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

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!

Terror Waiter and the issue of really bad restaurant service

At least he's wearing plenty of flair.
(Photo courtesy of Deep Dish Creative)

A recent discussion on the Boston board of Chowhound.com got me thinking about the issue of bad restaurant service and how to deal with it. In that online discussion, a Chowhound regular recounted his awful service experience at Neptune Oyster in Boston’s North End, and how he’s finished with the place because the server who treated him so badly turned out to be the owner. (My own view of Neptune Oyster is markedly different: it’s my favorite European-style seafood restaurant in Boston, and when he has served me, the owner has always been great.) But I do have some empathy for this fellow Chowhound: I too have had a service nightmare in a Boston restaurant, an evening so bad that we still refer to it as the Terror Waiter Incident.

Terror Waiter was a young man who worked at the Hungry I on Boston’s Beacon Hill when I visited a few years back, on a busy weekend night when he was obviously hating his job, the patrons, and life in general. Our evening started badly at square one: I pointed out that my charger was food-spattered and asked him if he could replace it; he whisked it away with a look on his face like I had just loudly broken wind. I watched him serve a woman coffee who then pointed out that she had ordered tea; he responded by dumping the coffee into an empty salad bowl on the table, pouring hot water into the just-emptied cup, and flinging a teabag next to it. No dish was served without a slam; every request was met with an eye-rolling sneer.

He was basically a miserable, nasty bastard to everyone in the room, to the point where some customers seemed genuinely afraid of him, while the rest of us wavered between bemused incredulity and outrage. I was seething at first, but wanting to salvage something of Date Night, decided to laugh it off, make a game of noting to my companion how brutally awful this waiter was. We marveled at how someone whose job title was “server” could provide what was effectively the opposite of service. But ultimately I was really unhappy, to the point where I wrote a letter to the chef/owner documenting our evening of service horrors, and vowing to never return -- a promise I have kept.

Everyone in the industry has a bad night now and again -- maybe our server’s dog had died, or he was suffering from massive hemorrhoidal flare-up, or he’d just gotten dumped -- but he was unforgettably, excruciatingly inhospitable. It’s too bad: I had been a big fan of the Hungry I’s country French cuisine, found the atmosphere quaint and romantic, and particularly loved Sunday brunch in its tiny interior courtyard. But some service experiences are so terrible that they ruin a place for you forever, and I imagine my recounting this story over the years has steered many friends away, too.

That said, most of my service experiences are pretty good: Americans enjoy some of the best restaurant service in the world, and the majority of our servers are professional, well-trained, and well-meaning. If you’ve ever spent any time working as a waiter or bartender as I have, you know that it’s really, really hard work for scant wages ($2.63/hour in Massachusetts, far less than the minimum wage of $8.00) plus tips. And in any restaurant meal that doesn’t turn out well, the customer is frequently complicit, as outlined in this hilarious post from Steve Dublanica’s peerless Waiter Rant blog: “50 Signs You Might Be An [Impolite] Customer.”

The best way you can help your servers maximize your enjoyment of your meal is to communicate clearly with them. This includes complaining about kitchen mistakes (like the wrong order, or an underdone steak) right away, while they can be fixed in a timely fashion. This is why a good server always checks back with your table a couple of minutes after serving a course: to give you a chance to do exactly this.

Sometimes, though, a server does screw up badly in ways that can’t be blamed on the kitchen or the pressures of serving a big section full of demanding customers. If you have serious problems that you attribute to the server’s lack of professionalism, attentiveness, or commitment to hospitality, have a word with the manager after your meal is over. If you have business clients or other guests you’d rather spare this spectacle and its potential accompanying drama, make a follow-up phone call to management the next day. Don’t do this to solicit compensation, but because you believe a well-managed place will work to address this issue with its staff and strive to make your next experience better. (If the manager doesn’t think you’re just an abusive or exploitive customer, he or she will often offer some kind of comp anyway.)

In the end, try to remember that your servers are human beings with high-stress jobs who must deal with a public that is not always on its own best behavior. Don’t penalize them for mistakes the kitchen made. Tip generously when service is good: you might be surprised at how small the difference is over the course of a year between being a barely-adequate tipper and a magnanimous one. Be grateful that when you have a workday when you’re not at your shiny best, it’s usually not reflected directly in your compensation. And consider that it always could be worse: you could have gotten Terror Waiter.

A roundup of extraordinary Boston and New England dishes

I got solicited back in March by a national "lad" magazine to contribute a couple of Top 5 lists of Boston restaurants. Being the amateur food writer that I am, unschooled in the ways of the publishing world, I submitted a completed article rather than a proposal, which in retrospect was dumb, basically giving away the store. Now their editor has stopped responding to my emails, and since they never sent me a contract, I must assume they’ve decided not to use it.

I hate to waste good copy, so here are my lists. (If that magazine decides to use them without paying me, remember you saw them here first; lawsuit to follow.) As the feature has an August 2009 publication date, I won’t disclose the exact nature of these “top” lists. Let’s just call them a collection of dishes from Boston and New England restaurants that I consider extraordinary.

TOP 5 LIST #1:

Raw oysters, fried clams and the cold lobster roll at Neptune Oyster. The most impeccably fresh, beautifully prepared local seafood in a city famed for it is found at this little French-leaning joint. Ironically, it’s located in the middle of Boston’s North End, a neighborhood mostly known for its hundred Italian restaurants.

