My Responses to Eater Boston's 2016 Year-End Survey of Local Food Writers

I don't pen many original essays for this blog: it mainly exists as a place for people to find links to my professionally-published restaurant reviews, food/drink features, and occasional interviews by other outlets. Researching and writing my biweekly reviews for The Improper Bostonian (on top of a day job in an unrelated field) doesn't leave me much spare time to write here. But I can offer up an easy one: reprinting my contribution to Eater Boston's annual survey of local food writers, where we recount our past year of dining and drinking all over Greater Boston -- our favorite new places, reliable old standbys, saddest closings, etc. -- and look ahead to trends in the New Year.

So here is my 2016 year in review with some thoughts on what's ahead in 2017. Thanks as always to Eater Boston for including me in this feature every year, and to my fellow Boston food-geek writers for their ongoing insightful, valuable and entertaining work. I encourage you to read their funny, thoughtful year-end responses in the "Year in Eater" story stream here, too.

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What were the top restaurant newcomers of 2016?

For me, as I imagine for many of us, 2016 was a carbuncle of a year. A world on fire, the passing of many beloved cultural icons, the election, watching family members and friends die or struggle with heartbreak, illness or unemployment: all prompted me to seek solace in good food and drink. That made the past twelve or so months’ welter of great openings in Boston an estimable, necessary salve.

Those newcomers ranged from fantastic watering holes with excellent drinks and food (Casa Verde, The Automatic, Ruka), sublime regional Italians (SRV, Fat Hen, Bar Mezzana), a welcome Greek renaissance (Kava, Brendan Pelley in his short-term perch at Wink & Nod and now at Doretta), dazzling Asian entrants (BLR by Shojo, Sichuan Gourmet Burlington, Little Big Diner, Tiger Mama, the reinvented UNI, Ganko Ittetsu Ramen, Pabu), a couple of lovely wine bars (The Maiden, haley.henry with its novel focus on luxury tinned seafood), superb pizza makers (the Stoked brick-and-mortar, Area Four South End, Ciao! in Chelsea, Arlington’s Commune Kitchen), and worthy new spots from familiar and upcoming local stars (Waypoint, Juliet, Little Donkey, Branch Line).

But I took special pleasure in the opening of Mamaleh’s, a smashing traditional Jewish deli from the team behind State Park. Boston hasn’t had exceptional, housemade Ashkenazi soul food in living memory: its revival was painfully overdue. Dining here was one of the best balms I found for 2016’s many surreal anxieties and lacerations of the spirit. I don’t doubt I’ll find more reasons to seek its hearty, delectable comforts in 2017.

What were your top restaurant standbys of 2016?

I spend so many nights researching my restaurant reviews for The Improper that I can’t revisit already-beloved places nearly enough. But I still hit a few favorites on the regular:

•  Erbaluce still kills it Every Single Frickin’ Time with its singular Piemontese cuisine and rare wines. Were I forced at gunpoint to choose one favorite fine-dining restaurant in Boston, this would be it.
• You could routinely find me at Chinatown’s Peach Farm, enjoying its unfussy, splendid Hong Kong style live-tank seafood and Cantonese dishes, especially very late at night.
•  Yvonne’s served as a versatile stop all year to take visiting out-of-towners to gawp at its cheeky, glamorous atmosphere, enjoy the top-tier cocktails, and share a celebratory meal.
• Hojoko, with its hip, raucous rock-bar ambiance, long menu of upscale-izakaya fare, and wicked cocktails (notably authentic Tiki drinks) became part of my standard pre- and post-Fenway rotation.
•  Drink in Fort Point and The Hawthorne in Kenmore Square aren’t just pinnacles of Boston’s craft cocktail movement, perhaps my favorite dining-out trend of the last 20 years: they serve as crucial engines of its growth as they train and disgorge new generations of talent year in and year out. Both understand the essential equality of hospitality and technical chops in creating a nonpareil drinking experience.
• Bar Mezzana lured me back often for its amazing crudos, crostini, pastas, sleek atmosphere, warm hospitality, and outstanding cocktails and wines.
• The new Sichuan Gourmet near the Burlington Mall is maybe the best of the mini-chain’s outposts of numbingly spicy, invigorating traditional Sichuan cuisine. It’s even better with a crowd.
• And as ever, there’s my longtime local, J.J. Foley’s Café in the South End, presided over by publican supreme Jerry Foley, bolstered by his many strong sons (most ubiquitously his eldest, GM Mike Foley), a sweet waitstaff, and the kind of modest Irish and American bar fare that perfectly suits watching a big game, playing pub trivia, or idling away a few hours with friends from the neighborhood. It’s the textbook incarnation of a great and ancient Boston tavern. 

