They Demolished The Hilltop, But They Can’t Take My Memories

The Hilltop Steakhouse in brighter days
Photo courtesy of bothkindsofmusic.com

I felt a twinge of ambivalent nostalgia today at the news that The Hilltop Steakhouse in Saugus, once a legendary national landmark, was undergoing its final demolition. Countless Bostonians, myself included, recall it fondly as an early experience of Special Occasion Dining in the form of choice-grade steak and gummy lobster pie.

I'll never forget being one of the vast crowds waiting boistrously in its ever-present long lines, the bustle of its enormous dining rooms, its kitschy Old-West-themed fun, epitomized by the herd of petrified fiberglass cattle out front. “The Smith party of six for Sioux City, Sioux City”, intoned over a scratchy PA by an ancient hostess in a beehive hairdo and cat’s-eye glasses, is an ineffable memory for many of us.

We can all skip the part where Frank Giuffrida -- the founder who opened The Hilltop in 1961 and built it into one of the highest-grossing restaurants in the United States by the early 1980s -- decided eventually to sell it to new owners, who through some combination of cupidity and incompetence began shepherding it through its long, slow decline into irrelevance and eventual oblivion.

The ultimately ignominious end of The Hilltop, once so iconic it was frequently name-checked as “The Hungry Heiffer” by barfly Norm Petersen on the long-running, Boston-set network sitcom “Cheers”, got me thinking about how former restaurant powerhouses lose their luster over time. Hang around long enough, and you're often faced with the question: "Did that place really go downhill, or did my tastes simply evolve past it?"

Both are true with The Hilltop, I think. Plenty of factors beyond its control pushed it into the grave: the rise of attractively-priced national chain steakhouses, the slow fade of US Route 1 roadside culture, the increasingly sophisticated tastes of and options available to the American dining public. It's a rare restaurant I revisit after a couple of decades that: a) is still thriving, and b) still delivers the same joy I remember from my youth. The restaurant business and its customers march relentlessly onward. But not every restaurant is doomed to lose its power to satisfy old hungers, to beguile with no-longer-fashionable charms.

Some of my most treasured dining experiences of the last few years consist of revisiting one of the few restaurants from my youth that my dad could afford to take his large, dubiously-mannered brood out to dinner. Decades later, my family uniformly recalled it fondly long after we had moved away from the area, often talked about it at holidays. So in my dad’s last years of failing health, we decided to bring him back there, hired a wheelchair van to do it. Confounding our muted expectations, the place turned out to be practically preserved in amber, every bit as terrific in its humble way as we'd remembered it. It still had the same icy pitchers of Bud, superb local seafood dishes (steamers, stuffies, and clams casino, particularly), hearty Italian-American fare (notably the house special, a spicy, soupy pasta with white or red sauce and littlenecks, langoustines, shrimp and scallops), and a few Portuguese specialties. (Chouriço and peppers! Pork and clams!)

They even made Manhattans just the way my pop preferred them, with Canadian rye and one of those awful neon-red Maraschino cherries in a squat, sturdy cocktail glass. The granddaughter of the owner who once took fond care of us had taken over his role, though the ancient restaurateur still kept his hand in, tottering around to inspect the place a couple of times a week. It was an uncanny, beautiful time-trip. My family remains deeply grateful for the several occasions we got to take Dad there near the end: it meant a lot to all of us, especially him, to return to a place for which we had such deep affection long ago and yet find everything we loved about it still perfectly intact. Those kind of profound, lovely restaurant experiences are too rare.

RIP, The Hilltop. RIP, all those other restaurants and bars we once loved that the inexorable slog of time has consigned to memory. RIP, oh my papa, a man who wasn’t the most worldly of gourmands -- he adored The Hilltop, too, after all -- but knew how to recognize a joint with good, unfancy, lovingly-prepared food and drink for not too much money when he saw it, share it with his family and friends when he could, and find that to be just right, just enough.

RIP, Tom Menino, the Boston food nerd’s friend

Mayor Menino at a charity event
(Photo courtesy of Hubbub)

I can’t add much to the countless heartfelt remembrances of Boston’s late, beloved, longest-tenured mayor, Thomas M. Menino. Myself, I ran into him personally three times, always when browsing the way-marked-down suit racks at the original Filene’s Basement in Downtown Crossing, looking for bargains on my lunch hour. The third time, we exchanged more than pleasantries: I told him I was proud as a Bostonian that he had upped his sartorial game lately with better suits and ties and tailoring. He seemed genuinely pleased. I meant it: I thought he looked more dignified and statesmanlike with his newly-smart dress sense, bringing a much-needed, high-profile dash to our famously schlubby burg.

