"

Misty probes further: "How do you feel about genever?"

"Um, not sure?"

"Give this one a try," she says, and returns with a Bols Smash ($11): lemon, sugar, a lot of genever and fresh mint shaken together and strained over hand-crushed ice, garnished with another bouquet of impeccable mint. It's beautiful and refreshing, and the malty, almost-whiskeylike undertone of the genever adds a heft and balance that the typically over-sugared light-rum Mojito lacks.

Next round? "How about something with gin?", I venture.

Asks Misty, "Have you sampled Ransom Old Tom gin? You must try a Martinez with this stuff: it's from Oregon, and it's amazing."

The resulting Martinez ($11) is a mix of Ransom Old Tom, Cinzano Rosso vermouth, Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, a dash of Jerry Thomas Decanter bitters, and a spritz of lemon oil. It's easy to see what Misty is excited about: this proto-Martini is much improved by the richer, dryer, barrel-aged Ransom.

Drink also serves punches, a specialty older even than Golden Age cocktails, one that few other Boston bars attempt. Most can be made to scale from two drinkers to much larger groups. One evening, Will Thompson concocts an unnamed punch for two ($24) that begins with lemon peels muddled with demerara sugar and macerated in tea. To this he adds Batavia Arrack, Jamaican and Barbadian rums, Cognac and fresh lemon juice. It's stirred with big, hand-carved chunks of ice in a lovely vintage bowl with a sterling ladle, finished with a flurry of fresh-grated nutmeg. It starts strong and delicious, gently mellowing over time, the ice cut large enough not to dilute it too quickly.

That highlights another detail that Drink sweats like no other Boston bar: ice. It sources 50-pound blocks from an ancient local icehouse, and makes Kold-Draft ice in crystal-clear, geometrically-perfect cubes. Bartenders wield antique ice tools to create a wide array of shapes and sizes carefully matched to the needs of each drink for cooling, texture, and dilution speed. It's a marvel to see a miniature blizzard of ice being planed off a giant block to make a mist, and startling to hear the thwack of a mallet on a Morris bag to produce ice with the texture of gravel.

Drink's no-set-menu philosophy aims to get drinkers out of their well-worn ruts, but I've noticed that some customers find it frustrating. They just want their usual, not a give-and-take to arrive at something unfamiliar. Vodka drinkers, beer lovers, and oenophiles are often flummoxed to learn that Drink offers them very few (and almost no familiar) options. I'm not certain why anyone would come here to pay $11 for a vodka and soda—it seems like going to a Chinese restaurant and ordering the hamburger —but Drink draws crowds of such drinkers on weekends, to the point where it must limit capacity, creating a queue on the sidewalk.

I guess they come for the cool vibe, not the chance to get into the spirit of the place. Quieter nights tend to attract more serious cocktail geeks, and that's when I encourage you to go. For although it has been joined since its opening by some fantastic places in the top tier, Drink remains the sine qua non of craft cocktails in Boston, the single best place to explore the near-infinite richness of the craft cocktail world. Having experienced it, you may never order another thoughtless Dirty Vodka "martini" ever again.

Drink

348 Congress Street, Boston, MA 02210-1236 (near A Street; map)

617-695-1806; drinkfortpoint.com

Jackets-Required Fine Dining Is Dying. Does Anybody Care?

2011-04-17T18:51:00.041-04:00

You don’t have to be very old to remember a time when certain Boston restaurants had a jackets-required rule. Locke-Ober, the Dining Room at the old Ritz-Carlton (now the Taj), and L’Espalier (in its original location) were three notable examples of rooms that insisted that male customers wear a tailored sport coat or suit to gain admittance. The maître d' literally would not seat you in the dining room without one. If you didn’t have the foresight to wear a jacket, or were arrogant enough to think they’d bend the rules for you, you faced a choice: go home and change, don one of their humiliating, ill-fitting loaner blazers, or dine somewhere else.

And they were dead-serious about it. Mick Jagger was famously denied entrance to even the bar at the Ritz in his t-shirt and jeans; being rich, famous, and a guest at the hotel didn’t matter. At Locke-Ober, that hallowed Downtown refuge for Boston’s vanishing Brahmin class, I witnessed many a host-stand scene featuring a young, well-heeled customer arguing in vain that his jeans cost $300, why couldn’t he get a table? But the jacket was non-negotiable. The owners were throwing a specific kind of party, and the invitation said “semi-formal attire”. You could get with the program, or take your business elsewhere.

That once-sacred condition of entry to the city’s temples of gastronomy is rapidly going the way of the dodo, the travel agent, and the landline phone. L’Espalier moved from its romantic but cramped quarters in a Back Bay mansion three years ago to spacious (if comparatively charmless) digs in the nearby Mandarin Oriental; dropping the dress code was a condition imposed by the hotel, which wanted its guests to have unfettered access. Before it became a Taj, the old Ritz closed its dining room and dropped the bar’s dress code; to the chagrin of old-timers, you could get a drink there in jeans and no jacket. But the true death-knell just sounded this month: Locke-Ober, the last restaurant in Boston to enforce a strict dress code, recently reopened after a brief hiatus, and its new owner has shot the jackets-required rule, though jeans and sneakers remain verboten.

Today, a few Boston restaurants say “jackets suggested”, but even the most casually-dressed patrons rarely get turned away. I recently dined at luxury steakhouse KO Prime next to a large table of businessmen in golf shirts and baseballs caps. In the new location of L’Espalier, one of the most formal and expensive restaurants in the city, I’ve seen customers in hooded sweatshirts, rocker gear (ragged jeans, motorcycle boots, band t-shirts), track suits, and head-to-toe Ed Hardy, complete with matching trucker hats. In the summer, it’s not unusual at places that charge $40 for entrees to see men wearing shorts and flip-flops that expose gnarly, ungroomed toes. (There’s a reason most fancy-restaurant dress codes are aimed explicitly at men; women seem to dress better without coaching.)

How did fine dining go from an occasion for your Sunday best to the equivalent of a Jersey Shore casting call? A few things are going on:

American dress sense has gotten steadily more informal. A hundred years ago, a gentleman wouldn’t think of dining out at a fancy restaurant in less than white tie – the Fred Astaire tailcoat, white pique formal shirt, vest and bowtie. To the horror of many at the time, this gave way to the tail-less dinner jacket, white pleated shirt, and black bowtie. Eyebrows were raised and tongues clucked again when men stopped “dressing for dinner”, i.e., changing into a tux from their daytime business suit and necktie. The next horror showed up only in a sport coat and slacks, first with a tie, but soon in a turtleneck or open-collared shirt. From there, it was a few short steps to no jacket at all, just a golf shirt, then t-shirt, then neon mesh wife-beater.

High-end dining is changing. Many restaurateurs, younger independent chef/owners especially, have fled the formality of the old Michelin-starred haute-cuisine palace, with its stiffness, white tablecloths and 20-piece place settings, preferring the casual conviviality of the bistro. While the food itself isn’t necessarily casual– it may in fact reflect just as much laborious technique, costly ingredients, and artful plating as the old school -- owners want the ambiance to be more relaxed. Even Boston’s Oak Bar, one of the city’s last surviving stately old rooms, is about to undergo a casual makeover. The tuxedoed waiter armed with a silver crumber has been pink-slipped.

Restaurants can't afford to turn away the business. Between the depressed economy, rising food costs, and new expenses like OpenTable and Groupon, many restaurants are struggling to stay profitable and win new customers. Given similar choices, customers will often opt for the restaurant that doesn’t make them dress up. As a recent Wall Street Journal article noted, even restaurateurs who cherish tradition and think that well-dressed patrons improve the atmosphere can no longer bear the competitive disadvantage of a dress code.

Many customers argue vehemently against dress codes, too. “I hate dressing up; I’m so happy I can have a nice meal and feel comfortable.” “Dress codes are elitist, designed to keep the hoi-polloi out. We’re a democratic society; you should be able to dine wherever you want to without owning an expensive suit.” “Go ahead and dress up if that’s what floats your boat, but don’t make me do it. You should be focusing on your companions and your dinner, not what I’m wearing.”

At the risk of sounding like a creaky grandpa, moaning that the world is going to hell and young people these days don’t know how to behave, I confess to some regret over this development. Americans have progressed with informality in dress to the point where we appear to have lost our sense of occasion entirely. We go to church in sweatpants, answer court summonses in novelty t-shirts, wear pajamas to the supermarket, sport jeans at funerals. More formal dress once symbolized the differentness of certain occasions from the humdrum social interactions of quotidian life. We’ve flattened that out: one loose, casual size now fits all.

A consequence of this uniformity is that special-occasion dining doesn’t feel as special anymore. I think a roomful of dressed-up patrons feels very different from one in which some folks are dressed up and others down. I get annoyed by people who show up at a Halloween party, black-tie wedding, or opening-night gala without applying enough effort to their attire to reflect the spirit of the occasion. A jackets-suggested restaurant is also a sort of costume party, and folks that flout the dress code are detracting from the atmosphere. That couple over there is trying to celebrate their silver wedding anniversary, and you look like you just strolled off the 18th hole? That strikes me as lazy and ungracious.

In certain settings, overly casual dress can be like too much perfume; there are limits to how much you can consciously shut it out of your senses. Try not to think about an elephant; it can be hard to pretend you can’t see that dude’s armpit hair right in your line of sight. Good manners are designed to help minimize the inevitable friction that results in public life, and they used to imply more effort than simply asking your neighbors to ignore you. Nice restaurants have joined the growing ranks of places in which American men no longer feel obligated to put on long pants, and I think that’s a shame.

I also worry that our all-casual, all-the-time sensibility is related to a broader coarsening of our culture, the decline of civility toward strangers in public life, the bubble of self-entitlement that a growing number of people appear to live in. I suspect the absence of a sense of decorum, an underdeveloped belief that some situations demand more formal behavior and dress than others, might be of a piece with our society's increasing rudeness and self-centeredness.

Ultimately, the death of jackets-required won’t make a huge dent in my life. I spend most of my time in and generally prefer more casual places. My professional restaurant reviewing duties are evenly split between fine dining and budget-priced restaurants, but even in the fancy joints, what excites me most is the food, not the ambiance. I understand how we got to this point, and respect restaurateurs' decisions to relax their standards. I personally wouldn’t mind if we rolled the sartorial clock back to the Mad Men era, arguably the last high point in American dress sense, but I know that ship has sailed.

Still, I can’t shake the feeling that something small but significant is being lost, and once gone, it will be gone forever. What remains of our dining-out culture will be slightly sadder, shabbier -- a bit more vulgar. It’s not the end of civilization, just the passing of a small grace, another tiny corner of a more genteel world sacrificed for our schlubby comfort. I think maybe I’ll put on a suit, head over to the Oak Bar, and have a drink there before it becomes just one more place where a jacket looks as quaintly old-fashioned as Don Draper’s tie bar. Sic transit gloria.

The Bar at Clio (Boston, MA): Todd Maul's Cannonball in the Craft Cocktail Pool

2011-03-28T18:14:00.016-04:00

[This is a reprint of a piece I wrote for Serious Eats, originally published on February 28, 2011. All photos by MC Slim JB.]

For over ten years, I'd been dropping by the small, handsomely modern bar at Clio Restaurant in the Back Bay and thinking, "What a waste! Here's celeb-chef Ken Oringer's flagship restaurant, serving some of the most beautiful New French food in the city. There's Uni Sashimi Bar downstairs, one of the great joints of its type in town. So why does the bar feature these horrible Sex and the City flavored-vodka cocktails?" Mercifully, change finally came last year, in the form of a largely unheard-of, self-effacing, enormously talented new bar manager by the name of Todd Maul.

Maybe Oringer got tired of customers asking why Clio's bar was so feeble while Toro and Coppa, his terrific mid-priced South End restaurants, had strong cocktail programs. Whatever the reason, he lured Maul away from Harvard Square's Rialto, another fancy hotel restaurant. Maul had certainly flown under my craft-bartender radar. Unlike many of his more-celebrated peers, he hadn't passed through Boston's No. 9 Park or Cambridge's bygone B-Side Lounge. So when he debuted a mammoth, ambitious new menu of pre-Prohibition classics, Tiki cocktails, and high-craft originals accented with fillips of molecular gastronomy, it was like a cannonball in Clio's sleepy pool, and I didn't see the splash coming.

American rye, gin, applejack, cognac? Interesting vermouths, bitters, monastery cordials and housemade Swedish punsch? Smoked ice? Hallelujah! Essaying the ten-chapter list is initially daunting, but a good springboard for the evening is the Tiki Drinks and Daiquiris section. This honors the recent revival of traditional Tiki cocktails pioneered in 1930s Hollywood by Donn Beach at his seminal Don the Beachcomber.

Dr. Funk's Cousin ($13) mixes Gosling's dark rum, fresh lemon and lime juices, housemade grenadine, simple syrup, soda, and fresh ground cinnamon. Stirred over ice and served in a retro moai ceramic mug, it embodies the classic rum/lime/sugar combination central to the authentic Tiki canon. Aside from its potency and the kitschy serving vessel, this drink is impossible to confuse with the fake-Tiki dreck served at suburban Polynesian restaurants and student hellholes like Cambridge's Hong Kong.

Having a second cocktail without some food would be a mistake. Now might be a good moment to order some of Clio's exquisite bar nibbles, like salt cod croquettes ($11) with black-garlic aioli, and from Uni's menu, a sashimi of Maine lobster tail ($16): gorgeous, delicately rich in flavor, a bargain.

While awaiting these snacks, you might scan the Aperitif section and land on the New Amsterdam ($13): Bols Genever, Averna (a bitter yet sweetly syrupy Sicilian amaro), fresh lemon juice, Bitter Truth celery bitters, and salt. Shaken over ice, strained into a coupe, it impresses with the clear, malty flavors of genever, not unlike an unaged whiskey, with restrained sour and savory elements. It's beautifully balanced: a proper aperitif.

Moving on to the Non-Thirteen Dollar Drinks section, you might note how Maul takes liberties with a Great War vintage classic like the gin-based French 75 ($10). Says Maul, "I've never seen a Frenchman drink gin", so he switches in Cognac alongside the traditional mix of Luxardo Triplum triple sec, fresh lemon juice and Champagne. The result falls somewhere between Sidecar and a Champagne cocktail—a refreshing and attractive update.

Beyond cocktails, there's an extensive list of wines by the glass ($10-$28) and a shorter sake list. The globetrotting bottled beer selection surprises with three Southeast Asian lagers—Lao, Chang and Saigon—at the sweet, sweet price of $3 a pop. A long list of whiskeys favors pricey single-malt Scotches and boutique bourbons. As Clio and Uni are among Boston's costliest restaurants, the crowd runs older, conservatively well-dressed and prosperous. Rest rooms are hidden downstairs off the hotel lobby; you might want to map out the twisting route to them before your third round.

Throughout, Maul works more cleverly with cane spirits than many bars that boast about them, studiously avoids cliché, and trains his lieutenants so well you don't need to skip his nights off. He still has room to grow: hardcore cocktail geeks could wish for more whole-egg drinks, hand-carved ice, and larger-format punches (though he pours some fine two-handers, like a swinging Singapore Sling for $25) Regardless, he merits a fat gold star for lifting the bar at Clio out of that deep, sorry trough of upscale Boston watering holes with three yards of glittering vodkas and zero precision, cocktail scholarship or passion. In short, he has utterly remade it into something worthy of Clio and Uni's extraordinary food and service. With gratitude, all I can say is, "It's about bloody time."

Clio Restaurant
Eliot Hotel, 370A Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215-2801 (Near Massachusetts Avenue; map)
617-536-7200

My Debut as Boston Cocktail Writer for Serious Eats

2011-02-28T08:28:00.011-05:00

I'm thrilled to announce my first contribution to Serious Eats as a writer covering the Boston cocktail scene. It's a review of one of my favorite craft cocktail bars of the moment: the bar at Clio Restaurant and Uni Sashimi Bar in the Eliot Hotel in Boston's Back Bay. I chose it for my Serious Eats debut because as wonderful as it is, the bar and its gifted manager Todd Maul tend to get overlooked even by serious cocktail aficionados who follow more celebrated local bartenders at better-known venues like Drink, Eastern Standard and Green Street.

Writing for Serious Eats is seriously exciting for me: it's the single biggest, most influential blog in North America focused on the enjoyment of food and drink, both out on the town and at home. Based in New York, with great content on the New York scene, it's the home of one of my favorite food writers, the food scientist, gifted chef, recipe maven, Boston ex-pat and MIT alumnus J. Kenji Alt-Lopez. Plus it dives deeply and nerdily into specialty areas like hamburgers, pizza, and recipes for home cooks.

I'm honored that they asked me to make the first Boston contribution to their new Drinks section dedicated to beverages of all stripes, including coffee, tea, beer, wine, spirits, soft drinks, drink-making techniques, books and equipment, food/drink pairings -- and of course, quality cocktails and the bars and bartenders that serve them.

Here's an example of how influential this site is: a year ago, Serious Eats picked up "27 Really Terrible Boston Restaurant Names", a piece I wrote on this blog that satirizes Boston restaurants with less-than-great names. On a typical day, my blog gets a few hundred hits. After Serious Eats linked to it, it got thousands of visits a day for a week, and the essay inspired similar pieces in several cities around the US. Their readership is huge and loyal.

I expect this will be the first in a series of reviews of my favorite places for a well-made drink in Greater Boston. I hope you like it, and I look forward to writing more!

CSI Boston – Restaurant Edition: Who Killed Rocca?

2011-01-03T11:21:00.069-05:00

A lot of Bostonians woke up New Year’s Day to learn that Rocca Kitchen & Bar, an upscale, modern Italian restaurant in Boston's South End, had closed. (I got wind of it on New Years' Eve from parties connected with the restaurant, confirmed it the next morning, and broke the news at 8am on Chowhound.) Many expressed shock: wasn’t Rocca doing well? Hadn’t chef Tiffani Faison (brought aboard in March 2010) reinvigorated the menu, garnered enthusiastic re-reviews in the Boston Globe and Boston Magazine, attracted plenty of press (in part with her celebrity from Bravo's Top Chef)? What the heck happened?

It’s said that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. I expect many conflicting stories to trickle out in the coming weeks, laying blame for Rocca’s closing variously on troubled management, the recession, the fickleness of customers, bad weather, crossed stars. As someone who lives nearby, roots for local businesses to succeed, and gave Rocca many chances over its three years and eight months of life, I have my own particular theory. Let’s consider the evidence:

Food. I considered Faison’s food an improvement over her predecessor, and particularly admired her deft, creative hand with seafood: I will fondly remember a dish of squid-ink strozzapreti with shrimp and grilled-escarole pesto. But opening chef Tom Fosnot was no slouch either, and some of his dishes, like corzetti with rabbit ragù, were also extraordinary. I found it refreshing to see a few nods to the cuisine of Liguria (like a hand-rolled trofie with hand-mortared pesto), a region of Italy that gets short shrift in the US, especially hereabout. On the whole, I really liked the food.

Location. Rocca had a great spot in a corner of the South End that had become gentrified with neighboring luxury condos and helped by the success of nearby restaurants and pubs like Gaslight Brasserie du Coin, Myers + Chang, Oishii Boston, and J.J. Foley’s Cafe. Locals no longer considered that stretch of Harrison Avenue dangerous to walk around at night, and visitors could take advantage of free parking, a rare amenity in the South End.

Ambience. I considered the upstairs dining room and bar a bit cramped and more than a little tacky, with shifting-colors LED lighting that was about ten years too late for hipness. But the first-floor bar and lounge was beautiful, airy and inviting, and the spacious patio, secluded comfortably away from street noise and car exhaust, was my favorite in the South End.

Wines and spirits. I found the wine list pretty useful, with good range in Italian wines and enough price breadth to meet both my weeknight bargain-sipping and weekend splurging needs. Bartending was never extraordinary but generally adequate, not distracting enough to be a minus.