What was the biggest dining surprise of 2016?

I suppose I could say it was the spectacle of once-timid friends gobbling down the octopus that appeared on countless menus this year, but really it was the continued stamina of Greater Boston’s restaurant expansion: so many big new openings that I now fret about the ability of the economy and labor pool to support. I was more hopeful than some of my peers in this roundup last December about the prospect of a bubble, but there are ominous portents of it now. (Crap: Emma’s Pizza, Spoke Wine Bar? Really? Eff you, 2016. Eff you to hell.)

What was the saddest closure of 2016?

The food was nothing special, but I was truly saddened by the closing of Johnny D’s, an intimate venue for many memorable shows over the years -- my standouts include The English Beat and multiple Sleepy LaBeef gigs. Among proper restaurants, I will most long for the quirkily-inventive, frequently mind-blowing, umami-overloaded Italianate cuisine of mercurial chef Tim Maslow at Ribelle. Glad he’s still around, cooking at Tiger Mama, but I kinda wish he’d never gone uptown after his reinvention of Strip-T’s.

What was your most disappointing meal of 2016?

I’m a fan of the original Frank Pepe Pizzeria Napoletana in New Haven, made pilgrimages there over the years for its justly-storied clam pies. That magic has not made the trip up I-95 to their new outlet in a Chestnut Hill mall. All of the hassle, none of the charm, not nearly enough of the flavor.

What was your best restaurant meal of 2016?

I was delighted to uncover fantastic traditional Mexican tacos at the itty-bitty, humble Rincon Mexicano in East Somerville: that chef from the D.F. has it going on. But the red-letter-day dinner was an epic debauch at Little Donkey, Jamie Bissonnette and Ken Oringer’s terrific globe-trotting small plates joint in Central Square. A few cocktails, 17 dishes highlighted by an awesome special of live uni with flatbread, a couple of bottles of wine, all the desserts. (I won’t cop to the party size, but will admit to later hearing that even the staff was gobsmacked by our horrific excess.) The evening ended with us waddling over to Trina’s for some desperately needed Fernet-Brancas. I generally eat with more restraint, or I’d risk serious health issues, but for some reason – maybe my scarily food-nerdy companions, the elbow room that feels liberating after the tight quarters of Toro and Coppa, the fabulousness of the food and drinks – we really went off the rails that night. I can’t blame the review-research imperative every time.

What are your headline predictions for 2017?

Well-ridden hobbyhorses of mine, but these issues continue to worry and frighten me:

• 2017 will be another year where our chances at slowing climate change -- and heading off the resulting catastrophic consequences for our food chain -- continue to dwindle.
•  Invasive corporate chains will keep surging at the expense of far better locally-owned establishments. (I for one will not be abandoning my favorite local Italian purveyors and restaurants to patronize Eataly Boston.)
•  We will continue to fail to deal with how abusive to restaurant industry workers our current wage practices and transportation systems are. That isn’t just awful for them: when it results in good indies fighting and sometimes failing to survive, it’s bad for you and me.

Sum up the 2016 restaurant world in one word.