That’s my only anecdote, one of tens of thousands among a citizenry that, according to one famous survey, more than half of had met Menino personally, an astonishing statistic, and doubtless a big part of the reason he endured and thrived as a popular and effective change agent in Boston for so long.

My real point here is to encourage you to check out these two pieces by Corby Kummer, the longtime restaurant critic of Boston Magazine whom I’ve long admired for his food journalism and estimable books on the history of food. One is a video interview with The Mayor at Esperia Grill (one of my very favorite Greek restaurants in town, in part for its phenomenal pork gyros). It’s part of a promised series by Boston Univerity's BU Today that trailed Menino as he visited local, family-run restaurants out in the neighborhoods. I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of those.

The other is a piece Kummer wrote for The Atlantic that makes a convincing case for Menino’s stunning, positive influence on our food scene. I was a longtime Menino supporter, especially appreciated his pioneering advocacy of our food-truck movement, but I had scant idea of how broadly and pervasively he improved our access to quality food, benefiting Bostonians of every age and stripe.

Thanks, Corby, for shining some light on that. And thanks, Mr. Mayor, for being a fellow food nerd, but also one with an aggressive social conscience and political dedication to making good, healthy food available to every one of the citizens about whom you so obviously, deeply cared over a lifetime of public service. That ought to humble every one of us who merely writes about the pleasure in good eating. You left an indelible mark. We owe you a huge debt of gratitude.

From the Archives: "Leftovers: Testing the enduring appeal of some of Boston’s old-school dining favorites"

The now-closed and crumbling Anthony's Pier 4
Photo courtesy of Chris Rich

As some of my old published work gradually fades from view online -- in this case, as the archives of Phoenix Media's bygone publications The Boston Phoenix and Stuff Magazine become more unreliable -- I will occasionally reprint pieces here, like this old Stuff cover feature. Filed with the proposed title, "Your Fifteen Minutes Were Up Fifteen Years Ago", it recounted my visits to four Boston restaurants that had passed their peak of fame and critical acclaim, former "It Places" still coasting on ancient laurels. It is perhaps unsurprising that five years on, none of them remains in business. Sic transit gloria.

LEFTOVERS
Testing the enduring appeal of some of Boston’s old-school dining favorites
by MC Slim JB
Stuff Magazine, February 23, 2009

Ever been to dinner and wondered, "Damn, is this the hottest restaurant in Boston right now?" The signs are obvious. Weekend prime-time reservations are like gold. The bar is four-deep with walk-ins waiting an hour-plus for a table. There’s excitement in the air, in your glass, on the plate. You spot a local celebrity or two. You can’t wait to tell your friends how amazing it is. You’re at an It Place, alright.

Of course, seasoned observers know that It Places don’t stay that way for long. Most have their moment in the sun and quickly fade. The crowd that makes it their obsessive business to patronize only the freshest of the fresh has a short attention span – after a few months, it grows bored and moves on, anointing another darling du jour. Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip wrapper.

Boston’s restaurant landscape is pocked with the craters of meteoric stars that flared briefly before crashing to earth, like Excelsior, a former Back Bay hotspot that abruptly shut down last month. The current economic freefall is partly to blame: many high-end restaurants are struggling to survive the drastic shrinkage in business entertaining. But Excelsior had already lost whatever edginess made it exciting when it opened in 2004. After a white-hot debut, it faded into the Not-It twilight, becoming just another expensively-decorated restaurant with an unchallenging menu, crazily-priced wines, and a bar prowled by plump businessmen and flinty-eyed gold-diggers. Its last-fresh-sale date was a distant memory.

So how is it that certain former It Places – restaurants whose bright, shining moment passed years before Excelsior’s – manage to survive despite the imploding economy? Knowledgeable locals may dismiss them with a, "Pfah, that place started sliding ten years ago", or, "Oh, I guess we loved it as kids when our grandparents took us there", but they’re still packing in the customers. One theory is that today’s faded-It-Place patrons are naïfs who’ve been sold a bill of goods: clueless tourists following their hotel-room dining guides, business travelers steered by graft-collecting concierges, local rubes who think the Phantom Gourmet is not only funny but untainted by sponsor bribery.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Could these superannuated superstars still have something worthwhile to offer? How fun would it be to convince your food-snob friend that a restaurant she derides as a passé tourist trap is in fact a hidden gem? I decided to test this contrarian idea by revisiting a few restaurants that are still popular, despite not having been The Hotness since at least before the arrival of PlayStation 2.

