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.

A roundup of extraordinary Boston and New England dishes

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

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

TOP 5 LIST #1:

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

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

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

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

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


TOP 5 LIST #2

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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