27 Really Terrible Boston Restaurant Names

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.

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

Allston Christmas
Photo courtesy of The Boston Herald

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 old media. While you still can, take advantage of professional restaurant reviews in publications like the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The Improper Bostonian, where I currently serve as professional restaurant critic and food/drinks feature writer. 

• 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).

• Consume amateur reviews warily, and be a good critic yourself. I cover this topic extensively in my essay, "11 Reasons Your Yelp Reviews Suck, and 11 Things You Can Do About It." TL;DR: Be careful whom you take dining-out advice from, and recognize that you probably know less about restaurants than you think, so try not to be a prick.

• 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.

An encomium for Icarus: a watershed fine-dining experience

“Nostalgia: it's delicate, but potent… in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.” -- Don Draper, “Mad Men” Season 1, Episode 13: “The Wheel”

I had a last meal at Icarus the other night, just before it closed for good after 31 years of operation in three different locations in Boston’s South End. When you spend as much time dining out as I do, you get used to a certain ebb and flow, a sense of the inevitability that most restaurants, even the great ones, don’t last more than a few years. You’re sad when favorites go, but you know it’s the nature of the business. But I felt a sharper-than-usual stab of nostalgia at this particular last meal, as Icarus was a restaurant that changed my life.

Everyone has life-altering moments: the inspirational lecture from a beloved college professor, the high school sports failure that quashes your Hall-of-Fame fantasies, the instant you realize you’ve found someone you could spend your life with. For me, one of those moments was my first dinner at Icarus, many years ago. My culinary experience to that point was meager: my mom’s cooking had made me like a cat, salivating at the sound of the electric can opener. Dinners in the homes of childhood friends with Azorean immigrant parents, communal meals prepared by better-traveled fraternity siblings, urban street food, and cheap Italian, Greek, and Puerto Rican joints: these circumscribed the narrow range of my food world.

That first meal at Icarus really bowled me over, upending everything I knew about fine dining. It wasn’t a posh chophouse or a kitschy upscale Italian-American joint. It sat in the South End, a neighborhood that had hip bona-fides as Boston’s gay ghetto but was still scarily crime-ridden, where the unwary were routinely robbed. Somehow I’d heard that this Icarus was terrific in a new kind of way, so I brought a date I wanted to impress with my sophistication and boldness. We’d risk getting mugged for a great meal together.

I don’t remember the girl, or what I ordered beyond the appetizer including some foie gras (itself shocking to see outside of a luxury French place), but the room certainly impressed me: Old Hollywood, Art Deco glamour. The crowd was young and urbane, gayer than I was used to. Service was attentive but markedly unstuffy. The menu took pains to describe the composition of each dish and the provenance of its ingredients. Here, new to me, was New American cuisine, with its emphasis on fresh local ingredients and globetrotting eclecticism, proffering a new kind of connoisseurship. The chef obviously loved introducing diners to novel ingredients in fresh preparations; he wasn’t showy about his classical French cooking skills, but he could bring them when needed.

That meal put the hook in me the way no swank dinner had ever done. It snapped off and discarded my simple notions of what fine dining should be about. Everything about it excited me. I peppered my server with questions: What’s that ingredient? What does this word mean? How is that prepared again? At the same time, it was relaxed, unpretentious: it expected its customers to take outlandish influences and components in stride. It was a peek into a broader, wilder world of possibilities, and it changed me. I utterly lost interest in Boston’s elite restaurants of the day – the creaky temples to haute cuisine, the sclerotic Continental places, the ostentatiously dull steak and seafood palaces, the suffocating old-boys' dining clubs. I suddenly found myself obsessed with finding restaurants as fresh, entertaining and challenging as Icarus, devoting a huge chunk of my disposable income to their pursuit. In an instant, dining out became my primary hobby.

We've come so far from Icarus’s early heyday that it’s easy to forget how radical it once was. Consider an Icarus appetizer from way back, grilled shrimp with mango/jalapeño sorbet. That would hardly raise an eyebrow today, but every atom of that dish was strange at the time: grilling (not boiling or steaming) shrimp. Sorbet – sorbet?! – of tropical fruit and burning-hot chili on your entrée: it was bizarre, fantastic, crazy! Having summoned your courage, ordered it, and taken your first bite, you were dazzled by its contradictions. East/West! Hot/cold! Sweet/fiery/salty/sour! It kicked old notions of classic European cuisine and heartland American convention in the crotch. It was sassy, it was beautiful, it was sublime. Eating it made you feel brave and cool, like being let in on some outré, slightly dangerous secret.