Resource-constrained. Our locally-owned restaurants battled anew in 2016 to attract talent both front and back of house against competition from deep-pocketed nationals: looking at you again, Eataly, and every chain in the godforsaken Seaport. And now I shudder to think of the impact of proposed draconian new immigration policies on our kitchen staffs. Said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: support your local independents -- maybe be willing to pay a little more so they can compensate quality staffers fairly -- if you don’t want Boston’s dining scene to become dull and middlebrow, indistinguishable from every less interesting, culturally-diverse city in the USA. Do your job.

Friends of Eater Boston 2014 Year-End Questions: My Responses, Plus Some Honorable Mentions

Illustration courtesy of Eater Boston

Eater Boston, the local affiliate of the national Eater network of city-based blogs covering restaurants, bars and nightlife, is essential reading for local food dorks. Editor Rachel Leah Blumenthal and a cast of contributors cover the length and breadth of the Boston dining and drinking waterfront with impressive depth and welcome sly humor. I've participated in a few of these year-end retrospectives of and looks ahead at the Boston scene, featuring a small group of local professional food and drink feature writers, restaurant critics and bloggers. It's great fun, and I'm always honored to be included. I'm collecting my answers here, including some Honorable Mentions that didn't make it into the Eater features. Check out the whole motley group's responses as well as Eater Boston's other 2014-in-review coverage here.

Eater Boston: What were your top restaurant standbys of 2014? 

MC Slim JB: Friends envy me my restaurant-reviewing gig, not understanding that continually having to research the next new place crimps the time I have to devote to established places I already know and love. Here are a few I managed to get back to repeatedly in spite of that:

• Café Porto Bello, City Point, the kind of modest, old-school, red-sauce Italian place your grandparents would love, with a welcome bit of Old Southie sass in the service. Pro tip: upgrade to the house-made pasta.

• J.J. Foley’s Café in the South End, a nonpareil family-run Irish-American tavern with a palpable hundred-plus years of history. Puts the city’s countless dull fake-Irish bars to shame and disgrace.

• The Franklin Southie, a more modern neighborhood joint with a genuinely loveable bartending crew (one example here). I mourn its imminent passing, though I’m hopeful for its successor, Moonshine 152, from first-time chef/owner Asia Mei. Her cooking at Sam’s at Louis Boston was about the only thing I’ve ever liked about the Seaport.

• Gene’s Chinese Flatbread, DTX and Woburn Center, lonely local outposts of Shaanxi cuisine, with its emphasis on hearty wheat-based foods like astonishing hand-pulled noodles and mind-blowing accents of garlic, chilies and Sichuan peppercorns. Soulful, satisfying and cheap: a food nerd’s dream.

• Dumpling Café, Chinatown. I’d go just for the best soup dumplings in Greater Boston, but its long menu of Taiwanese fare is consistently rewarding and a great bargain.

• Moody’s Delicatessen, Waltham. The one new place on my list. It plugs a giant hole in our scene with astonishing Jewish deli meats like brilliant pastrami and corned beef, but offers so much more, drawing on French, Italian, Spanish, German and other notable traditions of cold cuts, sausages, and pâtés. If the Food Dork Gods are just, Moody’s expanded wholesale operation will mean you can buy their singular artisanry from your local market soon.

• The Hawthorne, Kenmore Square. Absolutely brilliant craft bartending on both the technical and hospitality sides of the coin, in a lovely, dimly-lit, hiding-in-plain-sight setting. The short menu of bar snacks is very nice, too. Long, slow kowtow to its sublimely talented bar manager Katie Emmerson (whom I called Boston's best bartender in this year's Boston's Best issue of The Improper Bostonian), who decamped to L.A. late this year.

EB: What were the top restaurant newcomers of 2014?

MCSJB: My favorite new places included:

• Alden & Harlow. Folks who have been reading me for a decade know I’ve long tried to bring attention to the assiduous work of Michael Scelfo, who elevated a succession of other owners’ restaurants out of deserved obscurity. His first place of his own got my Best New Restaurant of the Year nod in The Improper Bostonian back in July, and I stand by that in December, despite some stiff competition. A humble, dedicated craftsman is finally getting his due. About effing time.