Service. Okay, some major blood spatter here. Rocca’s service ranged from very good to adequate to thoroughly incompetent. There were nights when we experienced flawless attention, others where we felt not especially well-treated but not ill-used, and at least two occasions when I thought, “This is the worst service I have gotten anywhere in a long time.” There appeared to be a persistent expediting problem, an inability to get food quickly from the basement kitchen to tables. During one particularly maddening stretch in the Fosnot era, I was so consistently served lukewarm to cold food that I stopped ordering anything that needed to be hot to be enjoyable. The biggest problem was that you never knew which Rocca service experience was going to show up. It could be great and awful on successive nights.

Management. I can’t speak directly to management competence at Rocca except as reflected in my service experiences, but one Chowhound poster made an observation that hadn’t struck me but I recognized as true: co-owners Michela Larson and Gary Sullivan weren’t a strong, visible presence at the restaurant. I didn’t often catch them working the room after the first few weeks, didn’t see their hands-on presence in the front of the house. That stands in marked contrast to many successful restaurants in the neighborhood.

There is doubtless more to the story than what customers can see; I can only share a customer's impressions. Great first experiences: loved the food, brought many friends there, spent a bunch of pleasant summer evenings on the patio. An ensuing pattern of frustration, as mediocre and poor experiences alternated with strong ones, leading me to drop Rocca from my rotation of reliable neighborhood standbys. A second chance granted under the new chef: another great first impression, with relief that it seemed to be on the upswing. Then another series of wildly inconsistent dinners, with service quality varying from good to so-so to my worst single fine-dining service experience of 2010 -- which I described as "so bad it was almost comical, until the $170 check arrived." Similar woes reported by friends I’d dragged back to the “new Rocca” but were no longer thanking me for it. We all have less dining-out money to spend and fewer free nights to spend it: why roll the dice when there are a dozen places within a few blocks that are less risky?

More than anything else, that inconsistency is what did Rocca in for me. In my experience as a customer and industry employee, it’s the one pitfall that is the most difficult for a restaurant to avoid. Inconsistency is the key reason so many places like Rocca that appear to have all the factors necessary for success – great location, attractive physical plant, veteran management team, loads of talent in the kitchen, strong concept – still fail. I really liked it, yet I couldn’t depend on it, and so found it difficult to recommend to others. The lesson in my mind is that it’s better to earn a B-minus seven days a week than an A on some nights and a D on others. Above all, consistency is what keeps restaurants in business.

The 2010 Devil's Dining Awards

2010-12-19T10:44:00.033-05:00

2010 was both brutal and promising for Boston’s restaurant industry. I handed out my usual professional accolades: the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards (with my friend and frequent collaborator Ruth Tobias); some year-end highlights from Food Coma, my biweekly fine-dining column for Stuff Magazine; and a year-end retrospective of On the Cheap, my budget-dining perch at the Boston Phoenix.

But there's never enough room to laud the praiseworthy or take a prose scimitar to the crass, the ridiculous, the fraudulent and the shameless -- except here, where space is free and no editor frets about whom I might offend. So for the second year running *, here’s my personal take on the extraordinary, high and low, in Boston’s dining and drinking scene: the 2010 Devil's Dining Awards!

Funniest Bid to Attract an Industry Crowd Award: to The Citizen Public House and Oyster Bar, for serving draft Fernet Branca at $3 a shot. At this terrific new Fenway joint from the Franklin Café gang, it takes eighteen 750ml bottles to fill the reservoir of Fernet, a tipple favored by bartenders, servers and cooks as an after-work cool-down chased by a High Life or Bud Lite Lime. I've advocated the joys of this poisonously-bitter Milanese digestif for years, so I’m gratified by its surging popularity. But the day it began flowing cheaply from a tap? I did not see that one coming.

The Horror Behind the Mask Award: to the Brothers Andelman of The Phantom Gourmet, a local restaurant-review TV show. No, it’s not for polishing the knobs of their advertisers: even their dimmest viewers recognize that the Andelmans are shameless whores. Rather, it’s the phony gusto with which the boys smack their lips on-camera over the fatty/starchy fare in which the program wallows: cupcakes, ribs, chicken parm, anything deep-fried and drenched with syrup, gravy or melted cheese. The truth is that Dave is a fitness fanatic, Mike a vegetarian, and Dan (judging from the places I routinely ran into him when he lived in town) more fond of tony fine-dining establishments than dripping steak bombs and glazed donuts. It’s like discovering the Red Sox color guy is secretly a Yankees fan: the Phantom loves arugula!

Comically Inept Thievery Award: to Judith Griggs, editor of Cooks Source magazine. In her Sunderland, MA-based monthly, Griggs routinely used food features she found online without asking permission from or paying their authors. When caught, she insisted that everything on the web is public domain and she was practically doing those stupid freelancers a favor. An Internet firestorm of outrage ensued, including a few thousand hilarious insults on Facebook. After several lame attempts to deflect guilt, a red-faced Griggs folded her journalistic chop shop and slunk into oblivion.

Ballsiest Debut Award: to Somerville's Journeyman. Sure, Barbara Lynch showed cojones by opening super-pricey Menton in the middle of an endless recession, but her backers have deep pockets: a flop wouldn’t kill her. Journeyman’s chef/owners Tse Wei Lim and Diana Kudayarova abandoned careers for which they’d earned MIT PhDs to open an expensive, ambitious restaurant in a modest corner of Somerville. The venture sometimes bespeaks an amateur’s learning curve, but the food is often breathtaking: snout-to-tail, intensely local and sustainable, occasionally molecular. As important, they’re doing what every gifted home cook fantasizes about, and in following their bliss, have mounted an enterprise that is at once humble and audacious. Bravo!

Saddest Closing Awards:

Gitlo’s Dim Sum Bakery in Allston, which never recovered from the departure of its brilliant opening chef
Beijing Star in Waltham, a superb traditional Northern Chinese restaurant
Terrie’s Place, a Southie diner that referred to customers living more than a few blocks away as being "from out of state"
The Forest Café, a long-running Cambridge townie dive / Mexican joint
Café 57 & Grille, a fine indie breakfast/lunch place in Brighton that a competition-wary Dunkin’ Donuts apparently sued out of existence
St. Alphonzo’s Kitchen, an amiable, eclectic Southie neighborhood spot; and
Chef Chang’s House, a faded Brookline American-Chinese institution I’ll always remember from days long past when the venerable Grandpa Chang carved Peking duck tableside. RIP, all.

Biggest (Qualified) Surprise Award: to Strega Waterfront. I’ve hammered Nick Varano’s flagship North End restaurant Strega for its hideous décor, awful website, overpriced and inconsistent food, and stale-as-yesterday's-cannoli Hollywood-mobster theme. Varano calls it “Da bes’ Italian food in da city”; I call it “Artie Bucco’s Cheers Bar”. But while the new Strega Waterfront commits familiar sins – too many TVs, dubious red-sauce dishes (see below), portraits of Pacino and DeNiro apparently painted by the bastard offspring of Jackson Pollack and LeRoy Neiman – the kitchen occasionally sticks a landing, like with its lobster risotto. I can’t give the whole package a rave, but the food does ascend at times to trump the tacky shtick.

Don’t Let the Door Hit You Award: to Don Otto’s. After closing for good, this short-lived South End gourmet grocery/deli penned a snotty website broadside that blamed its failure on disloyal, philistine customers and the perfidy of Wal-Mart (closest outlet: a half-hour drive away). Me, I ardently support local merchants, shun Wal-Mart and gladly pay a premium for quality, but I was done with The Don after I spied rotten, moldy fruit there. I’m sorry, Don Otto: it’s not me, it’s you.

Worst New Restaurant Name Awards. The most popular essay on my blog this year poked fun at various Boston restaurants for their awful names. Some new groaners have emerged since:

Deuxave -- a delightful restaurant with great food, service, wines and atmosphere, but “Douche Ave” just comes to mind way too easily
Waxy O’Connor’s -- ugh, just… ugh
Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill -- I loathe that song, and celebrity-owned chains
Twitters Bar & Grill -- three words: Not On Twitter
Pasta Beach -- maccheroni is not good for your swimsuit figure; saucy foods and sand don't mix.

Most Futile Hail-Mary Pass Award: to North End restaurant Davide for its pending appearance on Kitchen Nightmares. Fox’s restaurant-makeover show follows Gordon Ramsay, the talented but money-grubbing British chef, as he expresses disgust at a struggling restaurant's food, then profanely tongue-lashes the incompetent owners, cooks and waitstaff into submission. He then oversees a perfunctory menu and dining room face-lift before exiting triumphantly. The show's dirty secret is that Chef Shouty McSpittlefleck never addresses the business management issues at the root of most restaurant failures. So Davide will likely suffer the same fate as most of Ramsay's Cinderellas: a brief bump in popularity after the episode airs, failure within a year or two anyway, and the eternal afterlife of its public humiliation on YouTube. If you're a restaurateur in similar straits, consider preserving your dignity by just closing quietly.

Most Passé Bill-Padding Gambit Award: to pushing bottled water. Trying to make customers feel like peasants for choosing Boston’s excellent tap water over some pricey import is not only a dreadful first service interaction, but also out of step with the times. Smart places like The Russell House Tavern are doing the green thing, filtering and bottling their own still and sparkling water and serving it gratis. I’ll have the local, sustainable choice, thank you very much.

Lead Balloon Awards. If you write 70 or so professional reviews a year and dine out a lot more just for fun, you’re going to be served some dishes that fail unequivocally. Mine included porchetta at Towne Stove and Spirits (dry and inedibly tough, a $35 fiasco), bucatini amatriciana at Strega Waterfront (overcooked, oversauced, overdosed with pecorino and lacking guanciale), and seared skate at Sam’s at Louis Boston (bludgeoned to death with a salt shaker). Those are all kitchens with talent, but boy, did those plates flop hard.

Most Sobering TV Story Arc Award: to Season 4 of Mad Men, AMC’s acclaimed drama set in a 1960s Manhattan advertising agency. In Seasons 1 to 3, the show so glamorized old-school boozing that you wanted to head directly to Deep Ellum or Green Street after each episode for a classic cocktail, or to eBay to bid on some vintage highball glasses. This year it followed brilliant and troubled ad man Don Draper’s grim downward spiral into alcoholism. So depressing were Don’s rye-soaked travails that we considered quitting drinking altogether. Not even an actor of Jon Hamm’s considerable skills can make sweaty projectile vomiting the morning after an extremely ill-considered hookup look sexy.

Worst Food-Writing Trend Award: to unironic reviews of megachain fast-food excrescences. Teenagers rhapsodizing about horrific crap like Wendy’s Baconator Triple (1330 calories, 38 gm saturated fat, 3150 mg sodium), I can forgive: they’re kids. But Sam Sifton chewing over the KFC Double Down? The Boston Phoenix gushing over the McDonald’s McRib? Embarrassing, especially while worthy independent local restaurants remain unreviewed.

Happy For You, Not Me Award: to Rino’s Place, the family-run Eastie spot that serves excellent Italian-American fare and fabulous traditional Italian specials. A spate of critical raves (mea culpa: I lauded it in The Phoenix, as subsequently did the Boston Herald, Phantom Gourmet, and most fatally, Diners Drive-Ins and Dives) has engendered three-hour waits on weekends. Rino’s deserves the crowds; I just can’t spare the time to get a table there anymore. (Personal Hell Sub-Award: I'm the one who tipped off Guy Fieri's producers about Rino's.)

Ludicrous Food-Nerd Elitism Award: to anyone who dismisses gussied-up versions of lowborn food as “inauthentic”. In my accounting, the urge to glorify foods originally served from street carts, food trucks, carnival tents, and ballpark concession stands isn’t pretension. Rather, it's natural for creative, restless chefs to apply skill and quality ingredients in the interest of elevating ignoble dishes. By all means, diners should understand and appreciate these foods in their traditional incarnations. But spare me the reverse snobbery that says that poutine stops being poutine the minute you add foie gras. If you’ve ever paid more than eight bucks for a burger, you’re already down that rabbit hole.

Burn Your Own House Down Award: to The Upper Crust pizzeria chain, excoriated in a devastating Boston Globe story for allegedly engaging in ruthless, systematic exploitation of its Brazilian kitchen workers. Bad enough that a 2009 US Labor Department investigation awarded workers $350,000 in back wages, but now a newer investigation and class-action lawsuit depict management as trying to sidestep that settlement and continuing its other abuses. [Update: a former longtime Upper Crust manager who blew the whistle to the Labor Department is now suing, saying that owner Jordan Tobins retaliated against him by falsely accusing him of robbery, withholding hundreds of dollars from his last paycheck, and threatening to kill him.] The restaurant’s public demurral looks pretty feeble, effectively, "Sometimes people say untrue things." Many customers are buying their pies elsewhere until the dispute gets its next day in court.

Worst Enduring Cocktail Trend Award: to drinks that pander to one’s inner sugar-craving adolescent. The now widely-banned Four Loko was obviously targeting idiot youths with its 23.5-ounce can, Slurpee-inspired flavors, 24-proof strength, and double-Red-Bull stimulant dose; no wonder it induced blackouts and alcohol poisoning. Meanwhile, 30-proof alcohol-infused canned whipped cream and 80-proof chocolate milk remain on the shelves. Worse, some imp is goading the otherwise estimable Lydia Shire to create libations like the Holiday Macaroon, a froth of coconut and chocolate vodkas, crème de menthe and cream that looks like a Shamrock Shake in a cocktail glass. Unless you’re a grandma having one for dessert, I’m begging you: can we please just drink like grownups?

Charm Is Tough to Replicate Award: to Kelly’s Roast Beef, which opened a new store in Allston with the same menu as the 1950s-vintage Revere Beach original, including the famed North Shore-style roast beef sandwich it invented and some excellent fried clams. But the new outlet, like every Kelly’s except the mothership, has all the allure of a slightly-upscale Burger King. This food just isn't the same if you’re not perched on a seaside bench, defending your fries from aggressive seagulls.

Humankind Is As a Plague of Locusts Unto the Earth Award: to the perilous lurching of bluefin tuna, caviar sturgeon and other coveted food fish toward extinction through overfishing. It’s like we’re all in that scene in The Freshman, gloatingly eating the last of each species out of spite and self-satisfaction in our dominion over the biosphere. Seems like Homo sapiens needs to be shoved down a ring on the food chain, maybe by some War of the Worlds style blood-sucking aliens, to better appreciate the virtues of sustainable eating.

Even Chains Get It Right Sometimes Award: to the roast beef on kümmelweck sandwich at Bleacher Bar, a Lyons Group establishment best known for its center-field-wall view into Fenway Park. A Buffalo specialty rarely seen in Boston, "beef on weck" features a caraway-and-butcher-salt-topped roll, lots of thin-sliced rare roast beef, plus some jus and horseradish. Bleacher Bar's rendition hits all the right notes, and the bar shows Bills games and serves wings in season. Pretty fine work -- or so say my cousins from Buffalo.

Budget-Restaurant Personality of the Year Award: to Winston “Al” Niles, the garrulous, courtly Jamaican ex-pat behind WAN Convenience Store and Deli. With a steady stream of affable patter, Mr. Niles keeps a queue of Mission Hill regulars enthralled as he leisurely assembles delicious, messy, Dagwood-like sandwiches. Note that Al still operates on island time, meaning his posted opening and closing hours are more like suggestions than rules.

Most Delusional Customer Award: to the party at Myers + Chang who requested a doggie bag, forgot it, called to learn it was being held for them, and rather than return, demanded a gift certificate for the value of the food. (M+C declined. I suggested they mail the leftovers via Parcel Post.) This kind of outrageously grasping, absurdly self-entitled behavior keeps Boston civility advocate Patrick Maguire clacking, dumbfounded, on his Server Not Servant blog.

Big in 2010, Bigger in 2011 Award: to the influence of technology on restaurant/customer interactions, from Facebook and Twitter marketing, to Groupon-like email promos, to online booking via OpenTable and Rezbook, to billions of amateur food blogs and online consumer reviews. Maybe restaurants will finally figure out that hyper-animated websites are less useful than plain ones that merely deliver contact info, hours and menus – especially since iPhone and other popular mobile platforms don’t support Flash. Maybe diners will grasp that location-based check-ins say, “Burgle me, I’m not at home.” And with any luck, the bright minds at Quest Visual will do a Han character version of their astonishing Word Lens app, so I can easily translate Chinese restaurant signs, menus and specials boards. I’d take that over a personal jetpack any day.

Here’s hoping that 2011 ladles you up a nice cup of punch, tweets you the location of your favorite food truck, keeps the neighbors from bitching about your CSA crate in the hallway, convinces you to try the roast pig’s-head entree, and feeds your kid a healthier school lunch. As my friends in Natal say, Oogy wawa!

* Last year's awards are here.

15 Highlights from My 2010 Fine-Dining Column for Stuff Magazine

2010-12-13T10:23:00.014-05:00

The year-end issue of Stuff Magazine just came out, and as such it includes several 2010 retrospectives. One is a look back at my biweekly Food Coma column which reviews fine-dining restaurants in Greater Boston, trying to give readers a broad flavor of the restaurant while highlighting one particularly outstanding dish.

The Ultimate Food Coma: The 25 Best Things We Ate This Year not only includes my best-of picks from my 2010 year of high-end dining out on behalf of Stuff, but also includes Scott Kearnan's ten favorites from his Stuff It column, which tends to focus on more casual venues. Here's a breakdown of our picks.

From MC Slim JB’s Food Coma column:

15. Lobster risotto at Strega Waterfront

14. Crispy soft-poached egg at Russell House Tavern

13. Roasted suckling pig at Troquet

12. Grilled steak frites at Grill 23 & Bar

11. Blackened rare ahi tuna with yellow mole at Masa Boston

10. Peking chicken and pot pie at Towne Stove & Spirits

9. Cod en papillotte at La Voile

8. Codorniz al xocolat at Taberna de Haro

7. Dibi at Teranga

6. Farmer's plate at The Gallows

5. Marinated octopus at Bistro du Midi

4. Salumi at Coppa Enoteca

3. Fried Kumamoto oyster at O Ya

2. Kataifi-wrapped langoustines at Menton

1. Seasonal salad at Journeyman

From Scott Kearnan’s Stuff It column:

10. The mezze platter at Karoun

9. Butternut squash ravioli at Barlow's

8. Deviled eggs at Deep Ellum

7. Croque Dog at Mike & Patty's

6. Pork Milanese at Geoffrey's Cafe

5. Deep-fried lobster legs at The Barking Crab

4. Meat pies at KO Catering and Pies

3. Mac Attack at Boston Burger Company

2. Masala ravioli at Da Vinci Ristorante

1. The All the Way dog at Tasty Burger

The feature reflects my general sentiment that despite the lingering chill of the recession, 2010 was still a great year for restaurants Boston, with operators old and new giving us plenty of good reasons to keep dining out. Here's hoping 2011 represents a broad upswing for all of us.

Food Writing 101: On Vocabulary -- A Love Letter/Bitch Session, by Denveater & MC Slim JB (Part 2 of 2)

2010-12-08T09:44:00.010-05:00

[Here's Part 2 of an essay on food-writing words we love and hate. Part 1, focusing on the love part, appears here. The "we" is me and my friend / fellow food writer Ruth Tobias of Denver food blog Denveater, where this piece also runs. The whole thing was Ruth's idea; I just tagged along.]

Words/Phrases MC Slim JB Hates

Slim: “The food writing that most offends me reflects laziness: a reliance on shopworn clichés and the overblown yet vacuous language of restaurant-industry press releases.”

[verb]ed (e.g., cooked) to perfection. That’s not writing, that a lift from a Denny’s menu. Shame on you.

Washed down with. Nothing says “I really enjoyed that beverage” like calling it a lubricant for your food-chute. [Guilty, but then I’ve never been known for gracefulness at the table—Denveater.]

Mouth-watering. Salivation is like an erection: essential to the process of enjoyment, and a universally-understood signifier of excitement. But while I appreciate my own, I don’t care at all for descriptions of yours.

Drool (as an interjection). Mouth-watering, as said by a teenager in a text message.

To die for. Cute when your Yiddish grandma says it, a deathly cliché when you do.

So good. Empty and stupid even before “Sweet Caroline” became a sports-arena staple.