Times have changed mightily. Our supermarkets now stock an astonishing array of produce, meats, artisanal cheeses, and other groceries from around the world. Americans prepare Peruvian and Vietnamese and Indian food at home. The Food Network fills 24 hours a day with gourmet dining and cooking programming, making national celebrities of local chefs. A plebeian take on the creativity that Icarus and others spearheaded now shows up in casual-dining chains: you can order wasabi-crusted rare ahi with miso beurre blanc at The Cheesecake Factory, and macadamia-crusted tilapia with coconut shrimp and mango puree at the Rainforest Cafe.

In the wake of this evolution, Icarus’s menu no longer wowed -- by 2009, it had come to look sort of tame. Chasers of avant-garde novelty had long since moved on to edgier places like Clio and O Ya. The South End had become a thoroughly gentrified, mostly wealthy neighborhood with dozens of fine-dining restaurants. And Chris Douglass, originally Icarus’s chef, later its chef/owner, had decided that running an upscale restaurant was no longer the fun it once was, especially in a dire economy. Selling Icarus allowed him to focus on his newer, downmarket Ashmont Grill and Tavolo restaurants in the Dorchester neighborhood where he lives. But before Icarus fades from the local dining consciousness, I want to remind Bostonians how thrilling, how pioneering it once was. It helped catalyze an enduring interest in creative cuisine that has enormously enriched my leisure hours since.

I made that last reservation hoping to hear an echo of that first dinner, the genesis of the fixation that ultimately led to my current jobs reviewing restaurants for publications like the Boston Phoenix and Stuff Magazine. I got a little misty as I savored a last Negroni at that cozy bar, luxuriating one final time against that romantic backdrop of Deco luster and live jazz, a trio led by a melancholy baritone sax. Moving to the dining room, I noted many similarly verklempt patrons, mostly older couples, getting in their last licks. I ordered a few favorites: polenta with braised exotic mushrooms and fresh thyme, followed by crisp-grilled local bluefish with smoked mussels and tomato salsa, then a perfect lemon panna cotta with blueberry compote.

As ever, these were meticulously plated, skillfully served, fully delicious. I ate in wistful silence, slowing as the meal went on, reluctant for it to end. Finally, I paid the check, took a last stroll around to admire the gorgeous old art and lamps and statuary, then walked up the stairs and out the door, murmuring my appreciation to Douglass and the staffers who'd given me so much joy over the years. This place, I thought, really left a mark on me. So long, Icarus, and thanks for diverting me down that curious, delectable path, for which I will always be grateful, and always remember you.

There’s a riot going on in the cocktail world

John Gertsen, Misty Kalkofen, and Jackson Cannon getting down.
Photo courtesy of Jackson Cannon

There’s a renaissance in bartending going on right now, and it’s the most exciting thing to happen to sophisticated drinkers in decades. As a sometime bartender and longtime cocktail nerd, I witnessed the beginnings of this movement in Boston with the 1998 opening of The B-Side Lounge in Cambridge, a venue that pioneered a kind of scholarly, high-craft mixology I'd never seen before. I’ve been gratified to see its influence expand, but for some reason, not everyone has followed along.

Consider the estimable Robert Nadeau, the lead restaurant critic at the Boston Phoenix for over 25 years. In my view, he's the best food writer in town, an éminence grise with nonpareil range, that rare character who can write authoritatively and evocatively about everything from fine dining to authentic Chinatown holes-in-the-wall, and wine and beer, too. But at dinner the other night, when I started gushing about the recent uptick in local craft bartending, Nadeau admitted this wasn't an area he'd been following closely; he'd thought that Boston bartending was still stuck in a pink-tinged, icky-sweet vodka cocktail moment.

I happily demurred on this point, convincing Nadeau to let me drag him to a nearby craft-cocktail bar, where over a couple of beautifully made drinks originally conceived during the late-19th century Golden Age -- a period when America's best bartenders garnered the same devotion and fame that our current Food Network celebrity chefs do -- I continued to sing the virtues of Boston’s cocktail revival. I'm pretty sure he caught some of my excitement, that sense of a wild frontier worth exploring. But afterward I thought, “Nobody's more plugged into Boston’s restaurant scene than Nadeau; if he's a half-step behind me on this craft cocktail thing, then the typical bar patron must have no idea.” So I decided to offer a few tips here for curious beginners on how best to enjoy what's happening at the leading edge of Boston bartending:

• Forget “Sex and the City”. Nadeau’s take isn’t entirely unfounded: many Boston bars are still hawking specialty cocktails built on flavored vodkas, sweet liqueurs, and cream-based cordials. The sloppily-made Cosmopolitan is emblematic: sugary, pretty, potent, and profitable. These are aimed at novices, often younger drinkers who want sweetness to mask the taste of alcohol. The cool triangular glass may make the imbiber feel sophisticated, but its contents shouldn’t: a key hallmark of serious cocktails is balance -- an interplay of sweet, sour, bitter, and/or savory flavors in which no single element dominates. If you’ve ever looked at those candy-colored and –flavored drinks with disdain, or found them cloying after one or two, you’re a good candidate for the genuine old-school article.

