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

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 to one loose, casual one-size-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.

10 Critical Website Mistakes That Boston Restaurants Make

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.

The 2009 Devil's Dining Awards

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!

Yet Another "10 Worst Dining Trends" Blog Post

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.

“But There Is No Mr. L’Espalier!”, or, The Bane of the Grammar-Stickler Restaurant Critic

I believe most people are like me in that they harbor secret pet peeves, petty grudges against their fellow human beings that they hide because airing them would reveal them as cranks, obsessives, nutballs. “Really? That tiny issue bothers you? Who the heck cares about that? Who the hell even thinks about that?!” Luckily, I have a blog, and blogs were practically made for confessing these kinds of niggling idiosyncrasies. My private hell is being a grammar stickler, the kind that Lynne Truss describes in her slim, hilarious volume “Eats, Shoots, and Leaves”. Further, as a restaurant critic, I chafe at a very particular sub-order of grammatical irritant: the way people turn restaurant names into possessives.

It has bugged me since I was a kid: why do people have to append an apostrophe/letter-S to every restaurant name? Legal Sea Foods becomes Legal’s. Sonsie becomes Sonsie’s. It’s like people can’t wrap their minds around the notion that not every restaurant is named after an owner. The doofus logic seems to be, “This dude Sal owns a pizza place and calls it Sal’s Pizza, ergo it's L’Espalier’s, as in Mr. L'Espalier's Place.” Hearing this makes my blood boil. I know for a fact that it is L'Espalier, not L'Espalier's.

Brooking this solecism is a daily trial. Consider these renditions of popular Boston restaurant names as frequently spoken aloud by locals: Mistral’s, Beehive’s, Neptune’s, Silvertone’s, Pigalle’s, Aquitaine’s, La Voile’s, Douzo’s, EVOO’s, Hungry Mother’s, O Ya’s, Vlora’s. Yet if you go to the restaurant and look at the sign, you'll find no apostrophe+s in its name. To me, that errantly tacked-on possessive is as stupid and grating as a promo for The Real Housewives of New Jersey, only I can’t just turn it off. Everybody, but everybody, does it.

Does this common habit make you wince, clench your teeth, growl inwardly? If not, you are a normal person: move along. But if you’re a budding restaurateur who shares my absurd affliction, I believe I can help. Free of any consulting fees, I offer the following guide to selecting a restaurant name that won’t get you a damnable apostrophe+s wrongly bolted on, with real-life examples and counter-examples:

• Don’t pick anything that can easily be mistaken for a girl’s name. It’s not Clio’s, Sorellina’s, Regina’s, Carmen’s, Stella’s, Laurel’s, or Mamma Maria’s, but people love saying them that way – apparently they just feel better thinking some lady owns the place. Masculine names aren’t much better: people still refer to Dali’s and Da Vinci’s, even if they suspect that the famous dead guy doesn’t really own a piece of the joint.

• Avoid words that end in a vowel, especially Italian and Spanish ones; they’re too easy to pronounce with the bogus possessive attached. That way you won’t be seething like the owners who have to endure malapropisms like Cuchi Cuchi’s, Vee Vee's, Scampo’s, Rocca’s, Grezzo’s, Sportello’s, Erbaluce’s, Grotto’s, Picco’s, Pomodoro’s, Via Matta’s, Toro’s, Rialto’s, and Chacarero’s.

• Try tongue-twisters: choose a word ending in “s” (ideally non-plural: see below) or a difficult consonant cluster. Who can be bothered with the lip-work necessary to pronounce Radius’s, Meritage’s, Tossed’s, Rendezvous’s, or Les Zygomates’s? No one.

• Use physical locations: no sane person would think that Green Street might be the owner of a restaurant and so call that restaurant Green Street’s. Try rooms with “The” in front (The Oak Room, The Wine Cellar, The Blue Room), buildings (Church, Banq, House of Tibet, Peach Farm, Roadhouse), or addresses (Tory Row, No. 9 Park, Scollay Square, Kingston Station, Deep Ellum). No one comfortably says, “I just adore that place, The Butcher Shop’s.”

• Consider vague nouns, the more abstract the better, like District, Equator, Clink, Sage, Blue Ginger, Coda, Drink, Elephant Walk, Gaslight, Greek Corner, and Summer Winter. You won’t hear, “Let’s go to India Quality’s!”

• Befriend non-Latinate foreign words like Uni, Dok Bua, Kaze, Lala Rokh, Mela, Oishii, Tashi Delek, and Teranga. Those could be names, but most Anglophone Americans will feel uncertain about them, and thus be less likely to slap on the possessive.

• Use numbers to repel the apostrophe+s, like Bin 26, Cambridge, 1., and Grill 23.