Foodie. Bad enough that it’s infantile. But it has been co-opted by so many ridiculous people who think their love of food somehow makes them extraordinary—from the odious I-got-to-the-It-Place-before-you type to the I’m-pickier-about-my-Cheesecake-Factory-selections-than-you idiot—that it deserves banishment.

Homemade. That should be house-made, unless it was actually made in someone’s home.

Ethnic or authentic. When you say ethnic, I suspect you mean “food from a tradition other than white bread, mid-century American,” which does not reflect well on your worldliness. When you say authentic, I suspect you mean “Just like I had that one time I went to Bangkok for three days”, or “Just like my third-generation Italian-American mom made”, meaning you’re claiming some authority you probably don’t have. Traditional is generally safer and more accurate in both cases.

Crispy (should be crisp). Okay, this might be pure pedantry on my part.

Finger-licking. Unless you mean to say that the venue serves finger food but does not supply napkins, this does not reflect well on your table manners.

From hell. If you’re aiming to describe capsicum heat, or badness, you can do better.

Indulgent. This word makes me think of TV ads trying to glamorize flavored instant coffees. Let’s take it as given that paying to have food prepared and served to you by professionals is already an indulgence. If you mean there’s a lot of fat and sugar in your dish, please be more specific.

Scrumptious. I admit to falling back on simple superlatives and synonyms for delicious on a regular basis. There’s just a glimmer of eye-twinkling in this one that irks me. [Another one I’m partial to, I think because it sounds like the way I eat: scrump, scrump, scrump…Denveater]

Words Denveater Hates

Chowdah, etc. Real accents are charming; feigned, transcribed accents are just embarrassing. Forget “chowdah.” Forget “N’Awlins.” And for God’s sake forget “fuhgeddabouddit.”

Food porn; also crack, orgy, etc. Enough with the faux-edgy references to sex & drugs—yawn. Unless the food you’ve photographed contains actual boobies or you’ve literally been shooting up schmaltz in a back alley, eyes rolling back into your skull, the slang has long since ceased to shock.

¡Olé!; also Opa!, Mangia!, etc. Please, oh, please refrain from the belabored, ethnically stereotyped interjections. Do you actually let it fly during your meal? Does anyone actually shout it at you while serving your meal, outside of the Epcot Center? No, because it’s not a small world after all, it’s a big, bad one where the only proper response to such forced conviviality should be a cold black stare.

Heavenly; also divine, sinful etc. Leave the moral discourse to Sunday sermons & Family Circle. Not only is it not very useful—what exactly does heaven taste like? Ether? The simultaneous ejaculation of 72 virgins?—it just smacks of an era when euphemisms were power plays, when all the ladies wore aprons & stood sobbing quietly in their state-of-the-art kitchens before gleaming refrigerator doors with signs like “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips.” Depressingly prim.

Sammy/sammie. The infantilization of the word “sandwich” is irritating beyond belief not least because it’s pointless as a shortcut—the number of syllables still adds up to 2! Granted, if you’re regressing to toddlerhood as thoroughly as your vocabulary suggests, you may no longer be able to count to 2.

Stoup; also choup. This one goes out to Rachael Ray, who is as much a writer as she is a chef, which is to say not at all. Even “TV personality” gives her too much credit; in fact, it’s her lack thereof that confirms the suspicion that she’s probably a robot built by the Food Network to take over the world one brain-melting slice of microwaved bacon at a time. That would explain her programmatic abuse of the English language. She defines “stoup” as “thicker than a soup but not quite a stew” (and, even stoupider, “choup” as “thicker than a stew but not quite a chowder”). It’s like that old joke, “Waiter, there’s a hair in my soup!”—I don’t want the hairs she’s splitting (for the sake, I assume, of trademarks) anywhere near my bowl. Depending on the ingredients, a thick, chunky soup is a stew or a chowder; there’s no need or room for an intermediate stage. Longest 15 minutes of fame ever.

MC Slim JB concludes: “I hope readers understand that we’re not being prescriptive here: we want you to write as you write, not as we write. I admit to having committed most of these sins over the years myself. But if you want readers to keep coming back, my advice is to be vigilant against the trite, the vague and the cutesy. If you want to be read like a pro, you’ll have to rise above the level of the typical lazy Yelper. There, we summarized that to perfection, and it was more outrageously awesome than a barrel of vivacious monkeys, LOL! I think we’re done here. ¡Olé!"

Food Writing 101: On Vocabulary -- A Love Letter/Bitch Session, by Denveater & MC Slim JB (Part 1 of 2)

2010-12-06T15:58:00.017-05:00

[Here's another in a series of joint essays by me and my friend and fellow food writer Ruth Tobias of Denver food blog Denveater, where this piece also runs. Ruth conceived of this piece, so she's the "I" here; my contributions are noted explicitly.]

Every so often, some Chowhound starts a particularly juicy, funny, & unnerving thread (like this one) about foodie terminology that either tickles or rankles — usually the latter (including “foodie” itself). Without meaning to come off like a Teen Talk Barbie, I can’t help but whine a bit as I read them about the fact that "food writing is hard!" insofar as there are only so many words to describe the sensation of taste. Play it safe, & you’re bound to bore everyone out of their skulls, yourself included; jazz it up, and you’re sure to raise the howling specter of Restaurant Girl, the New York Daily News’s infamous erstwhile critic whose prose prompted my Boston-based food-critic pal MC Slim JB to host what remains one of my favorite snark-parties ever on the boards. A taste of Danyelle Freeman’s work:

"Even better, the homemade ravioli look like a store-bought sheet straight from a box. It's a deceptive maneuver with criminally delicious returns: Each doughy pocket gets plumped with a vivacious mix of four cheeses and spackled with a silky lettuce sauce."

Still, preferring the sound of laughter, however derisive, to that of steady snoring, I know I err on the side of exuberant overwriting myself. Slim agrees: “My food writing tends towards the rococo, especially when I’m trying to communicate emotions inspired by food. If you want to go beyond food reporting (‘Here’s what was served, how it looked, the ingredient list’) and give readers a flavor of the experience of pleasure in eating, it’s tough not get a little florid at times.”

Slim goes on: “The reality is that writing, not just food writing, truly is hard, even for people who ostensibly have the tools. For example, the notorious Ms. Freeman went to Harvard, wrote for the fourth-largest daily in the US, understands grammar and syntax, and has a high-SAT-score vocabulary. Nevertheless, she’s just an appalling writer, almost unreadable in her awfulness. But she’s an extreme example. The sins that offend us daily are more garden-variety: crimes against diction, thudding clichés, unnecessary neologisms. You don’t have to be Restaurant-Girl-horrendous to make us wince, eye-roll, or wish you’d done one more revision: just use hackneyed, empty phrases like ‘cooked to perfection’.”

Words, we recognize, are like anything else we humans use to communicate who we are & where we stand—gestures, clothing, hairstyles: they’re a matter of taste (in the broad sense), which means not everyone is going to like them. Hence, while we’ve been dishing for years on our own pet phrases—haters be damned!—as well as the clunkers & clichés that make us cringe, we don’t agree on everything. All part of the fun learning curve.

Here, then, is our signed manifesto/confession/defense.

Words MC Slim JB Loves

Says Slim, “I’m not offering these as Words Food Writers Should Use, just examples of Words I Love. I culled these from the sixty professional pieces I wrote this year. I sweat hard over word choice; few editorial decisions annoy me more than the substitution of an insipid, ninth-grade-reading-level word for one I painstakingly chose for its dense or allusive or narrow meaning. Saying a flavor is assaultive is not the same as calling it strong or intense.”

Describing qualities of food: toothsome (properly used to describe a certain texture, typically of pasta), luscious,velvety, zippy, lusty, miserly, parsimonious, prosaic, lyrical, zingy, bedecked, cunning, vivid, eye-goggling,acerbic, insipid, high-craft, icky-sweet

Describing a venue or its atmosphere: dumpy, seedy, ramshackle, a hog trough, boîte, hell-hole, soigné,crepuscular, dingy, gouging, a swindle, frippery, glowing, low-fuss, glossy, faux glamour, theme-parky,kitschy, hokey

Describing servers and chefs: convivial, stony, sassy, sweet-natured, cherubic, toque, seminal

Describing customers: food nerd (my coinage to replace foodie), white-bread, inky-hipster, multi-culti, philistine, nutbag, ding-dong

Intensifiers (positive): dizzying, ravishing, rough-and-ready, beguiling, righteous, serviceable, precious, gobsmacking, jaw-dropping, breathtaking

Intensifiers (negative): shameless, harrowing, appalling, sullied, dubious, benighted, fraudulent, egregious, grotesque, bastardized, grating

Slim, in reviewing this list: “Pretentious? Possibly, though I’ll defend foreign words like recherché when English doesn’t have pithy equivalents. Forcing you to consult dictionary.com? Occasionally, though I never choose a fifty-cent word when the nickel one will suffice; nobody likes a showoff. [Except me.—Denveater] Saying precisely, pungently what I mean? That’s the ultimate goal, the rationale behind every word choice.”

Words Denveater Loves

Boîte. Yeah, yeah, yeah, French throwaways are pretentious. But the English equivalent, “nightclub,” is a snooze. And where would you rather be—in the tiny, twinkling café, drinking wine & eating cheese by candlelight to the stylings of a beret-topped guitarist, that “boîte” evokes, or in the strobe-lit slaughterhouse of a “nightclub,” surrounded by screaming, stumbling, puking also-ran-tweens? Exactly.

Crispy. Slim’s right (see Part 2); crisp does the trick. But the diminutive -y suffix is just so damn cute, taking me back to Prague circa 1998, where the bathrooms were marked Toilety…

Eatery. Why this term strikes people as cutesy is beyond me—it’s really about as straightforwardly all-purpose as they come. Not every place that serves food is a café (which implies a degree of informality) or even a restaurant (Italians, at least, reserve ristorante for a high-end establishment), much less a taqueria/trattoria/tapas bar/bistro/barbecue shack/izakaya et cetera. But they’re all eateries.

Gastropub. I get the complaints, but I don’t agree with the complaints. The word was coined in the UK more than a decade ago under perfectly reasonable circumstances: to convey the fact that the word “pub” no longer needed be synonymous with “greasy grub” whose sole purpose was to absorb alcohol as quickly & unremarkably as possible. A chef-led movement toward food that was deceptively simple rather than merely honest, hearty, & every bit as delicious as the ales & ciders they accompanied was underway; that movement has turned out to be a revolution, & its stateside variant is to be applauded. Accordingly, the prefix “gastro” strikes me as sensible; those who object to it on the grounds that it reminds them of stomach ailments then must also do away with “gastronomy,” a word that dates back to 4th century Greece. The fact is, eating doesn’t begin & end with the mouth; it involves the whole digestive system. If Americans accepted that more readily—the processes and consequences of food intake—maybe we’d be in better shape.

Quaff. Okay, it’s a little goofy, but we English speakers have far too few opportunities to use the letter “q.” And the fact that its coinage dates back to 1523 speaks to its antiquated appeal: it makes me think of toddies & wassail & other such festive bygones.

Succulent. A sexy alternative to “moist” or “juicy.” Some people say you shouldn’t use $2 words when 10-cent words are available; I say those people are linguistic cheapskates. (Slim excepted.)

Unctuous. It’s true that the word has negative connotations—but only when used in its figurative sense, to mean “ingratiating.” Used in its literal sense, as a synonym for “oily” or “fatty,” it’s not unpleasant to me; in fact, unlike its synonyms, it suggests a softness or smoothness that may have to do with the fact that unction is a healing ritual. Think of it, then, as implying that butter makes you better, & slather it on!

Part 2, on Words We Hate, is here.

“That’s Not Poutine!”: Observations on Culinary Authenticity and the Exaltation of Drunk Food

2010-11-06T15:47:00.072-04:00

Poutine is very popular in Boston right now, a fact I noted in Stuff Magazine last summer in its trendspotting Hot Issue, with my award for Hot Canadian Import: “…one of the world's great cheap drunk-foods, the mighty poutine (pronounced poo-TEEN*). Quebec City tipplers know no night is complete without hitting some seedy, fluorescent-lit casse-croûte or dumpy food truck after last call for a $5 plate of French fries drenched in gravy and tooth-squeaking cheese curds. Bostonians being more discriminating than the average Québécois**, we sometimes like our poutine fancy, as at Pops (560 Tremont Street, Boston, 617.695.1250), where it's topped with short-rib gravy and house-made sausages of rabbit, duck, and wild boar***, and at Harvest (44 Brattle Street, Cambridge, 617.868.2255), where it comes with chicken velouté and bacon. But the moment's hottest poutine purveyor is undoubtedly The Gallows (1395 Washington Street, Boston, 617.425.0200), which, in true gastropub fashion, labors hard over every humble ingredient and does it four ways: classic (in a dark-chicken or vegetarian-friendly mushroom gravy), topped with local produce, topped with foie gras, and the daily changing ‘out of control’ version (sample toppings: sweetbreads, lardons, English peas, and spring onions). That's a platter even a sober person could love.”

A recent discussion on Chowhound’s Boston board digs deeper into the current poutine phenomenon. I observe there that I enjoy poutine to a point -- the point where I think, "Are gravy fries really such a great idea?" Isn’t crispness part of the fry ideal? Shouldn’t we prefer fries that are sauced on the side instead of in the kitchen, which is necessarily going to make them a bit soggy before they hit the table? But the larger question centers on that ancient food-nerd hobbyhorse: is Restaurant X’s version of Dish Y authentic?

I noted that The Gallows' fries are good, its gravies and optional deluxe add-ons excellent. The bone of contention for most poutine lovers is The Gallows' choice of cheese, which though house-made is more like soft, fresh mozzarella than the fromage beaucronne of the canonical version beloved in Quebec: firm cheddar curds, made fresh every day, that literally squeak on your teeth. Very few restaurants in Boston use cheese curds in their poutine -- Eat at Jumbo's in Somerville and All-Star Sandwich Bar in Inman Square are reportedly two exceptions -- and no one is making their own. Also, technically, the sauce should be a velouté – stock thickened with blond roux to achieve a velvety texture -- not just any old gravy, but I think the use of squeaky curds remains the shibboleth for poutine traditionalists.

Some folks further argue that gussying up poutine with fancy ingredients and charging more than $5 immediately takes it out of the realm of drunk food and makes it something else altogether, something – cue menacing music -- inauthentic. My own feeling is that there's absolutely nothing wrong with taking humble food upscale, replacing mediocre ingredients with quality ingredients, piling on luxury elements, and so on. Canadians themselves have long been dressing up poutine with a dizzying array of add-ons. And Americans didn’t invent $23 poutine au foie gras, either: that was the brainchild of hallowed Montreal snout-to-tail institution Au Pied de Cochon.

Nowadays, every rough-and-ready dish that was first served at a food truck, carnival stand, or greasy spoon eventually gets a genteel makeover, as anyone who's debated the relative merits of Boston's many $20 hamburgers should understand. It's a process that is ripe for derision as pretentious, ridiculous, as evidenced by the jeers and incredulity that greeted the $16 hot dog at Barbara Lynch's The Butcher Shop. The same people who don't blink at paying $8 for a cask-conditioned ale scoff at the $11 pork dumplings at Myers + Chang, saying, "I could get those in Chinatown for $3." Ken Oringer still gets grief in some quarters for his $4 tacos at La Verdad.

But applying that general aesthetic, in this case to modest tavern fare, is in fact what gastropubs like The Gallows, Russell House Tavern, and Garden at The Cellar are all about. I believe the quality of such dishes, wrapped as they are with good drinks, convivial service and cool atmosphere, more than justifies their prices, despite their inglorious origins. Foie gras poutine sounds crazy, except for the fact that the path from the street cart to the white tablecloth is a well-trodden one.

I also believe that despite its relative youth – most sources agree that poutine first emerged sometime in the 1950s – there is a genuine canon or tradition associated with poutine, a classic recipe, any variance from which will offend purists. (I’ve gotten an earful on the depravity of American poutines from a Québécois in-law of mine.) So I think it's perfectly germane to note a widely-held set of expectations about a dish from the regional or ethnic group that originated or popularized it. I have no problem with chefs breaking from a canon -- our food world would be pretty sad if this never happened -- but I think it's important to understand the tradition as a reference point. Maybe nobody cares that spaghetti and meatballs isn't often served in Italy, but it doesn't help your credibility in a discussion to pretend this isn't so, or to market your version as "just like they do in the Old Country".

Some observers object to discussing poutine seriously in the first place: “It’s just drunk food, after all”, and it is true that a lot of poutine in Quebec gets consumed at about 3am after a night in the bars. Or they dismiss it as “peasant food”: potatoes and gravy and primitive cheese, cheap and unsophisticated. I dislike the pejorative use of these terms: "drunk food" and "peasant food" should be non-judgmental. "Cucina povera", for instance, has positive connotations of applying thrift and creativity to a limited larder in straitened circumstances. Drunk food doesn't say to me, "food for the undiscriminating", but does imply inexpensive, salty/fatty/starchy, and available late. There's good drunk food and bad --think of the varying quality of all-night diners -- and yes, some purveyors are getting away with something because their patrons don't care so much. But I don't consider it necessarily a slur on the food itself. The pad kee mao (“drunken noodles”) at Allston’s S&I Thai is a plate of wonderment, even if one etymology of its name suggests drunk food.

So as Bostonians continue to climb aboard the poutine bandwagon, I will note that: a) there is indeed a canonical version of this dish, and very few restaurants around here serve it; b) there should be as much room for carefully-considered and passionate appreciation of so-called drunk foods and other lowborn fare as for haute cuisine****; and c) chefs in Boston shouldn’t be dismissed for wanting to dress poutine in fancy clothes and take it uptown. In other words, in food, as in life, it helps your appreciation of things to have clear-eyed knowledge of exactly where you came from, but that shouldn’t stop you from moving forward, setting a high standard of quality even for your more humble pursuits, and maybe spinning off in some crazy directions once in a while.

-----

* I have since learned that this Anglicized pronunciation is wrongedty-wrong-wrong. The proper Quebec French pronunciation is more like "poo-tin", with both syllables about equally stressed.

** This is pure pandering to my readers.

*** The excellent riff on poutine served at Pops is currently listed on its menu as "grilled sausage trio".

**** I have a floor for this, e.g., I don't think mega-chain dreck like McDonald's McRib or the KFC Double Down merits serious consideration, what my friend Robert Nadeau calls "the connoisseurship of teenagers." No offense, kids, but I remember what I ate in those days.

The Stuff Magazine 2010 Dining Awards

2010-10-20T08:33:00.013-04:00

I don't highlight my professional food writing very often here, as that's what the column on the left of this blog is for, but I'll make an exception for the 2010 edition of Stuff Magazine's annual Dining Awards, which I've been doing by myself or in collaboration with my good friend, the awesome food writer Ruth Tobias, for the last four years.

If you go back and reread the awards from 2007, 2008, or 2009, you'll notice these aren't exactly traditional: we try to avoid hackneyed categories like the "Best Italian Restaurant". We draw more inspiration from Esquire's bygone "Dubious Achievement Awards", and so spend as much time deflating the overhyped and shameless as we do lauding the worthy. (And if an award is too snarky even for my rather-indulgent editors to publish, it ends up here.)

Anyway, the biweekly Stuff Magazine, which focuses on Boston nightlife, fashion, food and drink -- and where I also write the recurring Food Coma column on Boston fine dining restaurants -- is the only publication I know that would let me recognize both the fanciest, most expensive new French restaurant in town and a modest, slightly mysterious, out-of-the-way Haitian restaurant on the same page. Our friends at publications like Boston Magazine ain't doing a Lady Gaga of Plating Award, or a Biggest Balls Award, a rare recurring category of which I'm especially proud.

Ruth and I always have a blast pointing out both the most notable and notorious chefs, bartenders, dining trends, restaurants, dishes and stories from the past year of Boston's great little dining scene. Hope you enjoy it, too!