• Expect a different kind of bartender. The pros behind the stick at craft cocktail bars are a new breed: serious and formidable, a combination of fine-dining chef, lab chemist, and history geek. They go to extreme lengths to source high-quality ingredients from all over the world, uncovering exciting and original spirits, fortified and aromatized wines, exotic liqueurs and cordials, and aromatic bitters. They use fresh fruits, fresh-squeezed juices, fresh herbs. They make their own syrups, infusions, bitters, and cocktail cherries. They assemble drinks with great precision, measuring everything. They worry about the proper manufacture, shape, and size of ice for each drink, and fret over the right serving glass. They study cocktail history, collect vintage bartending guides and barware, learn the origin stories and recipes of hundreds of classic drinks, labor to create new ones that respect the history of the craft. And they take hospitality seriously, recognizing that the ability to make a superb drink means nothing if the customer doesn’t feel welcome, valued, well cared for.

• Be assured that there’s a craft cocktail for every taste. While it might seem abstruse at first, this game is like bocce: you can have no idea what you’re doing the first time you play and still have a blast, but it gets richer and more interesting the deeper you get into it. The quickest entrée? Visit a craft cocktail bar at a time when it isn’t particularly busy, when you can have a leisurely discussion with a bartender about your likes and dislikes. These folks will find ways to gently ease you out of your well-worn rut to explore new alleys. Maybe a Manhattan variant will hook you, or a recreation of an authentic Tiki drink, or a long drink based on some obscure Italian amaro -- maybe even a carefully-conceived Boilermaker. It’s a strange new world, but the right guide can swiftly open it up for you. Don't be surprised if they try to wean you from vodka, which most craft bartenders consider too featureless a spirit, too blank a canvas, to merit inclusion in interesting cocktails.

• Understand that the scene is nascent and dynamic. The bygone B-Side fired the opening salvo in the battle to bring back 19th-century verve, skill, and sophistication to cocktail making. Talent honed there fanned out to places like Green Street, the bar at No. 9 Park, and Eastern Standard Kitchen. Subsequent waves kept rippling outward, with Golden Age inspired programs emerging at Deep Ellum, Drink (perhaps Boston's foremost incarnation of the revival), Hungry Mother, Craigie on Main, and others. Now the friendly local competition, level of serious training, growing enthusiasm and awareness among consumers, and greater availability of interesting spirits and bitters are all combining to help the scene rapidly evolve and grow. It’s like the drinking equivalent of the advent of Dada or the Lost Generation: tremendous artistic ferment and technical accomplishment effected by idiosyncratic and unique characters -- a fascinating scene.

• Look to the Internets for help. If we’re at the dawn of a boozy Nouvelle Vague, our Cahiers du cinéma is drinkboston.com, Lauren Clark’s acclaimed blog that limns the Boston cocktail landscape (and to which I occasionally contribute). This is a swell starting point, a way to get to know the key venues, star players, events, and recipes before you venture out. (It's also great fun; don't miss the hilarious comments from local bartenders and cocktail enthusiasts.) LUPEC Boston's website is full of edifying entries by members of a local classic-cocktail appreciation society comprised of lady bartenders and other women connected to the scene; it regularly sponsors terrific craft cocktail events. Cocktail Virgin Slut is another eye-opening read, a log of craft drinks sampled all over Greater Boston by four local cocktail mavens, with recipes and photos.

Like jazz music and basketball, the cocktail is a thoroughly, proudly American invention, one with a tradition that dates back 150 years. Prohibition gave it a sucker punch that has taken nearly 70 years to recover from, but it is bouncing back with a vengeance. This is not your auntie’s Raspberry Mojito – it’s more like your great-great-grandfather’s Martinez Cocktail (the historical predecessor to the Martini, made with Old Tom gin, sweet vermouth, Maraschino liqueur, and orange bitters, a drink you might love even if you profess to dislike gin.) Now just might be a great time to sneak a sip for yourself.