“One with everything” from Boston Speed’s Famous Hot Dog Wagon. This rickety food truck makes what the Wall Street Journal recently (and correctly) called the best hot dog in America, served in the middle of a wholesale food warehouse district. The giant dog is elaborately, lovingly prepared (marinated in brown sugar and cider, smoked on a closed charcoal grill, grilled on an open grill) and served with housemade condiments on a substantial grilled bun. It is a king among frankfurters.

Boiled Maine lobster at Barnacle Billy’s. Homarus Americanus is New England’s signature crustacean, and this unpretentious little shack on postcard-pretty Perkins Cove in Ogunquit, Maine, seventy minutes north of Boston, does it exactly right: naked, with a pot of drawn butter, and beautiful local sweet corn on the cob on the side. A bucket of steamed clams with broth and more butter completes the picture here.

Roast chicken with garlic, lemon and parsley from Hamersley’s Bistro. In the city’s chic and restaurant-rich South End, Gordon Hamersley runs the archetypal chef-owned New American bistro, applying French technique to perfect New England ingredients (he was insistently locavore decades before the term existed), elevating the humble broiler into something transcendent.

Carne de porco à alentejana (marinated pork and littleneck clams) at Casa Portugal. The chefs of East Cambridge’s many Portuguese restaurants are experts with local seafood, a reflection of how the Portuguese ex-pat community serves as the core of Boston’s enormous fishing fleet. This dish artfully gives sunny Mediterranean simplicity a fresh New England accent, served up with courtly formality by the Iberian-native owner himself.


TOP 5 LIST #2

JFK’s lobster stew at Locke-Ober, in the company of Boston’s dwindling Brahmin class. Jack Kennedy’s favorite restaurant is still where Beacon Hill old money goes to escape the hoi-polloi in the arms of solicitous service and classic Continental and New England fare. Lined with old mirrors and mahogany, the clubby room offers a rare echo of a bygone 19th-century Boston, when bony, effete WASPs still ran the show (they’ve since been supplanted by roughneck Irish- and Italian-Americans.) Given some much-needed physical restoration and a slight menu freshening by local celeb-chef treasure Lydia Shire, it has kept its 19th-elegance and nose firmly in the air -- the last place in town where gentlemen without jackets are turned away.

Clam cakes and stuffed quahogs, a/k/a “stuffies”, at George’s of Galilee in Narragansett, RI. The former are deep-fried clam fritters, the latter are big local clams chopped and baked in the shell with seasoned bread stuffing, both once-ubiquitous summertime standbys that are increasingly hard to find. No one does them better than this salt-spray-weathered joint, which -- unlike many more-famous tourist-trap clam shacks -- actually sits on a beach in one of the few active, working-class fishing villages left on the New England coast.

Jonnycakes at the Commons Lunch in Little Compton, Rhode Island. A native (Wampanoag) food that Colonials adopted in the 17th century, these thin, lacy-edged pancakes made from local white flint cornmeal are a breakfast delicacy that few diners know about and fewer restaurants serve. They’re a tragically disappearing vestige of ancient New England culinary history. A modest family diner in this pristine rural seaside town an hour south of Boston is one of its last standard-bearers.

New England boiled dinner (corned beef and cabbage) from Doyle’s Café, a bona fide Irish-American tavern (opened in 1882) in a city overrun with shamrock-bedecked, Lucky-Charms-lilting fakers. As the black-and-white photos lining the bar attest, this is where real Boston pols come to quaff properly-pulled Guinnesses and dine elbow-to-elbow with their salt-of-the-earth constituents.

Steak tips at the New Bridge Café in Chelsea, one of those great knockabout mid-century saloons that are slowly fading away, to be replaced by obnoxious cookie-cutter chain outlets. The New Bridge hasn’t quite been the same since the smoking ban took effect, but its steak tips are still the best around, and its townie regulars with their inimitable, broad local accents present a timeless snapshot of blue-collar Boston.


SOME ADDITIONAL BOSTON ENTRIES I INCLUDED, JUST IN CASE MY NEW ENGLAND ENTRIES WERE TOO FAR AFIELD OF BOSTON PROPER

Prune-stuffed gnocchi with foie gras and vin santo glaze from No. 9 Park. Barbara Lynch grew up in hardscrabble South Boston, then ascended through pluck and grit to build one of Boston’s most successful restaurant empires. No. 9 Park, her first venue, overlooks Boston Common and the State House, serving some of the most refined French- and Italian-inspired food in town. Not only does her famed pasta dish show how an Irish-American lass can outclass the Italian boys at their own game, Lynch cultivates the most polished and skilled servers and bartenders in town.

Grilled local bluefish at the East Coast Grill & Raw Bar. Forget the better-known Legal Sea Foods: grilling savant Chris Schlesinger’s casual, lively Cambridge joint is a superior exponent of ultra-fresh New England fish and shellfish. Bluefish is a darkly oily, predatory game fish that is tricky to prepare appealingly: expert wood-fire-grilling here makes it richly sublime. Schlesinger also does other fine local fish (like golden tilefish, monkfish, wild striped bass, and tautog), terrific raw bar, Asian- and Caribbean-inspired seafood preparations, and very creditable slow-smoked barbecue. ECG’s recurring Hell Night event, featuring ferocious chili-pepper-laden dishes, is a kitschy, delicious evening of culinary machismo for which you’ll pay dearly the next day.

A slice or a whole pie from the original Pizzeria Regina in the North End. The ancient coal-fired brick oven here, first fired up in 1926, turns out the best Neapolitan-style thin-crust pizzas this side of New Haven or Brooklyn, accompanied by the kind of casual, old-Boston Italian-American charm that the nearby tourist traps can only dream of. An original: the real deal.