From the Archives: My Dirty Secret -- I Like the New Bar that Killed the Old Man Bar

2010-09-29T14:43:00.068-04:00

Here's a 2005 food/drink feature of mine that's no longer available online. I wrote it in response to several articles bemoaning Boston’s relentless tide of gentrification. I’ve echoed that line myself, but found some reasons to dissent from it here, in the process reviewing a few bar/restaurants I liked. It's also notable as my first piece referring to Boston's embryonic craft cocktail scene, then just gaining momentum at The B-Side Lounge.

MY DIRTY SECRET: I LIKE THE NEW BAR THAT KILLED THE OLD MAN BAR
By MC Slim JB
[originally published in Boston's Weekly Dig, November 16, 2005]

Everywhere I turn these days, someone’s howling about the death of the neighborhood bar. Longstanding hangouts like the Littlest Bar on Province Street in Downtown Crossing are headed for oblivion, or worse, conversion into upmarket boîtes. The new Alchemist Lounge that will soon replace Triple D’s in Jamaica Plain is still under wraps, but the name alone is enough to nauseate the folks who’ve been drinking in that spot for 15 years. They can guess what The Alchemist will be like: soigné bartenders straining pink concoctions into delicate glassware, small nibbles of weird ingredients at $10 a plate, alien downtempo music wafting from a DJ booth in the corner.

I share some of their pain, having passed many hours in B&B’s (my Somerville-native pal’s shorthand for “Beer and a Beatin' bars") since I moved here after college. I don’t qualify as a townie, but I still believe every neighborhood needs a place that locals can call their own, where transplants like me are the minority -- a bar where you might order a PBR because your dad drank it and it’s $2.50 a throw, not because some snarky hipsters think it confers ironic blue-collar cred.

Consider the venerable Old Sully’s Bar in Charlestown, just down Main Street from the yupscum fine-dining hellhole that Olives has become. One night, my crew and I sat drinking draft High Lifes and watching the Bruins on the tube while two retirees shared a half-hour harangue about the game that slowly boiled into a shouting match over the merits of some long-retired winger. The barman insisted they take it outside, and they did, proceeding to swap four or five slow-motion punches, then fall down and wrestle feebly on the sidewalk for ten seconds. Then they helped each other up, dusted themselves off and shakily returned to resume drinking and yakking, which is how we left them two hours later. I’d guess they were both about 68 years old, friends since they were five. Now that’s an Old Man Bar.

I’ve bent an elbow in a few nearly-forgotten Boston saloons. How many Back Bay residents ever ventured into Jack Lynch’s Webster Lounge on Dalton Street? That crepuscular little cave featured Fifties-vintage rec-room paneling, the same five ancient patrons glued to stools molded to their buttocks, and a jukebox of 45s unchanged since the “Theme from Hawaii Five-O” was a hit. Better yet, I could get a Scotch and soda for $1.60, no brows furrowed at my mangy vintage threads, and the same surly service that the regulars got from the ex-boxer-looking barkeep in the ratty black bow tie. Here’s the odd thing: that singular Old Man Bar whose passing I mourned is now Bukowski Tavern, a place I admire for its hundred-strong selection of beers, ear-splitting punk-rock soundtrack, and decent, cheap food.

The Hammond Lounge in Brookline was a similar haunt, a seedy dump plopped in the middle of a nice block, windowless and cigarette-befogged. My brother-in-law and I nearly cried the day the smoking ban and creeping rents finally killed it for good, buying our last $2 Buds and some logo-emblazoned sweatshirts that had been stapled to the wall for years and took 20 washes to get the nicotine reek out of. I still miss it, but I also really enjoy its successor: the Washington Square Tavern, a convivial, upscale pub serving excellent, unfussy fare.

Which isn’t to say that these places were all chummy. I once strolled into the Windsor Tap near Kendall Square one sunny Saturday with a pal, looking to enjoy a cold one and check the Sox score. What seemed not-too-dubious from the curb turned out to be dark and dank within, airless and claustrophobic. A knot of leathery, inky bikers across the bar gave us the cold fish-eye. We ordered longnecks from the stony barman (“Um, no glass, thanks”), downed them in two minutes and fled. A friend who lived around the corner winced at us later: “The Windsor? That’s the best place in Cambridge to pick up an eightball and a stab wound.”

Just saying -- not every Old Man Bar deserves protection from the wrecking ball. I’ll venture an unpopular corollary, too: not every OMB replacement will necessarily become a trendy hive of yuppie villainy. Even revered old gin-mills that have been mercilessly cored and polished and refitted with craft-brew taps can become superb hangouts. In fact, some of these upstarts rank among my favorite places for a drink. I don't hold it against them that they are pretenders, resented by old-timers, too free of grit to be deemed genuine neighborhood places yet.

The B-Side Lounge is a favorite example, and not just because it superseded a harrowing bucket of blood (the aforementioned Windsor). I love it because it features some of the most serious, skilled bartending in the city. Spirits are top-notch, fruit juices fresh-squeezed, each carefully-crafted drink served in the proper ice-chilled glass. The cocktail menu includes classics as well as creative updates of standards like the Stardust: Nicaraguan rum, fresh lemon juice and the rare, violet-tinged Parfait Amour. These guys know why you shake some drinks and stir others, that Manhattans are traditionally made with rye whiskey, and what my usual is, even when I haven’t been by in a while. The fact that the food is good -- solid, modestly-priced New American served up by a cute and sassy waitstaff ‘til the wee hours -- is a bonus. A cast-iron skillet of baked gouda with garlic crostini ($10.50) makes a rustic fondue: hearty, delicious, easy to share standing at the bar. Brunch is also fantastic and served until 4pm for late Sunday risers.

The Mission Bar and Grill supplants the old Choppin’ Block Pub, long a hideous, dingy slab of a building that nevertheless was a versatile venue for live jazz, hip-hop, noise and metal. Now fronted with wide, tall windows, The Mission is warm, airy, inviting. The menu is American bistro by way of Irish pub. A perfectly cooked medium-rare burger ($9) has a beautiful char, grilled red onions and mushrooms, a good roll and a side of fine fries. Sweet-natured staffers pull pints at the long wooden bar while the game blinks from flatscreens, and small groups and couples fill the tables. A few Choppin' Block veterans rub elbows with the college kids and new homeowners. Seems they’ve forgiven the slick changeling that took their ugly old baby’s place. That amazing burger probably helps.

I’m too young to remember the scary juice joint that the current Franklin Café replaced. Long before they received the odious label “SoWa,” the adjacent blocks hosted dozens of decrepit rooming houses, and the Franklin opened daily at 6am to a brisk shot-and-beer trade. That onetime war zone was gentrified away years ago, and the area now risks teetering too far the other way into pricey, vanilla dullness. With its United Nations mix of straights and gays, the Franklin is now the throwback to an edgier, more diverse South End. It remains a godsend: a softly-lit space with booths, great cocktails, cool music on the sound system and a creative menu served ‘til 2am. The turkey meatloaf with fig gravy ($14) is as satisfying as it was before the tight-assed empty-nesters from Wellesley and Weston started to drain the funkiness out of the neighborhood.

I witnessed one indelible example of the Franklin's unique charm on the night a cherubic blond bartender decided she’d had her fill of some yelling-into-his-cellphone suit who was dumb enough to insult Southie, her boyfriend's 'hood. She flew out from behind the stick, and with a series of sharp forefinger jabs to his chest -- “GET! [poke] the EFF! [poke] OUT! [poke] of my BAR! [poke]” -- drove him stunned and backpedaling right out the front door. It was a glorious moment; we practically cheered. No one wanted that jackass in our place. Hmm, maybe I do have an old neighborhood joint to defend after all.

I can’t extend the same sentiment to the Waltham Tavern, a tiny Mob-owned dive just down the street, the last fading relic of a far-shadier South End. Despite my six years of regular visits for beers and billiards, nobody ever makes an illicit bet or buy when I'm around. I'm the square interloper there, a tolerated outsider. I could live right across the street, but I didn’t grow up on the block. By contrast, the folks at the Franklin treat me as one of their own, and I’ve returned the favor by making it my local. I can’t stop the OMBs from disappearing, but maybe the next best thing is to give my custom to a place where someday I'll rate as one of the true regulars, a righteous Old Man myself.

“I'll Have the Château Menino, Please”: Tap Water vs. Bottled in Boston Restaurants

2010-07-26T10:10:00.043-04:00

The first few moments of interaction with your server can set the tone for an entire restaurant meal. One of my longstanding annoyances at Boston restaurants, probably dating to the late 1990s, was when a server's first question to the table was, “For water, would you like still, sparkling, or...” Faint pause, “Tap?”, this last pronounced with a slight smirk or grimace as if to say, “The peasant option?” Ugh. Really? Trying to shame me into buying bottled water? That's how you want to start this dance?

The reasons this is a terrible practice are obvious:

Bottled water is not green. Most bottled water has a huge carbon footprint: it has to be shipped from far away, and consumes a glass or plastic bottle that may not get recycled.

Bottled water does not necessarily taste better than tap, especially here. Tap water in most of Greater Boston comes from the Quabbin Reservoir, which many professional water tasters (yes, they exist) rank among the country's best-tasting, along with New York City and Salt Lake City. Certainly to my palate, our tap water tastes better than mass-market waters like Aquafina and Dasani, water from who-knows-where bottled by PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, respectively. That junk tastes like the plastic bottle it comes in.

Times are tougher. Encouraging what once might have seemed like a harmless indulgence, a bit of living large, is more unseemly when diners are pinching their discretionary pennies.

Pushing bottled water feels like a clip-joint tactic. Starting off the meal with a crude attempt at bill padding is the restaurant equivalent of asking a first date, upon collecting them at their doorstep, “So, you gonna put out for me tonight, or what?”

This last objection is especially obvious in the North End, a neighborhood already notorious for its raft of techniques to gouge unwary tourists and suburbanites. Strega Boston, for instance, is famous for simply serving bottled water without offering tap; many customers incorrectly assume that bottled is complimentary -- until the check arrives. That don' make me wanna say, a'salute!, Signore Varano.

Others, including Trattoria Il Panino and Cafe Pompeii, brazenly refuse to serve tap water, a practice which may be illegal here. I know that France and some US municipalities legally require restaurants to offer tap water on request. So far, I have been unable to verify whether Boston or Massachusetts statutes do the same.* But even if it's legal, refusing to serve tap water flouts local custom, and just plain feels sleazy. I don't buy the excuse that you don't have the space for glassware or enough dishwashing capacity: if the South End's teensy Delux Cafe can serve tap water, so can you. I wouldn't object to a small surcharge, say, a buck or two per table, to cover your costs. But forcing me buy bottled water is scummy. It makes me hate you and want to shun your business on principle.

Some restaurants recognize the offensiveness of pushing bottled water and have seized it as an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to local products, sustainability, and general non-swindling hospitality. Rendezvous in Central Square, the wonderful, locavore-before-everyone-jumped-that-bandwagon New American restaurant in Cambridge, presciently got out in front of this issue, documenting its rationale for doing so in this excellent blog essay. Two newer restaurants, The Russell House Tavern, a fine gastropub in Harvard Square, and Post 390, a swank Back Bay "urban tavern", offer filtered tap water, with or without gas, for free or a nominal charge. Bravo!

As the Great Boston Water Panic of 2010 demonstrated, you don't always know what you've got until it's summarily interrupted by a giant blown water-main coupling. I think our four-day outage probably reinforced to many Bostonians just how wonderful it is to have abundant, low-cost, great-tasting tap water. I happily consume Quabbin tap water at home, and thanks to a recent investment in a SodaStream home carbonation system, no longer buy environmentally-hostile bottled seltzer anymore, either. There remain few good reasons not to do the equivalent in restaurants.

Go ahead and drink bottled water if you actually prefer it: I have a few European ex-pat friends who still do so out of long habit. But the rest of us should lustily, proudly respond to the “Bottled or tap?”question with “Source Municipal” or “Château Menino [or whatever the local mayor's surname is]", two droll French expressions for tap water. Or do as a friend of mine does, and counterpunch any implied sneer with a sniffy “Local water, please.” If enough customers do this, perhaps more Boston restaurants will get the message: pushing bottled water is so very last century.

* If you have an expert opinion to offer on the legality of restaurants refusing to serve tap water in Boston or elsewhere, please drop me an email at mc dot slim dot jb at gmail dot com.

10 Critical Website Mistakes That Boston Restaurants Make

2010-05-24T21:25:00.064-04:00

Like many folks who dine out regularly, I spend a lot of time on restaurant websites, and I'm frequently appalled at how many basic mistakes of good website design are on display. Last year, without naming names, I gave this raspberry of an award in my blog's The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards: “Most deserving of a wake-up call: any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website.”

But apparently my barb didn't have much effect, perhaps in part because it lacked specifics. Let me redress that by citing my ten biggest pet peeves with Boston-area restaurant website designs, this time calling out a few flagrant sinners (and recognizing a few saints). My examples focus on some of Boston's more expensive and/or popular restaurants, as they have more to lose with a bad website than the neighborhood taquería, and can afford to do better.

Note that my slagging a website doesn't mean I think the restaurant itself is terrible – in fact, I like most of these places, love some of them. Also, I'm aware of my own website's homely design, but I blog for fun, not profit. If a reader thinks, “Damn, MC Slim JB's site is awful: I'm going somewhere else more user-friendly,” I don't lose revenue. Restaurants that repel customers with these fundamental flaws are kissing off potential business:

Unsolicited music. Landing-page music was a novelty in 1998, an annoyance by 1999: users have hated this stupid trope since the days of the Hamster Dance. For the unwary surfer, it also announces to coworkers that he's researching his evening plans when he should be finishing his TPS reports. Not cool. The culprits are countless, but let's throw Da Vinci and Tapeo under this particular bus.

A site that doesn't work on smartphones. Blackberries, iPhones, and many other mobile devices (like iPads) don't support Flash, so Flash-based restaurant websites aren't addressing a segment that include many business travelers, well-heeled diners, and other coveted customers. The offenders on this score are also legion; I'll single out two very popular restaurants that are among my favorites but that I'd expect to be hipper to this problem: Toro and Coppa.

Lack of essential information on the home page. At a minimum, users should see the restaurant's address, phone number, hours of operation, and a link to an online reservation service like OpenTable (if offered) without having to click another link. Better yet, include those basics on every page. Sinners: Meritage, Blue Ginger. Saints: Hungry Mother, Union Bar & Grill.

Missing menus. It is incredibly useful to see today's actual bill of fare, beer list, cocktail menu, and especially the wine list: I may need to research that perfect bottle. If you don't display all your current menus, at least offer good, representative samples. Miscreant: Olives Boston. Solid citizens: Troquet, Rialto.

No menu prices. This is critical consumer information: nothing sucks the air out of a dining experience before it starts like sticker shock at the table. In an age where websites like MenuPages are posting scans of your menus online, it's ridiculous not to include prices on your own. Obfuscatory: L'Espalier, Locke-Ober. Transparent: Radius, Hamersley's Bistro.

Unwieldy navigation controls. Many designs require users to precisely mouse over narrow menu bars or grab little sliders to scroll down the page. Clicking and dragging a slider just to read a menu is annoying even on a laptop with a big screen and mouse, can be painful on a compact netbook, and often doesn't work at all on a smartphone. Patience-tryers: Barbara Lynch venues like Menton, No. 9 Park, and The Butcher Shop.

Videos and busy animations that force users to wait while every page loads. I expect many users wish they had spare time to admire your web designer's Flash animation skills, but most don't, so stop annoying them. Give them the information they're seeking quickly, without the frippery. Egregious offenders: Strega Boston, Via Matta.

A menu that requires the user to download a five-megabyte Adobe Reader file. This is more typical of chain outlets and lower-end restaurants that simply scan their print menus rather than coding them in HTML. This is not only glacially slow to load, but can look cheap. Bandwidth hogs: Miel, Skipjack's.

An online menu design that makes users click on separate links for each course (appetizers, soups, salads, entrees, desserts.) There's rarely a good reason to make anyone click more than once to see the whole dinner menu. Carpal-tunnel inducers: Oishii Boston, Bokx 109.

Pop-up windows. Most web browsers assume that pop-up windows are ads and so automatically block them. It's plain stupid to try to deliver important information about your restaurant this way. Blockheaded: Mooo....

Bonus mistake #11 (with a tip of the lid to Leila Cohan of Grub Street Boston): Websites that can't handle different browser window widths. The aforementioned Coppa shouts at you with an uppercase error message to resize your browser if yours isn't open at full width. Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks is even ruder: it just resizes your browser window without your permission.

In short, restaurants should keep their websites lean, clean, fast-loading, and easy to navigate, especially from mobile platforms. Useful exemplars of this less-is-more sensibility include O Ya, Craigie On Main, and T.W. Food. I expect that more and more marketing-savvy restaurateurs will likewise trim the gimcracks and gewgaws from their websites even as they expand their online presence through social-media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

The old Flash-intensive, desktop-oriented website aesthetic is sclerotic, increasingly ill-suited to how a smartphone-toting public uses the web. Don't keep burying the critical information your customers seek under a fog of lounge music, frenetic animation, and slow-loading videos and PDFs. You may well find a pared-down, mobility-enabled approach generates more customer goodwill and actual business than the current generation of busy, noisy, brand-fluffing restaurant websites.

Good Signs, Bad Signs (You Know We’ve Had Our Share): A Deconstructionist’s Guide to Gauging Restaurant Quality

2010-05-14T11:34:00.025-04:00

The following is a collaboration between my good friend Ruth Tobias of the inestimable Denver-based food/drink blog Denveater (tagged herein as Denv.), myself (tagged as MCSJB), Boston blogger Hidden Boston (tagged as HB), and Denver blogger Denver on a Spit (tagged as DOAS).

The idea for the post, the selection of the contributors, and the editing of all our input into a coherent whole was all Ruth's: many thanks to her for her originality, hard work, and supreme cat-herding effort. She is the first-person "I" in this piece. If you see a restaurant name you don't recognize, it's likely in the Denver area.

-----

I knew the Director and I were in for a long night at the not-surprisingly-now-defunct Mark and Isabella the second we stepped inside and I saw the slogan on the back of a server’s T-shirt: “Got lasagna?” Faux-snark swiped from an ad campaign that had long since been borrowed to the point of grinding cliché did not bode well for the freshness of the dining experience—and sure enough, from the half-hearted service to the even-less-hearted cooking, the meal was a real drag. It occurred to me then that outside of roadhouses and shacks—clam, BBQ, burger, and otherwise—cheeky T-shirts might be an indication that the powers that be were putting the style cart before the substance horse.

When my theory was confirmed at the meh Via della Pace in Manhattan's East Village a couple months back, it got me to thinking about other indirect but generally reliable signs that a place is going to rock or suck. Cheesy Asian pop in an Asian restaurant, for instance: good. Cheesy American pop in an American restaurant: bad. Frank Sinatra in an Italian restaurant: really bad. Sleek logos: good. Gaudy logos: bad. No logos at all: probably bad (assuming it’s a pretentious appeal to insiderly exclusivity—although read on for an important exception). And so on.

It also got me to asking other food bloggers for their thoughts on the subject; here, the authors of Denver on a Spit, MC Slim JB, and Hidden Boston graciously offer up some worthy words to the wise (hey, that’s you!). Which doesn’t mean you should take them entirely without a grain of salt; as MC Slim JB points out, “It's an old Chowhound adage that deliciousness turns up where you least expect it. I am still routinely surprised to find great food in places I figured would be awful, and bad food where I expected joy. And I keep ‘discovering’ great little joints that have been around for years; I just never noticed them or happened by their neighborhoods. So don't take these rules of thumb as durable: there are always exceptions, and pleasant surprises hiding behind ominous first impressions are among the great pleasures of dining out.”