Chowhound versus The Phantom Gourmet

One popular sport on Chowhound.com's Food Media and News board is Phantom Gourmet bashing. For non-locals, the Phantom Gourmet is a weekly WSBK-TV program that reviews New England restaurants and retail foods. The show is owned and produced by Dave Andelman, son of Boston sports-talk radio legend Eddie Andelman, and hosted by Dave's brother Dan. The titular Phantom is their undercover reviewer, actually purportedly a team of anonymous hired mouths. Boston Chowhounds mercilessly mock the show for a few reasons:

• Its poorly-disguised appearance of shameless prostitution. The hosts routinely praise restaurants that many Chowhounds consider awful, like The Kowloon in Saugus, MA, an enormous, Vegas-cheesy purveyor of gloppy American-Chinese food: magenta spare ribs, crab Rangoon, a huge buffet. (Chowhounds sniffily prefer authentic Chinese, ideally in dumpy Chinatown joints.) The obvious conclusion is that the Phantom’s opinions are for sale: advertise on the show and you’ll get a rave. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for this; sponsors do seem to get mentioned frequently and positively.

• The hosts’ relentlessly lowbrow tastes. The Andelmans love to gush over simple, fatty comfort food in huge portions, the kind of cuisine pushed by national chains like The Cheesecake Factory. While they claim to appreciate more refined cooking, they devote a lot more airtime to casual fare like pizza, wings, and subs, and sweets like cupcakes and doughnuts. They frequently discuss frozen foods, McDonald's-level fast food, and other highly-processed convenience foods. I call their supermarket segments, “Your Guide to the HFCS Aisles”.

• The awful prose and voice-over work. The Phantom relies on a gaggle of stock clichés to describe food (see the Phantom Gourmet Drinking Game below). Many Chowhounds find Dave’s narration especially obnoxious: he reads everything to the exact same singsong tune and rhythm. If Shatner went to a cheap broadcasting school instead of training as a Shakespearean stage actor, Dave’s voice-over work might be the result.

• The chumpy production values. There’s an overlit, cut-rate look to the show (and its sponsors’ commercials, which appear to be done by the same production company). Like the copywriting, the camerawork relies on a collection of tired food-porn visual clichés, e.g., the flood of a sauce or syrup over food. (Mercifully, shots of the Andelmans stuffing their well-fed faces are more limited.)

• A dubious numerical rating system for restaurant reviews that overemphasizes factors such as parking.
  

• The Andelmans themselves. I think Dan has gotten smoother and more charming in his role as host over time. But many Chowhounds find Dave tougher to take, with his smarmy, spray-tanned, hey-ladies persona, and the fact this his on-camera segments add little critical value to the show -- he just seems to crave airtime. Third brother Mike, credited as VP of business development, puts in occasional appearances in the role of “dumbest of the Dumb Brothers”, not something the show really needs more of.

• The show's insistent pimping of for-profit Phantom Gourmet “parties”, food festivals like their annual barbecue event, some of which reportedly have been badly organized, oversold, and understocked: a swindle. (Even the better-run ones have been knocked for bringing in lame food and beverage vendors.) This underlines the impression that the brothers are hucksters, crass money-grubbers.
  

In short, the Andelmans paint big red targets on their backs, especially in the eyes of Chowhounds who by nature distrust media types and self-styled experts in favor of individual research. We find great restaurants and dishes on our own, often before the critics ever notice them, and we have a lot of range. While we may love to dissect our experiences at Chez Hoity-Toity, we also recognize that any jerk with a couple hundred bucks can find a great fine-dining meal. It takes real determination to ferret out the best cheap burger in town. The reason we think the Phantom sucks isn't his nakedly commercial outlook or cartoonish not-a-food-snob act -- it's that we usually know better alternatives, and when the Phantom misses them, we suspect it's because they're not paying the graft.

Nevertheless, to my surprise, my appreciation of the Phantom Gourmet's TV show has grown over time. Here's why:

• Whether or not you agree with its recommendations, the show promotes a love of good food and dining out, keeping one kind of lively food discussion going. And it frees me of any obligation to review popular but awful casual-dining chain outlets like the newest Olive Garden outpost: someone else on the local food-crit scene has that crappy niche covered.

• It occasionally uncovers worthy restaurants that I’ve overlooked in my role as the cheap-eats reviewer for The Boston Phoenix. I must thank the Phantom for pointing me to Jim’s Deli in Brighton, and reminding me that I really needed to review Alex’s Chimis in Jamaica Plain.

• It provides coverage on restaurants in the far-flung Boston suburbs and around New England. Few local food-media outlets demonstrate that much geographic range.