Todd English neglected to pay his bills at Olives Charlestown
Photo courtesy of the Boston Globe

RESTAURANT: OLIVES
PEAK OF IT-NESS: 15 YEARS AGO

I checked in first at Olives Charlestown, which for a long time was one of the most critically-acclaimed and popular restaurants in town, but now inspires indifference from many once-ardent fans. (Olives failed to even crack the top 50 of Boston Magazine’s recent ranking of local restaurants, a composite of the reviews of Boston’s major food critics.) How did the first smash hit from chef/owner Todd English, one of the most successful and telegenic chefs ever to emerge from Boston, fall so far from the top of the heap?

When Olives debuted as a 50-seat Charlestown storefront in 1989, English was the smokingest young chef on the scene. His take on rustic Italian cooking was creative, fresh, and full of bold, concentrated flavors. (Some critics carped at "too many tastes on the plate", but I disagreed, adoring his dense, fiercely-flavored compositions.) With a no-reservations policy, Olives had folks lining the sidewalk before the doors opened each night; two-hour waits for tables were common. It was a brilliant, deserved success.

English got progressively more ambitious, moving Olives to a larger location and opening his first Figs pizzeria. He added Kingfish Hall and Bonfire, more Olives and Figs outlets, and eventually another dozen restaurants around the world, attaining bona fide celebrity-chef stature. But running an empire left English with little time to actually cook at his flagship restaurant; Olives’ quality suffered under the stewardship of various lieutenants.

Twenty years on, Olives still draws crowds, though it now takes reservations. A recent visit revealed a crumbling physical plant (men’s-room partitions falling off the walls) and indifferent bartenders decanting overly-sweet $11 cocktails into unchilled glasses. One appetizer was a delightful echo of Olives’ glory days: a luxurious, truffle-flecked savory flan ($15) topped with fine wild mushrooms, foie gras and a wondrously intense reduction of veal stock. Entrees were pretty fine, too, like a slow-smoked lamb shank ($25) atop a rich root-vegetable mash, and a Flintstones-esque wood-grilled pork chop ($30) so moist it must have been brined, though it arrived overdone. But an appetizer of tagliatelli Bolognese ($11) was a major misfire: overcooked fresh pasta drowning in truffle butter and sporting a crown of carmine ragú crudely overseasoned with cinnamon. It was terrible in concept and execution, a dish that would never have been served had The Man Himself been in the kitchen.

Other aberrations cropped up, too, like a neighboring couple’s side order, a football-sized mound of deep-fried onion strings ($8). This seemed better suited to a casual-dining chain like the nearby Ninety-Nine than the restaurant where English won two James Beard awards. Service was sweet and mostly attentive if a bit callow, but at $200 including a modest bottle of wine, dinner for two was a distinctly uneven, unsatisfying experience. For those of us who remember how perfectly delicious Olives was in the days before English became a superstar, when he was at the stove every night, it’s a cautionary tale on the perils of expansion. Maybe Gordon Hamersley, a chef/owner of lesser fame and fortune whose single, far-more-consistent restaurant still makes the top ten lists, is onto something after all.
Olives, 10 City Sq., Charlestown, 617-242-1999

Harbor view of the forlorn Anthony's Pier 4
Photo courtesy of Chris Rich

RESTAURANT: ANTHONY’S PIER 4
PEAK OF IT-NESS: 30 YEARS AGO

I moved on to Anthony’s Pier 4, which my dad, back when he was a high-flying salesman, favored for celebrating his big business deals. Anthony’s was the reigning king of Boston fine dining in the 1970s, an oversized temple to Americanized Continental cuisine and fancy New England seafood whose football-field-sized parking lot was always full. Pretty harbor views, one of the city’s biggest and best wine lists, the bustle of a cavernous dining room, and an always-throbbing bar scene made it the preferred haunt of the city’s movers and shakers. For a long while, it was the It Place for the thousands of Bostonians who would never (or could never) set foot in the stuffy French restaurants and Yankee private clubs that otherwise dominated fine dining at the time.