With that said:

+ (PLUS) SIGNS

English—or Rather the Lack Thereof

This may seem fairly obvious, but a good sign when looking for good food is a lack of English. This can start with the customers. If the customers are all talking in a language other than English, then chances are you have found a place that is at least authentic. This can backfire, of course, because if you go the McDonald's on Alameda near Federal; a lot of people may be talking in Vietnamese or Spanish, but you're still in a Wack Arnold's. If the waitstaff doesn't or barely speaks English, then that could be a good sign, too—but that could also happen at McDonald's. So probably the best indication is that the menu is in another language—especially if all or parts of it are not translated. [Conversely, see Dining for Dummies below—Denv.] Also, you probably want to figure out how to order off that part of the menu. Like at Denver’s New Saigon. Ever notice that untranslated page in Vietnamese? The servers often strongly discourage non-natives from ordering from there. Ignore them.— DOAS

A staff that cheerfully labors to overcome language barriers (example: East Boston's Restaurante Montecristo). Actually, that's a red herring: restaurants with little English in the front of the house that don't try to work with my kindergartner's Spanish can be good, too [see: El Taco de Mexico—Denv], but I'm impressed when they bother.—MCSJB

Wheels, Tents and Tunes
Signage—or Rather the Lack Thereof [an exception to my "no logos" rule—Denv.]
Speaking of signs good and bad, a complete lack of signage is often a good sign. Las Tortugas on Alameda just recently added a sign after years without. This is one of the most authentic torta experiences you will have outside of Mexico. A restaurant not only surviving but flourishing without any kind of advertising can only mean good things. Places like these grow by word of mouth. They have no websites, emails or, at times, even traceable phone numbers. If you are lucky enough to find one, then it is likely that you have stumbled upon something special. Likewise, signs you can't understand are often good.—DOAS
Attitude—or the Lack Thereof
Many restaurants feel the need to cater to every whiny need of its customers at any cost. Others, in the tradition of the Soup Nazi, post a list of rules that owners expect their customers to follow. These places know their food is good. If you are worried about pissing off the restaurant owners or cook, it must be good. When dining at Tom’s Diner in Denver, read the rules and don’t be a pain in the ass. The result? Some of the best Southern fare you can hope for in Denver.—DOAS
A warm, sincere-sounding greeting from the hostess stand immediately upon entering. A flustered, supercilious, or inattentive maître d' is a red flag.—MCSJB
[See: Wild Bangkok—Denv.]
A chef-owned place that closes when the chef goes on holiday (example: Trattoria Toscana near Fenway). The level of professional pride reflected in the implied motto, “If I'm not here cooking, it's not my food,” is generally encouraging.—MCSJB
Tableware—or the Lack Thereof
Environmental awareness has not yet expanded to encompass all restaurants equally. So if you are comfortable enlarging your carbon footprint from time to time in exchange for some good food, then an unfortunate good sign is often paper plates, plastic forks and Styrofoam cups (big ones).
Meanwhile, napkins are fluff. In my own home, napkins are for when guests like parents come over. Paper towels are absorbent and good for dabbing the corners of your mouth, wiping up big saucy spills from the table and sopping up the grease you can't lick off your fingers. A roll of paper towels on each table is a solid sign of good food. The opposite of the paper towel is ultra-thin, almost transparent tissue-paper napkins. I have not seen a lot of these in the States, but in many countries this is the standard. If you grab for a napkin, then need to grab four more to sop up a pea-sized spill, you have chosen well.
[See: Tin Star Cafe Donut Haus—DOAS]

Roots, Part 1: Where Everybody Looks the Same [to the tune of the "Cheers" theme]
Not in the way that all white people look the same, but as in a staff that shares the same genetic makeup. Is sis hosting while bro serves and mom barks orders from the kitchen? Stay. It's going to be good.—DOAS
Son out front, mom in the back. I've run into this setup in many tiny, traditional restaurants, and the results are often wonderful.—MCSJB
[See: Lao Wang Noodle House—Denv.]
Roots, Part 2
A cliché that happens to be true: a crowd of ex-pats in a restaurant serving their homeland's cuisine, e.g., many Thai immigrants dining in a Thai restaurant. Somewhere there must be throngs of Cantonese speakers with lousy taste—the Chinese equivalent of Chili's fans—so their presence at a Hong Kong–style live-tank seafood restaurant shouldn't impress me. But I haven't run into them yet.—MCSJB
[See: Star Kitchen—Denv.]
Places with wheels always get my attention. There is something about an operation that has the potential to be portable that tickles my tastebuds. In Denver, many of my favorite meals come from food carts or out of taco trucks, running the range from Gastro Cart’s gourmet goodies to my favorite hidden loncheras (luncheonettes) in Aurora. Everything tastes better when it comes from a vehicle parked on a street corner or empty lot. As the food truck and cart boom grows in Denver this spring and summer, this might change, but for now, it's a great place to start.

Or: There is a big white canopy tent in a parking lot next to a restaurant. Under that tent is a hunk of red stacked pork loins roasting on a spit with open flame. There are juices dripping off the meat. You probably want to go there.
Also: nothing says Mexican street life (and that in many other parts of the world) like bootleg CDs and DVDs being sold on the street. If there is someone with a rack of CDs leaning against his or her car in the parking lot of a restaurant, that really can only mean good things for the food inside. If there is a guy hawking cheap plastic toys as well? Jackpot. For a special bonus, does the owner let people come in off the street and peddle stuff inside of the restaurant itself? This takes the parking lot theory to a new level, and is not limited to CDs. Tamales, cheese, and tortillas are all fair game. Denver's Taco Mex has it all.—DOAS

Cleanliness, Godliness
A spotless open kitchen where every cook has a tidy mise-en-place. Not every fine dining restaurant that exhibits this orderliness will be good, but an open kitchen without it inevitably disappoints. Also: spanking-clean bathrooms. A restaurant that minds this particular corner of the store reveals something honorable about its character.—MCSJB

– (MINUS) SIGNS

Staff: Aptitude and Attitude
"Hi, my name is ____ and I'll be your server tonight." Not the server's fault, I know: this is part of the restaurant's robotic training regimen. But it still sets my teeth on edge every time. A rote phrase of greeting is an unpromising way to start the meal.—MCSJB

Bouncers. Your place may serve food, but it's primarily a nightclub, and nightclub owners virtually never run worthwhile restaurants.—MCSJB

The host who points to your table rather than taking you to it. When hosts do this, it implies that a) they hate their job; b) they don't really care about the customers; c) they are incredibly lazy. In all three cases, it sends up warning signals to the diners.—HBPimped-out servers. Restaurants that drape female servers in tight, revealing uniforms are usually trying to distract you from some unflattering facts about their food. Staring at you, Hooters. —MCSJB
[See, er: Hooters—Denv.]

A server who sits at your table when s/he takes your order. Why do they need to sit at the table? Are they tired? Are they looking for new friends? Either way, it is irritating and vaguely disturbing, especially if the table is tight to begin with.—HB
[See: The Wine Loft—Denv.]

Schtick
The involvement of a professional athlete: their name on the marquee or their ownership stake touted in the restaurant's marketing. I can't think of a single restaurant of this type I've visited that wasn't overpriced, mediocre, or both.—MCSJB
[Elway’s is an exception, but one that proves the rule.—Denv.]

“Tony Gabbagool” shtick. Certain Italian places (example: Strega in Boston’s North End) hype their affinity for heavily-stereotyped American Mafia culture, some going so far as to hire former Sopranos bit actors to promote their restaurants. It's stale, stupid, and borderline-offensive, not a harbinger of quality.—MCSJB

A floor show. Benihana-style teppanyaki, strolling violinists, Fire + Ice falderol (you select ingredients and sauces to be stir-fried in front of you on a giant griddle), and other gimmicks often hide lackluster ingredients behind the zazzle.—MCSJB

Kitschy mismatched bric-à-brac: stuffed game-animal heads, old road signs, etc. Another casual dining trope that says, "Boil-in-bag food served here."—MCSJB

Dining for Dummies

An English-language menu that only captures a subset of the entire Chinese menu, usually featuring only Americanized dishes. This doesn't mean that Chinese restaurants with limited-for-dumb-Americans menus don't have good food, but I may never know if all they offer me is junk like crab Rangoon and General Gau's chicken. (Pointing at other customers' orders can help, but only until your next visit when you want to get that dish again.)—MCSJB

Tent cards, those little pre-printed cardboard pyramids on the table promoting a drink special (Hypnotiq Cozmos!), appetizer (Shrimp Poppers!), entree (Fettuccine Alfredo in a Bread Bowl!), or dessert (Mom's Homemade Chocolate Lava Cake!). They're a staple of national casual dining chain hellholes, and thus inspire foreboding.—MCSJB

Similarly: An insert for specials looks older than the regular menus.—HB

A menu with photos of the food (this mainly applies to traditional American places, as pictures of food at ethnic restaurants aren't always a bad thing). Usually the pictures are stock photos, which means they have nothing to do with the restaurant (unless perhaps the point is to show diners what a hamburger looks like). All they do is take up space on the menu, which may be the questionable goal of the restaurant.—HB
[In Italy, picture menus are usually accompanied by the words "Menu Turistico!" If that's not a sign to vamoose, I don't know what is.—Denv.]

First Impression (with your teeth)
Wonder-Bread-like dinner rolls with portion-control oleo pats served at an American-Chinese restaurant. Get ready for magenta spareribs and gloppy chicken chow mein.—MCSJB

Roots, Part 3
No ex-pats dining in a restaurant serving their traditional cuisine.—HB
[See: P. F. Chang's—Denv.]

Got it? Good. Now you’re ready for the Dining Deconstructionist’s Bonus Guide, by MC Slim JB (with yet more commentary by Denveater):

SIGNS THAT PEOPLE BELIEVE TO BE REVEALING BUT AREN'T

Reviews as Signage
A glowing review posted in the window. This is only useful if the review is recent and the reviewer trustworthy, not some pay-for-play schmuck like The Phantom Gourmet, or a faceless mob of Zagateers who might also adore P. F. Chang's. Further, some restaurants have been caught posting counterfeit reviews, using Photoshop to convert pans into raves.

Agreed: A “They love us on Yelp!” sticker might as well read, “We paid our monthly advertising bill!” As for Zagat, here’s a little tip from a former editor of the Boston/Cape Cod guides (yes, me)—a sticker reading “Zagat Rated” means, uh, the place has been rated. Likely iffily. If it had been rated highly, the owner would probably have opted to frame the whole review. And to underline Slim’s emphasis on recent reviews: I always do a double take when all the clippings and plaques are years old—who knows what’s changed since then? Case in point: Mare in Boston’s North End, which is lined with banners boasting major accolades—from 2006, when the legendary Marisa Iocco was in the kitchen. The current chef may well be a gem, but those banners don’t reassure me; they aren’t sparkling for him.—Denv.

Crowds—or the Lack Thereof
A full parking lot or a line stretching down the sidewalk. All this certifies is that the joint has connected with some lowest common denominator. As with amateur reviews on Yelp, unless you know the tastes of the enthusiasts, you can't trust the endorsement of the crowd. Most outlets of The Cheesecake Factory have nightly lines out the door, too.

No customers. Plenty of wonderful restaurants, e.g., East Boston's lamented Oran Cafe, never find a following, thanks to a bad location (rough neighborhood, hard to reach, no parking/public transit nearby, unpromising setting like a gas station), seedy physical plant, inept or nonexistent marketing, and/or sheer bad luck. Or maybe it's just really, really new. You may be the first to discover it, to truly appreciate and evangelize it.
Roots, Part 4
A match between the nationality of the chef and the restaurant's cuisine. There are excellent Japanese restaurants with Chinese chefs, swell Cajun restaurants with Vietnamese chefs, fine French restaurants with American chefs, fine molecular chefs who aren't from Mars. Conversely, many bad Italian restaurants brag about their Italian-native chefs. Non importa, amico mio.
Addendum: Corny Décor. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths in a trattoria, serapes and sombreros in a taqueria, golden dragons galore in a dim sum palace: you’d think such clichés would amount to gigantic red flags, proving the equivalent of foot-tall mounds of Alfredo, stale tri-colored chips with neon kway-soh dip and sweet and sour mystery meat. But for some reason, they don’t, at least not often enough to judge by.—Denv.

Shaming Lousy Tippers Into Better Behavior

2010-04-01T15:46:00.065-04:00

A new style of restaurant check has emerged that has the potential to mitigate an old problem we've all experienced: the great dinner out with friends that gets sullied by a less-than-savory settling up of the bill because there are one or more cheap tippers in the group. See if you recognize either of these scenarios:

The check lands in front of you. You announce the check total. Everyone in the party throws in a wad of cash. Somehow the total doesn't cover the food and drinks, tax, and a decent tip (say, 18%).

The check arrives, and everyone throws in a credit card. The restaurant does the division, either equally or to your specifications; each diner completes their individual check. Returning to the table to collect a forgotten item, you notice that the check on top of the pile includes a 7% tip.

Such moments are uncomfortable, and they can get ugly. If I notice an inadequate total, I will usually cover the deficit myself rather than make a scene at the table or stiff the server. If I can identify the cheapskate, I will have a private conversation with them about it later: “Don't do that again, or I won't invite you out with us again.” I've had friends shrug or get angry and tell me to go to hell. Others have apologized and agreed. I try to exercise as much tact as possible in this situation, but one way or another, I make sure they don't try to pull a similar stunt around me again.

Being a miserly tipper is a character flaw in my book, an impediment to friendship, and I eventually shun repeat offenders. I find it baffling when folks aren't ashamed about their cheapness and undertipping, but many are not. I suspect that some people undertip because they think their bad behavior is invisible: in the scenarios I outlined above, they stand a good chance of their skinflinting going undetected by their friends.

Enter a genius new solution: the split-but-still-communal restaurant check. (It's new to me, anyway: I wonder what the proper term for it is.) I got my first such check at dinner recently in a Boston restaurant. It works like this for a party of four splitting the check four ways. The check arrives, everyone throws in a credit card, the server runs them and returns with five copies of the receipt, which all look like this:
______________________________
Total: $200

Fred's Mastercard xxxx1234: $50
Tip: _____
Total: _____
Signature: _____

Jerry's Visa xxxx2345: $50
Tip: _____
Total: _____
Signature: _____

Louise's Amex xxxx3456: $50
Tip: _____
Total: _____
Signature: _____

Chloe's Discover xxxx4567: $50
Tip: _____
Total: _____
Signature: _____
______________________________

Everyone gets one copy of the receipt for their own records (that's four of the five copies). The last copy of the split-but-communal check is the restaurant's, and it must be filled out by each diner in succession. The tip you leave gets passed around; everyone after you sees it. (Signing last might let you get away with something, but you still risk being exposed if someone asks to see the check again, say, to "recheck their math".) It's harder to hide if you're screwing the server on the gratuity. Your bad behavior is far less likely to be invisible to your dining companions.

I love the idea of this new type of check splitting, and hope it catches on. It has the potential to shed a little sunshine on tightwads, perhaps shaming them into the humanly decent and socially customary tipping behavior they ought to be exhibiting. Lest we forget, restaurant server gratuities aren't just some nice-to-do-if-you-feel-like it, optional practice in the US. Quite the contrary: tips provide the lion's share of compensation to nearly everyone in the front of the house, including your server, other servers who help out, service waiters, buspeople, bar staff, and in some establishments, the sommelier, captain/headwaiter and/or manager.

For Massachusetts service workers who depend on tips, $2.63 is the typical hourly wage, a fraction of the $8/hour minimum enjoyed by most workers. Even worse, substandard tips bite servers twice: they are liable for taxes on a percentage of sales (which varies according to a somewhat complicated IRS formula based on the restaurant's past two years' credit and debit card receipts -- 15% is not unusual) even if you stiff them.

At the end of the day, I consider proper tipping not just the socially correct thing to do, but the moral one as well. I am hopeful that split-communal checks will nudge more restaurant patrons into the proper tipping habit. I wish more people had simply learned this as part of their upbringing, but many clearly haven't, and if social shame is what it takes to make them better restaurant customers and human beings, so be it.

*****

I've made some assumptions above, as follows:

I assume that there is consensus at the table that the service was at least adequate, that any undertipping is out of cheapness, not a response to poor service.

I'm also assuming that no one at the table is in straitened financial circumstances, that everyone can equally afford the cost of dining out, including tax and tip. One could argue that if you can't afford to pay your fair share at the chosen venue, you shouldn't be dining there, but that is a more complicated and delicate scenario than the one I'm addressing here.

I take it as given that there will be unintended consequences to this new check type, like what happens when everyone in the party is a cheap d-bag. In such a case, it could backfire: the first Scrooge might validate everyone else's rationalizations of their own penny-pinching. On the other hand, it might drive a bunch of hedge-fund guys to try to outdo each other with the size of their big swinging tips. I can live with that; I just wonder what other unanticipated outcomes might arise.

My examples assume that you usually play it loose when dividing checks, that you don't sweat paying for your friends' five extra cocktails or foie gras appetizer. Why wouldn't you care? Because at some point, you have been or will be the more extravagant eater/drinker. Some folks like to break dinner checks down to the cent. My friends and I like to skip the niggling at the end of a nice meal and just divide by round numbers – we figure it all comes out in the wash. Occasionally, we may do more math, e.g., to ensure our teetotaling friends don't have to subsidize our alcohol costs. But that only affects the pre-tip amount. Whether you divide evenly or itemize down to the blue-cheese-dressing upgrade, everyone still has to tip like a mensch.

Go Read Denveater's and My "Menu Writing: The Good, The Bad, The Excruciating"

2010-03-25T17:13:00.029-04:00

Once in a while I get invited to do a guest stint on the blog of a fellow food writer. My latest, "Menu Writing: The Good, The Bad, The Excruciating" is a collaboration with my old friend Denveater: the ever readable, always funny, often provocative Denver-based food blogger.

Denveater and I start by expressing admiration for a few restaurant menus that rise above the great bloated bulge of the unextraordinary. But mostly we have fun busting on less-careful restaurateurs, servers, and industry pundit types for their fumbling and bumbling with menu prose, food item pronunciations, and usage of cooking terms. Here's a sample:

"antipasta for antipasto -- I heard this recently on the Boston-local TV restaurant 'review' show, The Phantom Gourmet. I wonder: if you were to order the the antipasta and the pasta and they arrived at the same time, would the universe explode?"

We had a ball writing this piece; hope you enjoy it, too!

27 Really Terrible Boston Restaurant Names

2010-02-27T18:20:00.164-05:00

Choosing a restaurant name has to be one of the most difficult and significant decisions a new restaurateur has to make. A lot is riding on it: the name represents the only opportunity many potential customers ever get to decide if the restaurant appeals to them in terms of its concept, atmosphere, price, and the other intangible qualities it may connote. So I'm always amazed when a restaurant chooses a really terrible name.

I'm not just talking about the widespread misapplication of bistro and trattoria, though that annoys the deuce out of me. Properly used, those terms denote rather specific forms of relatively humble restaurants in France and Italy, but in the USA, they're abused to mean practically anything. In Boston, they mostly get slapped on places that are too fancy and expensive to fit the traditional usage, and the offenders on that score are too numerous to mention. Rather, I'm here to cite the garden-variety-stupid, the what-the-hell-were-you-thinking, the where-were-your-friends-when-you-picked-that kind of restaurant naming awfulness.

So, herewith are a few notably-bad Boston restaurant names from my personal Hall of Shame:

Mooo... -- A romantic luxury steakhouse making a cutesy, lame joke at cows' expense? And WTF kind of omission does that ellipsis represent? Maybe, "Mooo..., despite the tee-hee name, is located in XV Beacon, a $500-a-night Beacon Hill boutique hotel, and is every bit as costly and pretentious as you therefore might expect.”

Prose -- Actually a pretty good chef-owned small restaurant in Arlington, but the name leads you to expect the prosaic, not the lyrical, on the plate. This bit of self-sabotage is matched only by the chef's famously grumpy attitude toward customers.

Blunch -- A terrific little South End breakfast/lunch place that sounds uncomfortably close to onomatopoeia for vomiting.

KO Prime -- Winner for Most Ironic Name, as this expensive Downtown hotel steakhouse does not serve prime-grade beef, but the same choice-grade meat you can buy plastic-wrapped in Styrofoam trays at Johnnie's Foodmaster.

BOKX 109 -- "I know, honey, let's go to that cheesy 'Vegas-style steakhouse' in Newton named after a slaughterhouse term for a carcass container." “Oooh, yum-o!”