• Even if you're comfortable with possessives, think carefully before you include an apostrophe. 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.

• To discourage unwanted written possessives, employ weird spellings, shouty ALL-CAPS, mixed case, all lowercase, and/or gimmicky punctuation, like Jer-Ne, OM, LiNEaGe, dbar, Mooo…, ZuZu!, and STIX. These already look bizarre enough; maybe folks will resist putting the extra crap on the end.

• Watch out for plural nouns; idiots may pronounce them properly, but in writing will jam in unwanted apostrophes. Just ask the poor souls at Pops (the chef/owner’s nickname), Josephs Two (run by two guys named Joseph, like Wise Men Three), Salts, Olives, Ten Tables, Anchovies, and Gargoyles on the Square. (Honestly, there’s no Uncle Gargoyle, so why would you write it as Gargoyle's?)

Phew, that made me feel better. Next, I must attempt to cleanse the English-speaking world of the Superfluous Pop-Culture “The”. You know, as in: the names of those movies are “Big Night” and “Alien”, not “The Big Night” and “The Alien”. Also, the name of that band is Talking Heads, not The Talking Heads. (That must have chapped their hides, too, as they used an album title to point this out.) Then I have to get Bostonians to stop referring to our central parks as the Boston Commons and Public Gardens: it's Boston Common and the Public Garden, you know. What do you mean, you don’t care?!

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the Restaurant, or, Dirty Laundry and Dining Out Don't Mix

Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor share a tender moment
 in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966)

A funny thing happens when my beloved and I head out for a romantic dinner: we often get seated next to couples who are obviously having a miserable time. The comically bad first date is one common scenario. We still wince to recall the hapless dope at Khao Sarn Cuisine who got snappish with the server upon learning he couldn’t order egg drop soup or General Gau’s chicken at a traditional Thai restaurant. Given his date's cringing embarrassment, we rated the odds of her returning his subsequent calls as vanishingly low.

More pitiable was the couple at Casa Romero who were celebrating years of wedded bliss by loudly calling each other the vilest names I've ever heard uttered in a public place. (There's something about the C-word that just pole-axes the romance and tenderness of an anniversary dinner.) I kept glancing sideways, wondering when the crockery might start flying. The idea of divorce was being broached by the time we gratefully left, to which I thought, “Hmm, maybe not such a bad idea for you two.”

On another evening, at the new L’Espalier, a sixtyish man with the mien of an insurance executive prosecuted an excruciating fight with his garishly attractive, thirtyish paramour. Apparently he was remodeling their love nest and accused her of cheating on him with one of his contractors. She protested against what she characterized as insane, jealous delusions. The recriminations, too sordid to detail here, got uglier and louder, though the young woman did a better job of retaining her dignity.

The whole shabby business unfolded and escalated rapidly. In ten minutes, we went from being unwilling but slightly titillated eavesdroppers ("Ha-ha!, Ole Sugar Daddy and His Siliconed Hottie Mistress are having a little tiff") to feeling sad and ashamed for them. I think the tipping point was when we realized that this dinner was her birthday celebration. Or maybe it was just witnessing the bloom go off the rose of their romance -- perhaps once beautiful, now revealed as arid mutual exploitation -- in real time.

I got up and sought out the floor manager, who with the help of three servers deftly relocated us, our wine, and the second course of our tasting menu to another table out of earshot, though not line-of-sight. After a bit more sparring, Miss Decolletage finally stalked out. The old man sat there for another hour, sulking blackly with his entree untouched, knocking back a whole bottle of wine and a few whiskeys by himself. Happy effing birthday.

So, why on earth do people air out their personal lives like so much threadbare, stained underwear in restaurants where strangers can't look away? I have a few theories. One, to certain couples, restaurants afford rare moments of imagined privacy away from children and in-laws and telephones and texting, a seeming oasis for real conversation. Two, lovers let their guard down at the table, lulled by attentive service, warm atmosphere and good food, the illusion of privacy enhanced by a ring of unfamiliar faces. Three, flowing alcohol is often a lubricant, sliding open windows long barred by familial pressures, guilt, connubial obligation, or propriety.

Whatever the reason, you may find yourself dining next to a soap opera you didn’t ask to see and can’t easily tune out. With luck, you'll be at a place like L’Espalier, where a highly polished waitstaff will adroitly swoop in whenever a party of Battling Bickersons threatens to spoil your dinner. But more often, especially during restaurants' increasingly crowded weekend nights, the host simply won't be able to move you to another table. That's something to remember the next time your own conversation in a restaurant turns toward more intimate subjects. Chances are your neighbors are getting an earful of your private drama, and would really rather not.