• Sarma, which I know opened in late 2013 but I was slow to get to, so please indulge me. Running delectably around the Mediterranean, with some emphasis on one of my favorite underrated-by-Americans cuisines (Turkish), this ultra-cool Somerville place makes every sequence of small plates a memorable night out. Vik Hegde’s terrific bar program is another huge plus. One protracted, 20-plate, overstuffed January evening there – did we really say yes to four helpings of the Turkish-style fried chicken thighs with yogurt remoulade? -- was a close second on Single Best Meal of 2014. 

• La Brasa. Beautiful, eclectic, inventive food, much of it kissed by wood fire and smoke, with another fine bar program. I don’t live in Somerville, but places like this and Sarma make me wish I did.

• Thao Ngoc. Humble room, incredible Vietnamese fare from a huge menu, and prices so low it feels like theft. Don’t call yourself a food geek if you haven’t been here.

• Moody’s. I’m no longer bitching about the lack of a proper delicatessen in Boston, even if it means I have to extend my definition of Boston to Waltham. Feast on one of their shockingly good sandwiches on premise if you can, but regardless, don’t leave without an armful of sausages, charcuterie and salumi. No deli in my experience this side of New York or Montreal holds a candle to it.

EB: Describe 2014 in one word.

MCSJB: Smoky! The flavors of wood fire and smoke beguiled me at dozens of places, including Alden & Harlow, La Brasa, Pastoral, Viale, River Bar, the Stoked truck (with its genius wood-fired Neapolitan pizza oven on wheels), Row 34, and many others.

EB: What was the best dining neighborhood in 2014? 

MCSJB: I say it every year: Allston. The most diverse concentration of affordable restaurants serving amazing traditional cuisines from all over the globe. I’m hopeful it can sustain more grownup, Western-tradition restaurants like the fine new Glenville Stops, too easily overlooked in its location on an obscure side street. 

EB: What was the biggest dining surprise of 2014?

MCSJB: I was gobsmacked that in the age of Yelp and Instagram I could still uncover a new restaurant that had been open for eight months yet was entirely overlooked by the local press and barely acknowledged by amateur reviewers: Thao Ngoc, a homey Vietnamese place in Fields Corner. One of my favorite new restaurants of 2014: a place to bring six friends, feast like a king, and collect $20 apiece to cover the check, including a fat tip. I’m truly grateful that The Improper occasionally lets me review more modest places like this in sorely under-reported neighborhoods like Dorchester.

EB: What was your single best meal in 2014?

MCSJB: A tasting menu at Giulia in Cambridge. Gorgeous, ravishing yet subtle from start to finish, notably in the house-made pastas that were rolled out earlier in the day on the very table at which we dined. Just a fantastic, traditionally-centered, chef-owned Italian indie, with evident love and long-honed finesse in the cooking. Mike Pagliarini is another original who toiled for years in service to more-famous owners (I long admired his work running Michael Schlow’s Via Matta) that I’m really gratified got the chance to helm his own place.

EB: What was the biggest restaurant grievance of 2014?

MCSJB: The proliferation of popular but mediocre chain restaurants in tourist neighborhoods like the Seaport, which is inflicting a line cook and server shortage on far worthier independent restaurants around town. I cringe at the advantages that deep-pocketed nationals have over home-grown talent. Every dink city in the US has those chains; the quality of Boston’s currently-fantastic scene depends on its indies. Support them, I beg you.

EB: What are your headline predictions for 2015?

MCSJB: I'm not a prognosticator, but I'll offer a few hopes for the new year:

• I’m going to lean hopeful, pray that the recovering economy will support a worrisome expansion of restaurant seats in the city, and expect that new-broom Mayor Marty Walsh, with his appointment of an all-new Boston Licensing Board and purported commitment to the late, beloved Tom Menino’s ideals about providing access to better food for all Bostonians, will wreak some positive changes on our dining scene. We need that greenmarket, for starters, Mr. Mayor. 