Thirty years later, Anthony’s remains pretty much a fly in amber, exactly what it was in its heyday. Formally-clad waiters still wheel out trolleys laden with lobster bisque ($11.95), New England clam chowder ($6.95), and bouillabaisse ($12.95). The deluxe raw bar platter ($49.95) is a showy pile of local raw oysters, cherrystones, littlenecks, shrimp, mussels and lobster on a mountain of crushed ice. Popular entrees include scrod ($24.95), baked stuffed shrimp ($27.95), grilled swordfish ($27.95), a pound-and-a-quarter boiled lobster ($32.95), and prime rib ($31.95). The a la carte menu boasts old-school sides like char-broiled onions and ratatouille Provençale (both $7.95). You can even order a proper Grand Marnier soufflé ($9.95).

If all this sounds like a short step up from the dinner buffet on a mid-market cruise ship, you’re not far off. Anthony’s crowds might be the oldest in town; its tables are spaced widely enough to accommodate walkers. Every other party seems to be celebrating some golden anniversary or diamond birthday. Boston’s dining scene has become a UN of global influences, but you’d never know it here, aside from a lonely sashimi platter ($19.95). We recently took my now-wheelchair-bound dad there, and you could see him reliving his glory days, when his expense account would let him order fine French wines and that giant raw-bar platter for his clients, then grandly commandeer the check. At Anthony’s, it’s still 1979 in the kitchen, and that’s exactly how its nostalgic, snowy-haired customers like it.
Anthony’s Pier 4, 140 Northern Blvd., Boston, 617-482-6262

The bygone Locke-Ober Room in its goldenly glowing glory days
Photo courtesy of The Hub's Metropolis

RESTAURANT: LOCKE-OBER
PEAK OF IT-NESS: 45 YEARS AGO

Next I visited Locke-Ober, which opened in 1875 as the kind of hushed, formal, mahogany-and-old-mirror-lined room then favored by our dwindling Brahmin class. You’ve seen them around town, those gaunt old WASPs with good Beacon Hill addresses and family fortunes dating to the 17th century. One family at a nearby table was prototypical: mom in the Hermes scarf, Chanel suit, and helmet of white hair resembled an 80s-vintage Barbara Bush, while her son, fortyish in brown tweeds and a hand-tied bow tie, probably played squash with Tucker Carlson when they prepped at St. George’s.

Locke-Ober’s peak of national fame occurred during the presidency of John F. Kennedy (the Hope and Change candidate of 1960), whose family loved the joint precisely because as arrivistes they coveted its aristocratic sheen. In a token of his clan’s belated acceptance by the Palm Beach set, the superb lobster stew ($18) is now named after JFK. But by the 1990s, this grande dame was distinctly threadbare: I used to worry that the ceiling paint might flake off into my chowder. The 19th-century menu looked like a worn relic, too. Bostonians were flocking to nouvelle French and New American cuisine: Dover sole Meunière and Wiener Schnitzel a la Holstein seemed about as hip as Burt Parks singing Auld Lang Syne.

Then along came Lydia Shire, one of Boston’s most original and beloved chefs, who decided to rescue Locke-Ober and renew its former luster. With a deep-pocketed partner, she bought it in 2001, restored the space’s fin-de-siècle elegance, and subtly refreshed the menu in her signature style, adding bits of offal here, unusual vegetables there, and Mediterranean accents throughout. The old formal flourishes – rolls served on silver salvers, individual salt-cellars, the flattering glow of Art Nouveau sconces – remained. (One regrettable holdover is the 1970s-vintage bartending; if any place ought to catch up to the current revival of Golden Age cocktail craft, it’s Locke-Ober’s handsome little bar.)

Despite the recent, much-buzzed-about suspension of lunch service -- a terrifying omen for local restaurants -- Locke-Ober continues to host big parties of trophy-wine-swilling Financial District types celebrating whatever remaining deals they’re still winning. One nearby table full of navy and gray suits overflowed with slurred toasts to Mammon, racks of lamb ($42), prime strip steaks ($44), and gargantuan lobster Savannahs ($62). I ordered one of those old-school classics that isn’t much seen anymore, a perfectly-tender, barely-seared calf’s liver ($28) with two beautiful, oversized onion rings, bacon, carefully fried parsley, and (thanks to Shire), a balsamic/fig reduction loaded with toasted garlic.