No Name -- The retirees on cut-rate package tours dining by the busload at this Waterfront tourist trap of a shore-food joint probably don't appreciate the dull irony of this moniker.

Basta Pasta – You'd think a pasta specialist would want to signal its abundant portions. "Nope! We're just Enough Pasta!”

Big Papi's Grille –Red Sox slugger David Ortiz is one of the most lovable sports personalities in Boston history, in no small part thanks to his epic contributions to ending the local nine's 86-year championship drought. But I think it was a mistake to telegraph his involvement in this place, as anyone with a lick of dining-out experience knows that restaurants owned by athletes usually underwhelm. Predictably, the reviews have been mediocre.

Strip-T's – It's hard to bust on a modest indie restaurant in Watertown, the kind of place that serves good American food with nothing over $15, but that name makes me gnash my teeth. Nobody equates hoochie dancing with fine dining.

Chung King Rick's Cafe -- A pitiable Billerica brown-sauce American-Chinese restaurant/townie bar, filled with customers who seem equally desperate for and hopeless of escape. "Of all the greasy-eggroll joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."

Boloco – This small local burrito chain didn't bother me until a fellow Chowhound pointed out that the name can be read as “bollock-o”. I'll wager that, despite the current rage in Boston for offal, the owners weren't trying to evoke the image of bull testicles. (The true etymology isn't much more appealing, an abbreviation of “Boston Local Company.” Bleh.)

uBurger – Actually a not-bad pun in the making (the German “über”, indicating superiority, crossed with “burger”), but nobody pronounces it as anything but “you-burger”.

Violators of my “dubious possessives in restaurant names” bugbear -- I documented this nagging peeve of mine on my blog entry, "But There Is No Mr. L'Espalier!". To quote that essay: “Is there really a Mr. Soya at Soya’s? Does a Ms. Zebra sit on the board of Zebra’s Bistro? I’d love to believe there’s a Pepper Sky running Pepper Sky’s Thai Sensation – she sounds like the star of a 1960s TV show about a secret agent who favors Mod fashions – but I suspect the truth is duller.” Add Harvard Square Spanish/South American/Central American whatsis Conga's to this shamefully growing list.

Island Hopper – A pretty passable Back Bay restaurant with a fun pan-Asian menu, but I wonder whether its Indonesian owner is aware of the usage of "hopper" in some quarters as slang for “toilet”.

Mamagoo's – Why call out a humble Fresh Pond sub shop? Because it used to be called “Mr. Magoo's”, presumably until it got a cease-and-desist letter from the lawyers at Columbia Pictures, which owns the old cartoon character. Change one letter, drop a period, and voila! You're no longer violating copyright law -- now you're “Mamagoo”. Um, ew.

Smoken' Joe's – I haven't tried this Brighton barbecue joint yet, but I cringe at that misbegotten spelling. I have to assume that “Smokin'” was taken, but that alternative looks dumber than Snooki.

Stork Club – I imagine this South End spot would like to attract the same multi-racial clientele that flocked to its predecessor, Bob's Southern Bistro. Guess it overlooked the fact that the original Stork Club, one of New York's most famous cafe-society nightclubs, was notoriously inhospitable to African-American celebrities. Oops. (Tip of the hat to esteemed fellow Boston Phoenix restaurant critic Robert Nadeau for spotting this unfortunate irony.)

Thaitation – A fine little Thai storefront in the Fenway with a nearly nonsensical tongue-twister of a name. What does the “-tation” stand for? Citation? (Might make sense, given the nearby parking situation.) Mutation? (Not so appetizing.) A play on “titration”? (Ugh: not a chem lab term!) Puzzling.

Pu Pu Hot Pot – A serviceable, very reasonably priced American-Chinese place in Central Square, but honestly, do we need to give twelve-year-olds another reason to snigger?

In the Stupid and Bygone category:

T.J. Scallywaggle's -- Winner, Cognitive Dissonance Division. Sounded like the kind of hideous chain restaurant that serves Steak Quesadilla Towers and Shrimp Poppers, was actually a vegan pizzeria. Its also-a-vegan-pizzeria successor Peace o' Pie may have a groaner of a pun for a name, but at least it's consistent with the presumed leftie-activist sensibilities of its owners and customers.

Apocrypha – As the name suggests, this extremely precious Needham restaurant has since been expunged from the canon of still-operating establishments.

INQ -- An awful Newbury Street restaurant with an equally-awful name, though not as gobsmackingly imbecilic as its successor, Luigi and Roscoe's @ INQ (also mercifully closed.) The legacy of naming inanity in this location continues to this day with Cafeteria, which reflects the owners' mistaken impression that putting air quotes around the name of a would-be chic hangout serving $12 Pineapple Cosmos is ever-so-fascinatingly droll.

In the Not As Dumb As It Sounds category:

Moby Dick – I'd originally guessed that this Persian kabob joint near Symphony Hall was a seafood place in its prior incarnation, and the owners simply were too cheap to get a new sign. Wrong: it turns out there's a famous restaurant in Tehran by this name, which also inspired the popular DC-area Moby Dick House of Kabobs chain.

Bull McCabe's -- The name of this sweet little Irish pub in Union Square (Somerville) sounded to me like the kind of casual-dining hellhole that Anthony Bourdain would call "TGI McFunster's". This just proves I'm not so well-read: in fact, it refers to the protagonist of beloved Irish author John B. Keane's play The Field.

Lord Hobo -- Several friends urged me to flay the name of this Cambridge beer-geek bar for verging on mocking the homeless, but I consider it a different animal. To me, it evokes a quaint, possibly rural British pub, echoing an ancient English tradition of consciously quirky public-house names. Further, I admire its marketing effectiveness: the name alone has engendered a lot of discussion, which I'll speculate was partly the owner's intent. In other words, deliberately vs. unintentionally unseemly is a non-trivial distinction.

At least Bostonians can take solace in the fact that, despite the howlers I've cited here, we have nothing as patently, crudely nudge-nudge-haw-haw as Crabby Dick's (a Delaware seafood shack), Phat Phuc Noodle Bar (a London Vietnamese restaurant which I'm certain was not named to honor its literal translation, “Happy Buddha”), or The Money Shot (a Chicago comfort food joint). As for my not making any more cheap jokes here, you're welcome.

From the Archives: Five Reasons to Dine at the Bar

2010-01-12T15:16:00.016-05:00

I'm republishing a piece here from June 2005 that hasn't been available online for years. This one is special to me: it's the first food/drinks story I ever published professionally, a cover feature for Stuff Magazine (then known as Stuff@Night) on why bar dining is often superior to a table in the dining room. See if you think it still holds up.

FIVE REASONS TO DINE AT THE BAR
by MC Slim JB
[originally published as the cover feature of the June 9, 2005 issue of Stuff@Night]

As a longtime Bostonian who loves to dine out, I struggle with conflicting goals. I want to eat well, but can’t afford to patronize luxury establishments every week. Fast food is cheap and tasty, but I hate the nausea and regret a half-hour later. One of my best strategies is to frequent mid-priced places and dine at the bar. It’s low-fuss, you often get better food and service, and it’s friendly and fun, especially if you’re dining solo.

My Belly Doesn’t Need Ms. Right; It Needs Ms. Right Now

There are few civilized pleasures as sublime as the two-hour-plus weekend prime-time dinner. Consider Union Bar and Grill, one of the South End’s sleeker, more well-oiled dining entertainment machines. Sliding into a glossy banquette for a Friday 8pm reservation, the four of us are a little dressed up and a lot revved up. We kick off with expertly-made cocktails, dulling the keen edge of hunger with the gratis cornbread and excellent butter.

We uncork a Chianti Classico to go with appetizers of short ribs, beet salad, and chorizo-and-corn risotto. Next, we attack entrees of lamb rack, pork tenderloin, roast chicken, and codfish. We pause a bit to take in the scenery before lingering over a five-item cheese plate with perfect accompaniments, washed down with a couple of glasses of port and an espresso or two. By the time 11pm rolls around, we’ve passed an entire languid evening of very pleasant food and solicitous service, amplified by a little hot-spot atmosphere, for a mere $350.

While lovely, this pricey scenario doesn’t quite play on Wednesday night, when it’s just two of us wandering into Union at 9pm, looking not quite daisy-fresh in rumpled work clothes, feeling irritable with stress and hunger. This moment calls for our light, tight, weeknight strategy:

Pass on the hosts’ offer of a ready dining room table in favor of bar seats.
Get a beer, a glass of wine, and two sandwich plates – a hefty Rueben and an Andouille-flecked hamburger with excellent frites. Appreciate the real care in the preparation (a burger actually cooked medium rare as ordered, and mmm, those frites).
Wrap it up in under an hour, for about $50 including tax and tip.
Feel good about minding our mid-week budget, avoiding delivery of bad Chinese or pizza, and not dreading the alarm-clock detonation we face in a few hours.
Congratulate ourselves on being frugal, canny urban diners-at-the-bar.

My Folks Told Me Never to Talk to Strangers

There seems to be an unwritten rule at fine dining establishments in this town: you don’t chat much with nearby tables. Near as I can tell, there are two exceptions: 1) wishing someone a happy birthday or whatever occasion was just signaled by a candle-lit dessert (and hopefully, not a song); and 2) asking them what enticing plate just arrived at their table, so you can order it, too. At best, any other topic is likely to get you a look of polite forbearance that is clearly two seconds from curdling into disdain. We don’t mind looking at the pretty strangers next to us, we just don’t want them talking to us.

If you crave a little bonhomie with your steak-frites, you’ll have to dine at the bar. (This also applies to the comparatively rare communal table, but we’ll save that one for another time.) Maybe it’s that you are sitting close, or have better access to the social lubricant of alcohol, but bar diners converse far more easily than their dining-room counterparts.

Consider my recent visit to Dedo, a year-old little sleeper of a New American restaurant near Park Square. I come looking to sample the cuisine of its new chef, Jason Santos, whose work I admired at Tremont 647. Dedo serves some great-looking small plates in the bar, but not in the dining room. I love the Spanish custom of nibbling tapas early in the evening, so I opt for the bar.

It isn’t long before the parade of little bites I’ve ordered gets my neighbors sharing dining-out stories with me. Everyone oohs at my “cappuccino” of sweetbreads and black truffles in a stiff sauce and a blanket of chestnut foam, served in a china latte cup. Despite the precious presentation, it’s a rocking little stew, a minor symphony of richness and slightly spongy textures. I marvel at the deviled eggs (here, done with tuna sashimi for filling, with nary a hint of mayonnaise), and recall other favorite versions (Mom’s, which hews to the circa-1960 Good Housekeeping canon, and Oleana’s, which adds poached tuna and olives to the filling.) A businessman from L.A. boasts of the dining palaces out West he’s visited while chasing the perfect poke (pronounced “pokey”), a raw tuna salad of Hawaiian origin – he rates Dedo’s very highly.

While we talk mostly of food that night, the scenario echoes a thousand similar moments I’ve enjoyed: a few strangers holding a friendly debate over dinner on the finer points of baseball, movies, music, drinking, and/or the attractiveness of the bar’s other patrons. What’s nearly taboo in the dining room is welcome in the bar. I’ve made many pleasant acquaintances and business connections this way, enjoying what might otherwise have been a dull hour or two. Actually interacting with your fellow man: it’s one of simplest and most accessible pleasures of dining at the bar.

The Best Server in the Room

In a handful of places in Boston, the bartender is such a multi-talented, genial host that you hate to hazard the dining room. Joe Carbonaro at Caffe Umbra is one of these, the rare barman who can deftly juggle responsibilities -- mixologist, wine steward, waiter, busboy, raconteur, and confidante -- and make it look easy, with grace and aplomb, like a professional athlete.

I rate him the best pure bartender in the South End (no faint praise -- there’s a lot of talent with shakers nearby): he just plain pours a beautiful drink. He crafted the restaurant’s signature cocktail menu, placing his own stamp on the classics, like a Negroni punched up with Punt e Mes. He’s on intimate terms with the wine list, quick with thoughtful food-and-wine pairings, slow to push the most expensive stuff, able to hold forth on esoteric dessert wines. That’s in between making drinks for everybody in the place, and serving dinner in the bar.

Joe approaches the food side of the job with similar seriousness and relish. He’s a subtle and effective salesman for Laura Brennan’s innovative rustic Italian and French cuisine, telling you exactly what he loves about each dish. He shows a Sicilian-American’s appreciation of the simple, beautiful ingredients on most plates here, like the asparagus shoots that accompany a torta appetizer. Despite a trim frame, he affects a gourmand’s lust for the pastry chef’s work. “You didn’t order this, but you have to – it’s off the charts”, say Joe of one of several nightly homemade ice creams, a melon-Sambuca number. We trust him, despite the unseemly combination. He’s right: it is spectacular, with a big upfront melon zing that fades almost completely to make way for an extended anise finish. Strange and utterly wonderful. Thanks, Joe!

Not to knock the dining room staff at Caffe Umbra; I’ve eaten in the back many times, and they too are skillful, polished and personable. But they’re not as much fun to watch work, and aren’t in the same position to regale us with stories about neighborhood goings-on. The wait staff doesn’t have the dedication to the art of tippling to solicit patrons’ opinions on the latest crazy super-premium liquor to hit the market (anyone for a sample of the new cherry-flavored rye?). If it’s Joe’s night off, or there are no seats at the bar, we head someplace else. We can barely imagine eating any other way there anymore.

The Food Here Sucks, Let’s Eat at the Bar

My beloved is giggling at a laptop in the next room. “What’s so funny?”, I call out. “Oh. My. God. Have you seen the glamour photos of Todd English on toddenglish.com?” “Yeah,” I reply: “Don’t hate him because he’s beautiful. Hate him because he’s too busy flogging his latest casino venture to stand at a stove in the town that put him on the map.”

Maybe that’s not fair; Todd probably does don a toque occasionally hereabouts, but I know few once-rabid fans like myself who aren’t in mourning for the days, now more than a decade past, when he was the deserving, white-hot focal point of the Boston fine-dining scene. The Charlestown Olives created some of the most exciting food I’d ever seen, and served it up with real verve, the kind of experience for which we’d tolerate a hateful no-reservations policy and two-hour waits in the packed bar. Currently, that kitchen cranks out obviously premade, not-always-fully-reheated appetizers to a crowd of undiscriminating tourists. Latecoming locals must wonder what all the fuss was about.

Worse still are lackluster outliers of the English empire like Bonfire, a steakhouse that has Todd’s brand but none of his formidable virtues (I’m talking about cooking, not marketing.) My several underwhelming meals here have featured grotesquely oversized slabs of over-charred pork and beef, brought by staffers who seem mightily self-impressed for no reason related to their actual service skills. I think the dining room looks fantastic – I’ll admit to a soft spot for that Phillipe Starck-designed bordello vibe -- and I admire the wine list’s South American depth. But the food regularly disappoints, at really high prices. I just kind of hate it.

But I join Bonfire’s often-lively bar scene on occasion, resisting the staff’s insistent promotion of their over-sugared travesty of a Caipirinha. To my bemusement, the same kitchen that fails in the dining room succeeds in the bar, where it serves up lip-smacking tacos and small plates like tempura green beans. Even better, you can get these nice-priced gourmet snacks at an hour when few places in the Back Bay are still hopping (till 1:30am Wednesday through Saturday).

I haven’t forgiven Todd for big-timing his local former devotees. But late-night grazing at Bonfire’s bar does help me to forget for a moment how success spoiled a one-time favorite. “Gimme an El Tesoro Plata margarita straight up, please, and some smoked-duck taquitos -- hold the Vanity Fair spread.”

Don’t Look at the Pitiful Lonely Freak -- Maybe He’ll Go Away

Business travelers, stop me if you’ve heard this one: after a long workday in a strange city, you let your hosts go home to the bosom of their families for dinner. You’ve done enough homework to dodge the room-service turkey club: trusted local sources have pointed you to some worthy restaurants. A quick taxi ride later, and you’re greedily surveying an interesting menu, proud to be an intrepid, globetrotting epicure.

But before the appetizer arrives, you notice the unwelcome glances. That mooning, hand-holding couple across the aisle give you matching tight smiles that say, “Someday, modern medicine will cure your scrofula or whatever it is that keeps you in your sad prison of one.” The wary glares from the next booth’s klatch of sharply-turned-out young professional women send a rather different message: “Look at us again, pervert, and we’ll stone you to death with our teeny cellphones”. Mercifully, you have a paperback to bury your nose in, thus avoiding further eye contact.

Now the weird part: the next time you’re out to dinner in Boston with a group of your attractive friends, you espy some poor benighted soul at a table for one. And despite having walked several miles in those moccasins, your first thought is, “Oh, the poor leper! Why didn’t the maitre’d just lead her quietly out back where she could shoot herself?” Remember this moment the next time you’re out on your own. Preserve your dignity, and avoid harshing the buzz of diners who are trying to share laughter and witty conversation as well as fine food and drink. Eat at the bar. You already have enough other good reasons to do so. FIN

N.B. After this was published, women friends of mine pointed out that solo bar dining doesn't work nearly as well for women as men -- that unwelcome attention from boys on the prowl is often an unfortunate consequence of sitting at the bar without a companion. Shame on me for not considering this issue and mentioning it. (It was my first feature.)

N.B. 2 Special thanks once again to Scott Kathan of Stuff@Night for plucking me from the ranks of amateur reviewers on Chowhound.com and giving me my first shot at writing professionally! I've published hundreds of pieces since, and now write food/drinks features and two Boston restaurant-review columns (On the Cheap and Food Coma) for The Boston Phoenix and Stuff Magazine. See my blog for links to most of my professional work.

The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards

2009-12-21T00:46:00.056-05:00

I handed out a lot of recognition to Boston restaurants and bars in 2009: the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards; a Boston-centric “Ten Worst Dining Trends of the Decade” essay; and "2009: The Year in Cheap Eats", a year-end best-of list from my "On the Cheap" column for The Boston Phoenix. Seems like there's never enough room to shower kudos on every restaurant that deserves it: ditto the loud raspberries that ought to be sprayed at the crass, the ridiculous, the fraudulent and the shameless. But my blog has no space constraints or gentler-minded editors, so herewith I present a few more citations at year's end: call them the Devil's Dining Awards.

Best new cocktail trend. Authentic Tiki drinks. Forget about Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong and Mai Tais at suburban Polynesian restaurants: craft cocktail bars like Drink and Eastern Standard are reviving the authentic, 30s-vintage Tiki-bar mixology of Don the Beachcomber and his heirs. This is not a trivial endeavor, requiring house-made infused syrups, fresh juices, and many obscure spirits and non-alcoholic ingredients, including a battery of unusual rums, pimiento dram, Cherry Heering, Velvet Falernum, etc. But the results are breathtakingly complex, beautiful, and potent. Kitsch plus craft equals serious fun.

Worst new cocktail trend. Bars aping the trappings of craft cocktail bars and speakeasies but forgetting to bring the craft. Golden Age cocktails on your drinks menu, Prohibition era décor, and passwords at the door aren't enough. Building a real craft cocktail program demands training, hard work, study, and commitment, much like a fine-dining kitchen. Here's a hint: if you don't know how to consistently make a decent Sazerac, what glass it should be served in, why you might use Cognac instead of rye, and why the hospitality with which you serve it is as important as how well you make it, you're a faker with a very short shelf life. Here's another hint: if local cocktail maven Lauren Clark of the inestimable drinkboston.com isn't writing favorably about you, you probably suck.

Saddest budget-restaurant closings. Oran Café, a homestyle Moroccan restaurant in East Boston that only lasted for an eyeblink; Uncle Pete’s, a fine little purveyor of barbecue in Revere that could not survive its owner/pitmaster's passing this year; Rangoli, the Allston restaurant that introduced dosas and other South Indian specialties to Boston; Reef Café, a fantastic Syrian joint in Allston that was the definition of family restaurant: mom in the kitchen, son out front; and Poppa B’s, the Mattapan soul food standout that served Boston's best fried chicken (and by extension its best chicken & waffles) – but at least will survive as a Codman Square takeout place.