And in all candor, I have to admit real envy for the Andelmans’ ability to turn food reviewing into a lucrative enterprise. My professional restaurant-critic gig is an avocation: I still need my day job in a wholly unrelated field to pay my bills. If I could figure out a way to better monetize my food criticism while maintaining ethical integrity – something the Andelmans clearly haven't done, either – I’d gratefully pursue it. So even if the Phantom Gourmet is just a new spin on the world’s oldest profession, you have to tip your cap to the Andelmans’ success. Whoring may not be the most honorable line of work, but it’s still hard work.


THE PHANTOM GOURMET DRINKING GAME

I’m one of those Phantom Gourmet TV show viewers who finds Dave Andelman’s voice-over so grating that I usually watch with the sound muted, but you’ll have to turn it up to play this one. Take a drink every time you see:

• Dave or Dan uttering any of the following Phantom Clichés:

1. an overblown superlative: "the greatest on the planet", "world's greatest", "greatest in history", "the country's most", "world-famous" for some dish unlikely to be heard of outside of Boston
   
2. "addictive"
3. "ultimate"
4. "awesome"
5. "impossibly"
   
6. "outrageous" or "outrageously"
7. "ooey-gooey"
8. "smothered with cheese"

• A close-up of too much sauce/syrup being poured over something, a/k/a the Phantom Money Shot.
  

• A rave for a sponsor, e.g., Upper Crust, or an obviously awful restaurant (inevitably a future sponsor), e.g., Ciao Bella.

• A plug for an upcoming Phantom event, e.g., the Barbecue Beach Party. Forfeit the game if the entire show is devoted to pimping an event, as happens every few weeks.
  

• A shot of Dave's repulsive hairdo, which is so larded with greasy pomade that he appears to have cheap hair-transplant plugs over his entire scalp.

• A shot of Mike, the Zeppo of the Andelman brothers* (whose entire shtick seems to be acting brain-damaged) nodding like a bobblehead.
  

I’ll update this over time with more entries as I uncover them, but this collection is probably enough to get you hammered before the typical show is half-over. Proceed with caution.

* I must credit this awesome wisecrack to fellow Chowhound tamerlanenj.

What’s up with the odd moniker, MC Slim JB?

Pictured: an actual MC
Photo courtesy of Wikipedia

I know my pen name is obviously unconventional for a food writer, so I get asked about its origin a lot. It dates back to the days when my friends and I, very young punk-rock kids, became fans of old-school hip-hop: The Sugarhill Gang, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, Kurtis Blow, et. al. We sat around dreaming up stage names: what would your emcee (rapper) or deejay (turntablist) name be? Good for a laugh, but as I was unlikely ever to rap outside of the shower, my microphone controller name “MC Slim JB” went into a drawer alongside my spinner name, “DJ Phattee Phat Phat" or somesuch.

I dredged up the MC moniker sometime around the turn of the century for use as my alias on Chowhound.com, where most posters go by nicknames. As a frequent poster on Chowhound's Boston Board, I came to the attention of two local print-media editors: Scott Kathan of Stuff Magazine, and Eric Solomon of Boston’s Weekly Dig. Both approached me the same week with offers of freelance food writing work. Kathan, my first editor, suggested I write under my Chowhound nickname, saying “MC Slim JB has some credibility with local Chowhounds, and I’d like you to bring that Chowhound sensibility to your food writing here.” Solomon saw similar value in the name for use at The Dig.

After my food writing debut with a Stuff cover story and over 30 pieces for The Dig, I felt the name had brand equity worth preserving, and so pitched it as I went on to write for Boston Magazine (where predictably it made the editors nervous) and The Boston Phoenix (which valued its name recognition). My current gigs at The Phoenix (a cheap-eats review column) and Stuff Magazine (a fine-dining review column) are what I am now best known for, all as MC Slim JB.

So through no real plan, a jokey lark from my youth ended up as my nom de plume. As it happens, choosing an alias for Chowhound instead my real name proved a happy accident, as the anonymity it afforded has made it easier to avoid special treatment, the extra service and kitchen attention that well-known critics get. (The great Ruth Reichl outlines this phenomenon in her excellent, funny restaurant-critic memoir “Garlic and Sapphires”.)

Anonymity is a fragile thing; no critic goes unrecognized forever. But thanks to the MC Slim alias, many restaurants still don’t know me by sight, and I strive to be an unobtrusive, ordinary-Joe diner. This improves the chances that my experience will be the same as that of any diner walking in off the street, not the “as perfect as it can be” version that recognized critics tend to get. With any luck, there will always be restaurants that don’t connect the dots between that person sitting at the counter and the food writer with the odd hip-hop name.