My server, in his traditional vest, bowtie and apron, was a steely, dignified old pro who monitored his tables like a hawk, swooping in with finesse to fulfill his customers’ whims, something he’s been doing here for thirty years. I finished with baked Alaska ($11), another bygone classic: a spiky, flambéed snowball of meringue encasing a thin layer of cake with strawberry and vanilla ice cream, flanked by strawberry sauce and fresh berries. Grandma would surely have oohed at that one.

So on reflection, maybe Locke-Ober doesn’t belong on this list. Its resuscitation under the loving eye of a certified celebrity chef brought it some brief attention from trend-scenting exurban lemmings. But mainly it resists the strongest tides of modernity, holding out as the last dining room in town where patrons in sneakers or jeans are firmly refused a table. Locke-Ober abides more as an indispensable fixture, a Mecca to which faithful habitués of the dining scene should make at least one hajj. Not ever really an It Place, I hope it remains as an Always There Place.
Locke-Ober, 3 Winter Pl., Boston, 617-542-1340

Seasons, once a great incubator of chef talent, disappeared and nobody noticed
Photo courtesy of the Boston Business Journal

RESTAURANT: SEASONS
PEAK OF IT-NESS: 25 YEARS AGO

My last stop was Seasons at the Millennium Bostonian Hotel, which in the early 1980s was an essential station on the Boston food-geek circuit. The owners had a knack for hiring immensely talented, fast-rising chefs to execute the restaurant’s innovative New American menu; many left to attain local and national stardom on their own. Seasons launched the independent careers of Jasper White, Lydia Shire, Jody Adams, Gordon Hamersley, Scott Hebert, Peter McCarthy, Tony Ambrose, and many others.

As I walked up to the hotel, I thought, "Nobody talks about Seasons anymore, but maybe it’s hiding the next Tony Maws or Barry Maiden. Hmm, where did the entrance go?" The doorman ruefully informed me that Seasons had closed nine months ago, converted into a ballroom. I felt a pang: a wellspring of Boston’s culinary renaissance had vanished, unremarked and unlamented. I mentally lit a candle for Seasons, wondering how a former It Place could fade away with most of us not even noticing.

That experience left me hoping that restaurateurs remember to cherish their regulars, the folks who come in on a Tuesday night when it’s snowing, and will still be there when the trend-moths have fluttered along to the newest sparkly light in town. And I reminded myself that it’s never good as a diner to get too wrapped up in the pursuit of novelty – especially when the pressures of the economy now threaten to put many worthy restaurants out of business. While you’re out scrambling for a table at this week’s Miss Thing, you’re neglecting a solid old standby in your back yard that may be dying. Guess which one you’ll miss more if they both disappear?

The Stuff Magazine 2011 Dining Awards

[Photograph by Conor Doherty]

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

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

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

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

Enjoy!

Defending Boston's Restaurant Scene (Part 1)

[Photograph by MC Slim JB]

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

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

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

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

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

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

• A solid assortment of regional French cuisines.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

** This is pure pandering to my readers.

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

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

The Stuff Magazine 2010 Dining Awards

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

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

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

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

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

Photo courtesy of desktopwallpapers4.me

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

The reasons this is a terrible practice are obvious:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 Critical Website Mistakes That Boston Restaurants Make

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With that said:

+ (PLUS) SIGNS

English—or Rather the Lack Thereof

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

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

Wheels, Tents and Tunes

Signage—or Rather the Lack Thereof [an exception to my "no logos" rule—Denv.]

Speaking of signs good and bad, a complete lack of signage is often a good sign. Las Tortugas on Alameda just recently added a sign after years without. This is one of the most authentic torta experiences you will have outside of Mexico. A restaurant not only surviving but flourishing without any kind of advertising can only mean good things. Places like these grow by word of mouth. They have no websites, emails or, at times, even traceable phone numbers. If you are lucky enough to find one, then it is likely that you have stumbled upon something special. Likewise, signs you can't understand are often good.—DOAS

Attitude—or the Lack Thereof
Many restaurants feel the need to cater to every whiny need of its customers at any cost. Others, in the tradition of the Soup Nazi, post a list of rules that owners expect their customers to follow. These places know their food is good. If you are worried about pissing off the restaurant owners or cook, it must be good. When dining at Tom’s Diner in Denver, read the rules and don’t be a pain in the ass. The result? Some of the best Southern fare you can hope for in Denver.—DOAS

A warm, sincere-sounding greeting from the hostess stand immediately upon entering. A flustered, supercilious, or inattentive maître d' is a red flag.—MCSJB
[See: Wild Bangkok—Denv.]