Worst trend for occasion diners. The death of the restaurant dress code. Nowhere in Boston does this hurt worse than at L'Espalier, whose new landlord, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, nixed a longstanding jackets-required rule. You can now spend $400 commemorating your silver wedding anniversary while staring at a table full of louts bedecked in Ed Hardy ballcaps, t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. One hopeful counter-trend, as recently reported in a New York Times feature, is that a younger generation, taking cues from pop-culture touchstones like Mad Men, is finding that a slightly nattier style distinguishes them favorably from older schlubs who can't be bothered to don a jacket. Here's hoping that inclination gains momentum: no one needs to see tracksuits and hoodies when they're dropping a bundle on a big-number birthday dinner.

Local restaurant blog of the year. The tandem of Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants, a trove of restaurant reviews, discussion boards, and news of Boston-area restaurant openings and closings. Required reading for anyone obsessed with finding (and writing about) hidden gems in Greater Boston. Marc also does a great job of covering restaurants in lesser-known stretches of New England beyond the 128 beltway.

Proof that the South End is over. The March arrival of Stephi’s on Tremont, an injection of bleached-blond Newbury Street faux-glamour into a once-colorful ‘hood already overrun with white-bread Chads and Muffys. Meanwhile, atmospheric inky-hipster hangout Pho Republique, an original trailblazer on now-restaurant-lined Washington Street, closed after eleven years of upholding the neighborhood's artier, funkier, more multi-culti heritage. Sic transit gloria.

Best replacement for a departed star. Trina’s Starlite Lounge. Cambridge and Somerville heshers and hipsters alike lamented the death of the Abbey Lounge, a unique hybrid of townie dive and live indie-rock club. Then an all-star lineup from renowned neighborhood-bars-with-great-food (like Silvertone, Highland Kitchen, and Audubon Circle) stepped in to create a retro-cool haven of lawnmower beers and casual Southern-inflected cuisine. Manny, I mean, Abbey Who?

Nose Cut Off, Face Spited Award. To the former landlord of Bella Luna, the Milky Way Lounge & Lanes, and Zon’s, whose 85% rent increase convinced Bella Luna and the Milky Way to relocate (sans tenpin lanes) to a splendid new space in The Brewery complex, and forced Zon’s out of business. Cunning revenue-enhancement plan there, fella.

Best use of a potato (tie). Tater tots at Garden at the Cellar and potato pancakes at Café Polonia. The lowly kiddie-meal croquette and the usually-soggy hash brown get exalted treatment at these two underpraised spots. In both cases, the result is ungreasy, crunchy outside, creamy inside -- tasty enough to mitigate a thousand freezer-case insults. Spuds got respect.

Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial “Hell is Other People” Award. To Lord Hobo, for the licensing tribulations it endured from its abutting neighbors and the City of Cambridge, who apparently believe that all bars should close at 10pm and only serve food. We presume these folks have forgotten the Windsor Tap, the frightening drug bar that used to occupy the spot where Lord Hobo now serves fine food, classy cocktails, and what may be Greater Boston's best lineup of craft beers. Ingrates.

Foie Gras Poutine Award for Extraordinary Food in an Unlikely Setting. To Pupuseria Mama Blanca, a superb little Salvadoran joint in a remote residential corner of Eastie, further camouflaged by operating in a space that looks like someone's house. Easy to miss it, but don't.

Best actual poutine. The so-called “mix grill sausages” at Pops Restaurant in the South End, which tops beautiful hand-cut fries with cheese curds, short ribs, and sausages of rabbit, duck and wild boar. With too much quality in the ingredients and refinement in the preparation to be mistaken for the classic cheapie Québécois drunk food, it still hits all the requisite animal-fat-laden, guilty-pleasure notes. Fernet-Branca, please!

Most Biblical disaster. The January fire that destroyed an entire block of beloved independent restaurants: Thornton’s Fenway Grill, Umi Japanese Cuisine, Sorento’s Italian Gourmet, The Greek Isles, Rod Dee Thai II, and El Pelón Taqueria. The fact that no one was hurt is small comfort to devastated owners and bereft locals. If there is a God, he’s an angry God, one who probably dines at Applebee’s. (Some faith-restoring news: a long-delayed rebuilding program for the block is apparently back on track.)

Most lopsided hotness-to-skills ratio. The bar staff at Whiskey Park: undeniably fetching, but seemingly hired with mixology experience optional. With luck, your stylin’ barmaiden’s $300 hairdo, bewitching décolletage, and almost hoohoo-level hemline will distract you from the fact that your $14 Manhattan is as warm as bathwater, and possibly made with gin.

Tom Brady Award for Best Upgrade at a Position. To Coppa Enoteca, the Italian small-plates spot that just opened in the South End in the former home of The Dish. The latter was a lovable but uneven little neighborhood joint that eked out an existence from its great patio and spillover trade from the Franklin Café across the street. Judging from the consistently amazing food (with house-made salumi and pastas a highlight), terrific cocktails (making the most of a beer/wine/cordial license), and early patronage by seemingly every chef in town, it's hard to imagine how Coppa's team of Ken Oringer (owner), Jamie Bissonnette (chef), and Courtney Bissonnette (GM) doesn’t repeat its flaming success at Toro.

Most deserving of a wake-up call. Any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website. If you have a slow-loading video for a top-level landing page, your web designer has sold you a bill of goods: Web surfers have hated that hokum for ten years now. If diners can't access it on an iPhone or Blackberry, your whizzy, music-playing, over-animated website is putting you behind the times – and deflecting potential customers.

Smartest decision by a big local chain. Legal Sea Foods' hiring of Patrick Sullivan, former owner of The B-Side Lounge and a major progenitor of Boston's craft cocktail revival, as its beverage program manager. That's good for Legal, and good for anyone who wants to see serious cocktails brought to a wider audience.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time Award. To Guillaume Schmitt, food/beverage manager at Sensing Restaurant, the Fairmont Battery Wharf's pricey, pedigreed French restaurant, who greeted a guest wandering around the bar looking for help with a snarling “Go wait back at the front door!” That guest turned out to be Mat Schaffer, the Boston Herald's lead restaurant critic, who duly name-checked Schmitt to lead his review of Sensing. Oopsie.

Most wished-for return. Copley Square's charming food stand Jack & the Bean Bowl, which brought some much-needed al fresco deliciousness to the stodgy and street-food-averse Back Bay. Their summertime run of serving up fresh, tasty, cheap bowls of vegetarian and vegan beans, rice and fixings was way too brief. Come back, Jack!

Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy Award. To the Brothers Andelman of Phantom Gourmet fame (Dan, Dave and Mike, a/k/a Smarmy, Greasy, and Bobbleheady), for their lucrative whoring on behalf of their TV show’s advertisers. This kind of naked money-grubbing ineptly fig-leafed as unbiased reviewing might be easier to take if the boys could authoritatively discuss anything that wasn’t “ooey-gooey, smothered with cheese”.

Best doubling of menu options. The new charcoal-grilled pastrami sub at Speed's Famous Hot Dog Wagon, which before served only a hot dog, albeit Boston's best hot dog. Grilling makes this sandwich a bit lean for deli purists' tastes, but terrific pastrami from Newmarket Square neighbor Boston Brisket Company helps. We'll be keeping our ear on the rumor that Speed's may seek a permanent home in a South End storefront, which would make its fabled street food accessible to many more Bostonians.

Most embarrassing bit of Bostonian provincialism. The pitiful hand-wringing accompanying the news that legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer might convert the Pink Palace, a shuttered Boston Common restroom, into a Shake Shack. Sample objections: “He's from, gasp, New York!” “We call them 'frappes', not 'shakes'.” “We need something 'Bostonian'” – never mind that the competing proposal is from a one-time operator of a failed New York restaurant whose theme-parky concept includes hawking “Freedom Trail ketchup”. Forget about doing actual research on Meyer's reputation for restaurant hospitality (on which he literally wrote the book), sustainable sourcing, and upstanding citizenship in the neighborhoods in which he operates – let alone actually sampling the food that his much-admired kitchens produce. How did we get our reputation as unworldly, navel-gazing bumpkins, again?

Cleverest new street-food concept. Clover Food Lab, a vegan/vegetarian food truck for people who aren’t vegetarians or vegans. With the vivid flavors of Clover’s sandwiches and salads, nobody seems to miss the meat, and its fresh-baked popovers and hand-cut fries are shockingly good.

Funniest unattributed restaurant criticism. Found in TV ads for Strega, in which owner Nick Varano continues a longstanding promotional campaign based on third-rate mobster-wannabe shtick that leans heavily on paid-for endorsements by bit players from kaput-in-2007 series The Sopranos. The hilarity stems from one TV spot in which Verano claims, “Shtrega serves what some people call da bes' Italian food in da city." This conveniently ignores the large body of professional and amateur critical opinion that calls Strega's décor hideously kitschy, its Italian-American fare thuddingly average, and its prices breathtaking, e.g., $43 for a veal chop. There's “some people”, and then there's “some other people”.

Best tribute dish. Short-rib tacos at Myers + Chang, which accurately mimic the phenomenal flavor of Kogí truck tacos, the L.A. street-food sensation. Unlike many of its upmarket-taco competitors in Boston, M+C has memorized a crucial page from the taco-truck handbook, the one that specifies two tortillas per taco to avoid a drippy, disintegrating mess. And like Kogí, M+C tweets a lot, though arguably this seemed hipper before nine hundred other Boston restaurants got on Twitter, too.

Gigantic Balls Award. To Barbara Lynch, for moving forward with plans for a springtime opening of Menton, her empire's new flagship restaurant in Fort Point. This luxury establishment will feature Italian cuisine, French rigor in the preparation and service, and eye-goggling prices: $85 for a 4-course tasting, $145 for a 7-course tasting. The online kibitzers seem evenly split between “That's insane in this economy” and “If anyone can make a success of it, Lynch can.” Me, I'd welcome another occasion-dining venue in Boston that isn't a steakhouse and maybe asks guys to wear a jacket. Whichever camp you fall into, you have to admit: gigantic balls.

Little Guy Triumphs Award. To South Street Diner, for successfully defending its right to operate 24 hours a day, something it has done since 1947. Rich-jerk owners of nearby luxury condos, newcomers to the diner's Leather District neighborhood, tried to crimp its hours to 2am but couldn't turn back the tide of popular support. Moral: folks that crave perfect silence shouldn't move to dense urban neighborhoods.

Here's hoping 2010 finds you not believing the hype, supporting local establishments, getting out to Chinatown, Eastie, Allston and Dorchester to sample authentic traditional cooking, treating servers with respect (as documented in Patrick Maguire's fascinating new blog Server Not Servant), and tipping large. Na zdraví!

Shark Fin, Foie Gras, and the Conscience of a Gourmand

2009-12-10T20:19:00.021-05:00

I was recently interviewed by Tiffany Ledner, a Boston University undergraduate, for a class project and story she wrote for The Daily Free Press, BU's student newspaper, called Shark Tails. (A longer version of the piece appears on the author's "Twenty-Four Hour Diner" blog, entitled Hook, Line and Sinker.) Her subject is shark fin as a foodstuff and finning, the notoriously unsustainable and horrific practice by which a shark is caught, has its fins cut off, and is then thrown back alive to die a terrible death on the ocean floor. Both the newspaper story and the blog piece did not reflect my feelings or actual statements with perfect accuracy, I imagine due to some combination of deadline pressure, changes made by some unseen editor, and space constraints.

As I conducted the interview by email, a practice I've adopted to help preserve my anonymity as a restaurant reviewer, it's easy for me to present my full responses to Ms. Ledner's interview questions here. In addition to clearing up some of the confusion that a few of my readers had expressed in the wake of the story's publication, I think it's a topic worthy of further thought and discussion, as it presents some queasy ethical questions to those of us for whom eating well is an obsessive pleasure.

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Tiffany Ledner: Have you ever consumed or prepared shark fin soup or any other dish that requires shark fin as a main ingredient? If so, please explain where, when, the circumstances, cost of, preparation of, any other important details.

MC Slim JB: I have never eaten shark fin in the States, but have been served shark-fin soup in restaurants on several occasions at banquet-style business dinners in Hong Kong and mainland China (Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzen).

TL: Does shark fin have any sort of significance to you?

MCSJB: I understood that it was one of many luxury foods that were intended to demonstrate my hosts' benevolence toward me as an honored guest: a business partner who had traveled all the way from the USA to help them woo their customers, consummate deals, etc.

TL: How would you describe your position on environmental activism? Passionate, undecided, apathetic, etc?

MCSJB: I'd say I am supportive but not especially active. I donate to various environmental causes. I've read Schlosser and Pollan. I'm educating myself on sustainability issues, reading and promoting bloggers like Boston's Jacqueline Church. I carry the Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch list with me to avoid ordering seafood species that are caught or farmed in ways that harm other species or the environment. I buy local produce, meat and fish when I can. I'm planning to join a CSA and possibly a CSF next year. If I ever get the outdoor space, I will grow some of my own vegetables. But there's clearly a lot more I could be doing on this account.

TL: Did you enjoy shark fin? What did you take away from the experience? Would you sample it again?

MCSJB: It reminded me of many Chinese luxury foods: I didn't mind eating it, and it was more palatable than some costly foods I've been served over there, but I didn't find it wonderful. It's a dish that is mainly about texture, as it gets all its real flavor from the broth it's served in. But I think it's like a lot of luxury goods: the Veblen effect is in full force. That is to say, it's expensive mainly because it is rare, and it is valued primarily because it is expensive, enabling the diner / host to consume / entertain extravagantly in a conspicuous manner. If it were as cheap as pollock, people wouldn't get excited about it.

TL: What do you think about banning shark fins from dinner tables?

MCSJB: I am in favor of banning finned shark: finning seems an especially egregious example of unsustainable harvesting and animal cruelty.

TL: If shark fin soup becomes illegal, do you think a black market will develop for the delicacy?

MCSJB: Of course: this would be inevitable. But there is still value in making it illegal. Aside from the criminal and civil sanctions on finners and retailers (on which enforcement would be difficult), it would help increase the social stigma of consuming it. Of course, to certain diners, the fact that it is illicit and more expensive only heightens its appeal, but I think the net effect would be positive.

TL: Have you ever traveled to China? If so, what were your experiences there with shark fin soup, if any? Your experiences with Chinese cuisine?

MCSJB: I have traveled to China, Hong Kong and Taiwan (and throughout Northeast and Southeast Asia) many times. I always eat like a local as much as possible there. At home in the States, I spend a lot of time in comparatively authentic Chinese restaurants of every type, primarily in Boston's Chinatown. But I still feel like a neophyte: the collection of rich, distinctive cuisines that we call Chinese food is something I feel I've just scratched the surface of. I really wish I could read Chinese, have considered studying it just to be able to decipher menus better.

TL: What are your experiences with bird’s nest soup or other delicacies taboo in mainstream American culture?

MCSJB: Is there really a taboo on bird's nest soup here, or do you mean that most Americans would find the idea of eating bird saliva disgusting? I've had that dish in China, too: not really a big deal, though I suspect it meant a lot to my hosts that I ate it and feigned relishing it (it is punishingly expensive). I've eaten many foods that would be considered Fear Factor foods by most Americans. (My favorite anecdote for this purpose is stag's penis soup, which really wasn't bad, a sort of gamy consomme.) I had a harder time with sea cucumber (highly prized, also unsustainably harvested, and with a texture I find unpleasant), a curry of many tiny fish-heads, sea snake (a bright-green scaly skin still on it), and other dishes.

TL: Many people are vehemently against the practice of shark finning because of how the fins are procured; however, some see no difference with this type of “torture” and the production of foie gras or veal. Do you eat foie gras or veal? Do you believe that this is unnecessary cruelty or a Darwinist advantage or something between the two? Please explain in detail.

MCSJB: I find the practice of finning abhorrent: it seems particularly cruel and wasteful as well as terribly unsustainable, threatening the extinction of many species. I eat only humanely-raised veal, which I believe is sustainable within the limits that meat-eating as a whole is. But I eat foie gras, and have no excuse for it. It's hard to see how you could justify its production as humane. (I guess I could defend it somewhat on sustainability grounds, but that argument seems feeble. The real issue is animal cruelty, and in that context you might argue that eating any CAFO-produced meat is equally reprehensible.) It's a fundamental hypocrisy I have about such foods, a stain on my conscience that I brook because I find the products so delectable.

TL: It has been stated that the wild capture of sharks merely for their fins is unsustainable. What do you feel about this? If sharks could be farmed, would it make a difference in how you feel about the production and/or consumption shark fin soup?

MCSJB: If it could actually be done sustainably (which is not true of all fish farming), the idea of farmed shark seems much better. It would be less wasteful (much more of the animal would be used), less cruel, and more defensible on sustainability grounds. It would not change my ambivalence about the product as a bland, unremarkable foodstuff.

TL: You are well known for frequenting Chinatown and have written about the importance of stepping out of one’s culture-Americana comfort zone and sampling cuisine from different cultures. Does your empathy towards other cultures have an effect on your opinion towards shark fin consumption? Please explain.

MCSJB: In general, I think eating traditional foods is one of the best ways to get inside the soul of a culture, and that greater experience of the world has many benefits to the individual. It certainly chips away at the tendency that we Americans have to see our culture as ascendant – an idea that many of us cherish who have never actually traveled anywhere to test the theory. I think developing that kind of empathy is more important now than ever, for a lot of reasons.

Having said that, the fact that I eat foie gras and some CAFO-produced meats means that I don't really have a leg to stand on in accusing other cultures of odious animal cruelty simply for the pursuit of pleasure. But I feel bad about it and ponder a day when I give it up for ethical reasons, and think that consumers of shark fin should, too.

TL: What changes would have to be made to the shark-finning industry for you to feel less guilty about eating shark fin soup (assuming it was something that you enjoy eating)?

MCSJB: If shark finning were successfully banned in favor of ways to sustainably catch or farm shark, I wouldn't object to its consumption, though I wouldn't go out of my way to eat shark fin myself.

TL: Finally, if foie gras were banned in the US, how would you react? Would you continue buy/consume it?

MCSJB: I'm not sure how I'd react to a foie gras ban. I suspect I would view it as I do certain other vices: I would mostly honor the proscription, but hold out the possibility that I might go off the reservation on select special occasions. As it is, I do not eat it very often, so making it forbidden might actually heighten its appeal in some ways. Consider absinthe: much less exciting now that it's widely available. Forbidden fruit shouldn't taste better just because it's forbidden, but sometimes it does.

From the Archives: Learning to Take the Bitters with the Sweet

2009-11-25T09:15:00.010-05:00

I hope my friends at Boston's Weekly Dig won't begrudge my republishing a piece I did for them way back in April, 2007, an early cocktail feature I did on bitters. With Thanksgiving and the general roundelay of holiday overeating imminent, I thought now might be a good time to take another look at the wondrous world of herbal digestivi:

LEARNING TO TAKE THE BITTERS WITH THE SWEET
Drink like an adult: leave the booze Slurpies to the wide-eyed naïfs
by MC Slim JB
[originally published April 11, 2007 in Boston's Weekly Dig]

I remember my first exposure to bitters, a freshman-year swig of a louche college pal’s Campari and soda. “That’s the single worst thing I’ve ever tasted,” I laughed, retreating to my watery lager. I’ve had some regrettable flirtations since: white Zinfandel, frozen Margaritas, that girl who drank Mudslides. But I’m more hard-boiled now. I’ve forsaken sweeter tipples for the bracing and the sharp -- drinks that not only perforate my social inhibitions but remedy my occasional foie gras overdose. I’ve learned how to take my medicine, the same bitters I once mocked.

Initially, I tiptoed down the bitters path with cough-syrupy Jägermeister, then known as the kind of chic German pick-me-up you might sip from your flask on the St. Moritz ski slopes, and a very effective digestif. Alas, some American marketing genius hyped it into a frat-boy’s guzzle, boosting case sales to the millions but ruining it for sophisticates.

Casting about for a replacement, I discovered Fernet-Branca, a potent Italian bitters that looks like Moxie and tastes like, well, poison. My first gulp was like an uppercut to the nose, its overwhelming medicinal bitterness leaving me stunned and scrunch-faced. But there was no denying Fernet’s restorative powers. One dose could magically rouse me from an overfed couch-bound stupor to dance-ready vitality in ten minutes. I grew to love its opaque otherness, to relish its assaultive flavor.

My own bar now features a dozen bitters, each a unique infusion of roots, herbs, spices, fruits, and other botanicals in a base of neutral spirits. Potable bitters like Campari and Meletti are intense but sippable by themselves, often poured freely into cocktails like Negronis and Americanos. Non-potable bitters like the ubiquitous Angostura and the obscurer Fee Brothers Orange are highly concentrated, administered in dashes to old-school cocktails like Sazeracs, Hoskinses, and Martinis.

Many countries produce bitters, but Italy is the motherlode, home to scores of potable amari, beloved as apertifs with soda or fruit juice, and as digestifs served neat. Scan the cordials shelf of your liquor store or Italian restaurant bar for Averna, Nonino, Ramazzotti, or Montenegro. They’re good bitters for beginners, a mellower breed of amaro with some sweetness to balance their astringency and herbal complexity.

Non-potable bitters have been bar staples since the 19th-century Golden Age of Cocktails, when the term “cocktail” implied their presence. Wherever cocktail craft is revered as an art form, they’re an indispensable pigment in the bartender’s paintbox. At No. 9 Park (9 Park St, Boston, 617.742.9991), John Gertsen’s scholarly mixologists are so steeped in cocktail lore they seem to have bitters in their bones. Their genteel Seelbach Cocktail ($14) spikes bourbon and Cointreau with seven dashes each of Angostura and Peychaud’s Bitters, finished with a big Champagne pour.

At Eastern Standard Kitchen & Drinks (528 Commonwealth Ave, Boston, 617.532.9100, easternstandardboston.com), Jackson Cannon’s elite crew wields potable bitters in some arresting cocktails. Straw-hued, sweet-spiced Becherovka from the Czech Republic meshes smoothly with honey syrup and fresh lemon juice as The Metamorphosis ($10), a refreshing original. Bitters are everywhere in their new “Lineage/Legacy” line of Golden Age-inspired cocktails, too, like The Little Italy ($10), in which artichoke-flavored Cynar adds an acerbic interrobang to a Manhattan-like blend of rye and sweet vermouth. Then there’s The Rat ($8), an affectionate homage to this location’s ghosts, a Fernet-Branca and Coke highball that’s as brash and insistent as the hardcore kids who once rocked the basement here.

In short, bitters are the punk rock of liquors: a rebuke to insipid conformity, a necessary corrective to self-indulgent excess, an echo of its forebears’ formative heyday. Before you order another Top-40 cocktail, credit your hard-won wisdom, embrace the bitterer things in life, and drink bitters. It’s at once a rebellious and grown-up thing to do.

Yet Another "10 Worst Dining Trends" Blog Post

2009-11-02T09:57:00.040-05:00

Top 10 lists are justifiably popular: they're simple, quick to read, and fun to argue about. In the food writing world, a recent Chicago Tribune article interviewed various culinary hotshots like celeb chef/owner David Chang of NYC's Momofuku to compile a list of “ten worst dining trends of the last decade”.

Predictably, this inspired of a lot of knock-offs and disputatious blog responses: I know I disagreed with a lot of it, like its broad-brush dismissal of molecular cooking. So I'm belatedly chiming in with my own not-especially-original list that includes a few tropes that regular readers of this blog will recognize as old hobbyhorses of mine. Here's my Boston-flavored 10 Worst Dining Trends of the Past Decade:

Egregious markups on ordinary wines, especially American ones. As I've documented at length elsewhere, certain restaurants in Boston get away with murder on this score, apparently because their clientele is too undereducated on wine pricing or entranced by atmosphere to realize they're being swindled.

Bashing of molecular cooking. It's easy to be dismissive of foams and other chem-lab approaches to cooking, at least as employed by chefs who use them as gimmicks to mask their lack of traditional cooking fundamentals. But to my ear, a lot of anti-molecular gastronomy rhetoric sounds like culinary anti-intellectualism, effectively “Haw, haw, that foo-foo food stuff is fer fags!” The truth is that molecular cooking as employed by masters like Grant Achatz or Wylie Dufresne can be a beautifully artistic (and delectable) application of food science. Still, innovation in the kitchen has always met with reactionary resistance: cooking raw animal flesh over fire was probably pshawed by some cavemen. In the less-distant past, once-edgy technologies like the food processor, stick blender and dehydrator were used only by professionals. In short, your mocking of molecular cooking today may look pretty stupid five or 10 years from now when you're buying a home sous-vide machine.

The rise of casual-dining chains, with their emphasis on portion size over quality, their dumbing down of regional and traditional cuisines (more on this below), and their crushing of more worthy, idiosyncratic, locally-owned independent restaurants.

The grotesque swelling of portion sizes, pioneered by the chains and often forced upon independents as a competitive response. I hate the consequent expectation now carried around by most diners that they will leave with enough leftovers to make three more meals.

The ongoing debasement of distinctive regional specialties and traditional cuisines (again with national chains as a major culprit). The ignominies of American Chinese food are an ancient example, but there are plenty of newer abominations against authenticity: par-boiled grilled meats char-grilled with a finishing sauce burnt on and called “barbecue”; breaded chicken wings referred to as “Buffalo wings”; chain-level Tex-Mex posited as Mexican cuisine; the suburbanization of Thai food; P.F. Chang's.

The proliferation of national luxury-steakhouse chains, a format that I find boring and mostly a ripoff. For example, Boston already has a half-dozen good locally-owned platinum-card beef palaces. No city of our size also needs a Smith & Wollensky, a Plaza III, a Fleming's, a Ruth's Chris, a Palm, two Morton's and three Capital Grilles.

The term "foodie". I think this label had some positive connotations once, but it has since been claimed by the kind of fools who think beating their friends to the latest overpriced It Place somehow makes them special, and dopes who watch 40 hours of Food Network programming a week but would never dare venture into Chinatown. Nobody I know who is really adventurous and single-minded about finding extraordinary food calls herself or himself a foodie anymore. (One might argue that the rise of the “foodiot” – a term coined by Joe Pompeo in a funny New York Observer piece for the kind of annoying food-obsessive who won't shut up at parties or on their blog about where and what they've been eating lately – is equally lamentable, but I'm not calling that particular kettle black.)

The Phantom Gourmet, for: a) fooling some naïve viewers into thinking the show provides unbiased restaurant reviews when it actually spends most of its time giving tug-jobs to its advertisers, b) spreading the notion among viewers sophisticated enough to recognize the Phantom's grifting that all restaurant reviewers might be whores, and c) those hairdos.

Food-centric reality TV, epitomized by the appalling crapfest that is Hell's Kitchen. The patently bogus, manufactured drama, as well as the casting of hosts like Gordon Ramsay and some chef contestants for their sheer obnoxiousness, are lowering the bar further for reality TV's already subterranean level of insults to viewer intelligence.

The death of restaurant dress codes. I understand it's difficult for restaurants to turn away any business in these brutal economic times, and that dress codes merely reflect our society: we customers are the ones wearing sweat pants, hoodies and flip-flops to church, the mall and the workplace. But I still think it's a damnable shame that our top-flight destination restaurants can't enforce some minimum level of decorum (as in, “Take off your baseball cap in the dining room at L'Espalier, asshole”) for the benefit of other patrons who are celebrating big-number anniversaries, birthdays or other special occasions. Too bad it's a fallen world.

You don't really hate curry: reconsidering Indian and other South Asian cuisines

2009-10-14T10:16:00.029-04:00

Dining out with friends who aren't particularly adventurous eaters can be a chore, but I understand what it's like to be afraid of unfamiliar foods. I was a timid eater through my teens, didn't really start expanding my culinary horizons until I first moved to a big city. So while I will try to cajole you into trying a bite from my plate of crispy-fried pigs' tails (an incredible dish at Cambridge's Craigie on Main), I won't press the point if you demur. But there's one statement that really galls me: “I don't like curry." Most frequently, I hear this from friends as their blanket excuse for never trying Indian food.

Saying "I hate curry" is like saying, "I don't like sauces", or “I don't like gravy". What many Americans don't understand is that curry is not a flavor, it's not a spice, and it certainly isn't that yellow powder in your spice rack.* It's a generic term: there are literally millions of recipes for curry. A sweet green curry from Central Thailand and a Kashmiri rogan josh are both curries, but have almost nothing in common except that they are richly-spiced gravies served with some kind of starch (rice, potatoes, bread, pancakes or noodles). The particular combination of spices and other ingredients in a specific type of Indian curry (of which there are thousands) varies almost literally by family, and there are over a billion souls there. And by the way, there's way more to Indian menus than curry dishes. But let's start with this one stubborn American misconception.

You simply must stop thinking of curry as something that comes from a McCormick's jar. This is exactly like thinking a can of Spaghetti-O's represents Italian food. That supermarket spice-aisle junk is a 19th-century British bastardization of one very specific style of Northern Indian curry, from a time when English cookery sucked really hard. It's likely a stale blend of turmeric, cumin, and fenugreek, with a lot of salt, MSG and anti-caking agents mixed in: no wonder you don't like it! Decent pre-made curry bases do exist -- jarred powders, canned pastes, shelf-stable bars that break into squares like baking chocolate -- but serious cooks put these in the same category as frozen food or jars of Prego: strictly for students, kitchen naifs, camping, the lazy, the time-pressed, and emergencies.

Pre-fab blends are scorned because the true flavors of spices fade quickly as essential oils evanesce after grinding. Any self-respecting cook from South Asia toasts and grinds their spices fresh daily. Some use a mortar and pestle, but there's also a specialty appliance, the Sumeet grinder, a wet/dry electric blender optimized for grinding spices, aromatics, and other ingredients into pastes. Real local chefs with curries on their menus aren't reaching for a jar. So if you've turned your nose up at Indian food because your mom once sprinkled Durkee's curry powder on your chicken wings or tuna salad and you didn't like it, it's time for a reconsideration.

And another thing: Indian food is no more a single cuisine than American food: like the US, it's a big country with a diverse collection of many regional cuisines. Indian restaurants have come a long way in Boston; unlike 20 years ago, you won't find the same dozen Punjabi and Mughal dishes everywhere you go today. It's now possible for Bostonians to enjoy regional cooking from all over South Asia. Partly this is because American diners have gotten more sophisticated; partly it's because high technology, healthcare and other industries have brought professionals from all over the sub-continent to New England, and these ex-pats are driving demand for greater regional diversity.

Here are a few South Asian restaurants in Greater Boston that I enjoy, identified by one feature I especially value:

High-end and creative without being fusion-y: Tamarind Bay

Truck-stop (cheap, down and dirty, and delicious): Punjabi Dhaba

Northern: India Quality or its kid sibling Punjab Palace; The Kebab Factory

Southern: Tanjore

Pan-regional: Namaskar

Halal/Pakistani: Darbar

Street-food snacks: Dosa Factory

Hyderabadi: Rani, Kebab and Tandoor (Waltham)

Bengali / Bangladeshi: Darul Kabab

Tibetan-in-exile-in-India: Martsa on Elm

Lunch buffet: The Pongal (Billerica)

Friendly service: Ghazal

Take-out: Guru the Caterer (though it has expanded recently and now has sit-down space)

Desi Chinese (Chinese food as prepared in India, a unique and wonderful creature): Namaskar, Indian Dhaba

Nepalese/Indian: Himalayan Bistro (West Roxbury)

Nepalese (its own cuisine, but with similarities to Northern Indian): Mt. Everest Kitchen

Balti (a creation of Pakistani ex-pats in Birmingham, England): Bhindi Bazaar

Borrowing of Indian technique in the service of a Western restaurant: tandoor at Scampo

Decor: Diva

Patio: Kashmir

Date place: Mela

High-end, fusion-y small plates: naan bar menu at Mantra

I find it helps to start exploring with a friend who knows a little about the cuisine. But it's worth noting that chicken tikka masala is now the most popular restaurant dish in the UK. This "Indian for beginners" dish appears on a lot of local menus: chicken roasted in a clay oven and served in a mild, creamy tomato sauce. It's perhaps a bastardized example of the cuisine, purportedly invented by an ex-pat chef in Birmingham or Glasgow, but you have to start somewhere, and authenticity aside, a well-done chicken tikka masala is really delicious. So shake off your Western ignorance about what a curry is all about, and give Indian cuisine a shot. There's a whole new world waiting for you there.

* Yes, I am aware of the curry leaf, a/k/a sweet neem, a tree leaf commonly used in South Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani cooking, but if you know about that, you probably don't need to be reading this particular essay.

Check out "Teach a Chef to Fish" on Sept 28, 2009

2009-09-18T08:00:00.006-04:00

I haven't been particularly active on sustainability issues (though I'm learning), but I can plug worthy events on the subject by other folks who are, like this upcoming roundtable on seafood sustainability aimed at professional chefs:

Teach a Chef to Fish: A Roundtable on Seafood Sustainability for Industry Professionals
Monday, September 28, 2009, 3pm to 5pm
Fairmont Battery Wharf Hotel, 3 Battery Wharf, Boston, MA
Cost: $50 (50% of proceeds to benefit the New England Aquarium)

Fact: Almost 90% of diners say they want restaurants to serve only sustainable seafood, but nearly 75% are unaware which fish are close to extinction.

The Teach a Chef to Fish roundtable will be a "roll up your sleeves and learn" session. Attendees will hear from a panel, get introduced to a new state-of-the-art sourcing service, and learn how to redo seafood recipes to include on their own menus just in time for October's National Seafood Month.

Event highlights:

The Fairmont Hotel will open with their story of how the resort chain began to integrate sustainability into their practices 20 years ago, and how the Battery Wharf property in Boston decided to remove bluefin tuna and Chilean sea bass from their menus.

Attendees will hear about sustainable aquaculture from the example of Australis Barramundi, "The Better Fish". Not all aquaculture is problematic. Attendees will learn why and how this fish is an example of a sustainable aquaculture.

The New England Aquarium will share insights from its sustainable sourcing initiatives and give examples of what innovative companies are doing to help busy culinary professionals adopt sustainable seafood sourcing practices.

Attendees will learn about new tools like "Green Chefs, Blue Ocean", a joint venture between the Blue Ocean Institute and the Chefs Collaborative; review their seven-part online tutorial; and walk through their new sourcing service, FishChoice. Now in live field testing, FishChoice aims to give culinary professionals real-time information about sourcing sustainable seafood from a large database of purveyors, many of them already-familiar names. Chefs will have the rare opportunity to shape the service by offering feedback.

Attendees will gain insights into workable solutions for offering the sustainable seafood that diners prefer. Participants will then work together using the new tools to apply their creativity to redo existing recipes, working through actual menu items to take the first steps toward more sustainable menus.

Presenters include chefs from top restaurants in Boston, MA and RI. Attendees will receive sponsors discounts and materials in a USB flash drive to take away.

Register here via PayPal

Please contact the event organizer with any questions:

Jacqueline Church
617.851.4880
http://JacquelineChurch.com
http://GourmetFood.suite101.com
On Twitter: http://twitter.com/LDGourmet
Teach a Man to Fish!
http://jacquelinechurch.com/pig-tales-a-fish-friends/1806-what-is-teach-a-man-to-fish-

"Feeding Celine": my guest post in The Leather District Gourmet blog

2009-09-13T21:04:00.007-04:00

I just contributed a guest post to my friend Jacqueline Church's very fine Boston food/drink blog The Leather District Gourmet. It's called Feeding Celine -- Eating Well on an Engineer's Student's Budget, and it's basically more advice to incoming college students on dining out in Boston, much like my recent blog essay Wear Sunscreen in the Restaurant, or, Words of Advice for Hungry Young People.

Feeding Celine adds specific recommendations on cheap-eats dishes and venues within a short distance (a few T stops) of M.I.T., where a young friend just matriculated.

Be sure to check out Church's other blogs, notably Pig Tales & Fish Friends, on sustainability issues.

Wear Sunscreen in the Restaurant, or, Words of Advice for Hungry Young People

2009-09-02T02:46:00.117-04:00

Here are a few dining-out tips for you kids who've just arrived in the Hub of the Universe to start school, from a longtime chaser of the high life who's lived in Boston forever -- like, since before PlayStation II, when the Internets were all 110 baud (don’t Google that now, pay attention):

Get the hell out. Boston is no New York City, but it’s still a pretty great restaurant town, in part because you students support some excellent cheap-to-moderate places. But you'll still have to duck the many miserable ones aimed at the sorry philistines among you. If you have the iota of adventurousness necessary to rise above a life of mediocre food, you'll have to occasionally get on your bike or the subway or the bus to visit places like Chinatown, East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, East Cambridge, East Somerville, and Allston. If you get off your ass, you can eat fantastic food for your entire four or five or twelve years here. Don’t blow this opportunity by settling for so-so burgers, pizza, and burritos. Example: check out the Super 88 Market at the corner of Commonwealth Ave and Brighton Ave in Allston. Its ten-stall food court offers phenomenal cheap eats from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. It’s a low-risk, incredibly tasty way to start exploring. Don’t overlook Ken’s, the fantastic ramen (Japanese noodle soup) joint just outside the food court.

Consume amateur reviews warily. Online resources like Yelp Boston can help you ferret out worthy food, but beware: a lot of Yelpers still think The Cheesecake Factory and P.F. Chang's are the most awesome things ever. (If you agree with them, don't admit it in public: it's like inking “I’m a bumpkin from Pahokee” on your forehead.) Beyond the rubes who are impressed by Fire + Ice – “Ooh, look, Tiff, you pick your ingredients and sauces and they cook it in front of you on a giant griddle, wicked!" – many other online reviewers don't deserve your trust: they're actually restaurant owners, shills, disgruntled ex-employees, or garden-variety nutbags. Read other reviews by the same poster to make sure they’re not five-starring The Olive Garden. Utterly ignore anonymous reviewers: for all you know, those people live for Hot Pockets. Check out the Boston board of Chowhound, which has an ugly interface but highly knowledgeable, food-obsessed regulars who discuss restaurants in a helpful, conversational format.

Don’t overlook old media. While you still can, take advantage of professional restaurant reviews in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Boston Phoenix (where I write the weekly On the Cheap column), Boston’s Weekly Dig, and Stuff Magazine (where I write Food Coma, a biweekly fine-dining column, as well as occasional cover features like this one on Boston street food.) The Improper Bostonian also covers the scene but is print-only. Boston Magazine is like most city-branded monthlies in that its target audience is rich suburban ding-dongs.

Check out local bloggers and social media. In addition to the MC Slim JB blog, Boston has many useful food and drink blogs -- start with my WORTHY BLOGS / LINKS section on the lower left -- and unlike this one, most have attractive photos, video clips, and illustrations. Hundreds of Boston restaurants, bars, food retailers, and the writers who cover them are now on Twitter and Facebook: you'll quickly figure out which ones are worth following/friending and which are annoying, one-note self-promoters. Two helpful primers on my blog include an intro to Boston's craft cocktail scene and a humorous look at the Phantom Gourmet, a cheesy local TV show that reviews Boston restaurants (sort of).

Be a good critic yourself. When you start writing your own online reviews or food blog, try to focus on the restaurant’s cuisine, atmosphere and service, rather than just transcribing the reality-TV fabulousness that is your life as you live it moment-by-moment with your quirky cast of friends. That stuff is fascinating to exactly nobody but you. Write from representative experience: a single visit is not an adequate basis for a fair assessment, nor is brunch, nor is Restaurant Week, a semi-annual promotion during which restaurants offer limited, discounted prix fixe menus.

Try to observe some of our quaint, Colonial-era dining customs. Take off your baseball cap in the dining room, don’t spend the entire meal blabbing or texting on your phone, limit your public drunkenness to the pre-projectile-vomiting stage, learn how to tip properly, curb the public displays of affection, and consider that other patrons might not find your bare armpits, navel, or toes an appetizing sight, especially at swankier venues. I won’t tell you to sit up straight, but you really should do that, too.

So welcome to Boston, kids: it’s a wonderful place to eat, and we’re really glad to have you here. Now get off my lawn.