A chef-owned place that closes when the chef goes on holiday (example: Trattoria Toscana near Fenway). The level of professional pride reflected in the implied motto, “If I'm not here cooking, it's not my food,” is generally encouraging.—MCSJB

Tableware—or the Lack Thereof
Environmental awareness has not yet expanded to encompass all restaurants equally. So if you are comfortable enlarging your carbon footprint from time to time in exchange for some good food, then an unfortunate good sign is often paper plates, plastic forks and Styrofoam cups (big ones).

Meanwhile, napkins are fluff. In my own home, napkins are for when guests like parents come over. Paper towels are absorbent and good for dabbing the corners of your mouth, wiping up big saucy spills from the table and sopping up the grease you can't lick off your fingers. A roll of paper towels on each table is a solid sign of good food. The opposite of the paper towel is ultra-thin, almost transparent tissue-paper napkins. I have not seen a lot of these in the States, but in many countries this is the standard. If you grab for a napkin, then need to grab four more to sop up a pea-sized spill, you have chosen well.

[See: Tin Star Cafe Donut Haus—DOAS]

Roots, Part 1: Where Everybody Looks the Same [to the tune of the "Cheers" theme]

Not in the way that all white people look the same, but as in a staff that shares the same genetic makeup. Is sis hosting while bro serves and mom barks orders from the kitchen? Stay. It's going to be good.—DOAS

Son out front, mom in the back. I've run into this setup in many tiny, traditional restaurants, and the results are often wonderful.—MCSJB
[See: Lao Wang Noodle House—Denv.]

Roots, Part 2
A cliché that happens to be true: a crowd of ex-pats in a restaurant serving their homeland's cuisine, e.g., many Thai immigrants dining in a Thai restaurant. Somewhere there must be throngs of Cantonese speakers with lousy taste—the Chinese equivalent of Chili's fans—so their presence at a Hong Kong–style live-tank seafood restaurant shouldn't impress me. But I haven't run into them yet.—MCSJB
[See: Star Kitchen—Denv.]

Places with wheels always get my attention. There is something about an operation that has the potential to be portable that tickles my tastebuds. In Denver, many of my favorite meals come from food carts or out of taco trucks, running the range from Gastro Cart’s gourmet goodies to my favorite hidden loncheras (luncheonettes) in Aurora. Everything tastes better when it comes from a vehicle parked on a street corner or empty lot. As the food truck and cart boom grows in Denver this spring and summer, this might change, but for now, it's a great place to start.

Or: There is a big white canopy tent in a parking lot next to a restaurant. Under that tent is a hunk of red stacked pork loins roasting on a spit with open flame. There are juices dripping off the meat. You probably want to go there.

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

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

– (MINUS) SIGNS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dining for Dummies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIGNS THAT PEOPLE BELIEVE TO BE REVEALING BUT AREN'T

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

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

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

No customers. Plenty of wonderful restaurants, e.g., East Boston's lamented Oran Cafe, never find a following, thanks to a bad location (rough neighborhood, hard to reach, no parking/public transit nearby, unpromising setting like a gas station), seedy physical plant, inept or nonexistent marketing, and/or sheer bad luck. Or maybe it's just really, really new. You may be the first to discover it, to truly appreciate and evangelize it.

Roots, Part 4
A match between the nationality of the chef and the restaurant's cuisine. There are excellent Japanese restaurants with Chinese chefs, swell Cajun restaurants with Vietnamese chefs, fine French restaurants with American chefs, fine molecular chefs who aren't from Mars. Conversely, many bad Italian restaurants brag about their Italian-native chefs. Non importa, amico mio.

Addendum: Corny Décor. Red-and-white checkered tablecloths in a trattoria, serapes and sombreros in a taqueria, golden dragons galore in a dim sum palace: you’d think such clichés would amount to gigantic red flags, proving the equivalent of foot-tall mounds of Alfredo, stale tri-colored chips with neon kway-soh dip and sweet and sour mystery meat. But for some reason, they don’t, at least not often enough to judge by.—Denv.