• Against a welter of evidence to the contrary, I hope that Uber will retire the “Be Evil” plaque that seems to currently inspire its executives, and become a more ethical thorn in the side of our corrupt, deplorable taxi system. Affordable ride-sharing alternatives are not just a boon to customers, but to the many restaurant employees who work past the T’s closing.

• I firmly expect that the legacy of the great John Gertsen, whom I literally wept to see leave Drink for San Francisco this year, and still-here peers like Jackson Cannon of Eastern Standard, Row 34 and The Hawthorne – specifically, their indispensable training of successive waves of highly-skilled craft bartenders -- will continue to be felt in the presence of fine cocktail, wine and beer programs in bars and restaurants all over the city. The next time you raise a glass here with something really good in it, remember how uncommon that was ten years ago, and thank those folks and their gifted lieutenants.

My honorable mentions that did not make their way into Eater Boston's year-end questions:

• Shojo, already a unique venue for Chinatown with its hip atmosphere and superb cocktail program, getting a serious kitchen upgrade with Mark O’Leary’s smashing, street-food-driven cookery. The most memorable, delicious iteration of the wildly-overblown burger trend I had in 2014 was his witty, mantou-based gloss on a McDonald’s Big Mac. 

• Chef Chang’s on Back Bay, which offers Bostonians rare glimpses of the foods of Henan, Shaanxi and Xinjiang, among other more familiar regions of China. I’m hopeful that this represents growing local desire to visit the lesser-known corners of the world’s greatest collections of regional cuisines, but at the very least, it’s a huge addition to the Back Bay, a neighborhood that has long been a food-nerd desert.

• Erbaluce, to my mind the single most consistently soul-satisfying Italian restaurant in Boston, if for nothing else than the way that chef/owner Charles Draghi quietly makes the case for sustainable seafood. One sure way to get people eating less-familiar species is to present them so deliciously that you don’t necessarily notice that the chef’s sourcing choices are better for the health of our scarily-overtaxed and increasingly global-warming-damaged fisheries. Not hurting the cause: Draghi’s impeccable grounding in Northern Italian tradition, nor partner Joan Johnson’s heartfelt hospitality and extraordinary, idiosyncratic Italian wine list.

• Viale, for hitting the ground running with exceptional food, drink and service, admirably filling some very big shoes: the former home of the long-running, beloved Rendezvous in Central Square. Having a team of old pros at the wheel doesn’t guarantee that you will avoid some ugly shakedown-cruise bumps, but Viale crushed it from about Week Two on. 

Happy 2015: good eating and drinking in the coming year!

CSI Boston – Restaurant Edition: Who Killed Rocca?

A lot of Bostonians woke up New Year’s Day to learn that Rocca Kitchen & Bar, an upscale, modern Italian restaurant in Boston's South End, had closed. (I got wind of it on New Years' Eve from parties connected with the restaurant, confirmed it the next morning, and broke the news at 8am on Chowhound.) Many expressed shock: wasn’t Rocca doing well? Hadn’t chef Tiffani Faison (brought aboard in March 2010) reinvigorated the menu, garnered enthusiastic re-reviews in the Boston Globe and Boston Magazine, attracted plenty of press (in part with her celebrity from Bravo's Top Chef)? What the heck happened?

It’s said that success has many fathers while failure is an orphan. I expect many conflicting stories to trickle out in the coming weeks, laying blame for Rocca’s closing variously on troubled management, the recession, the fickleness of customers, bad weather, crossed stars. As someone who lives nearby, roots for local businesses to succeed, and gave Rocca many chances over its three years and eight months of life, I have my own particular theory. Let’s consider the evidence:

• Food. I considered Faison’s food an improvement over her predecessor, and particularly admired her deft, creative hand with seafood: I will fondly remember a dish of squid-ink strozzapreti with shrimp and grilled-escarole pesto. But opening chef Tom Fosnot was no slouch either, and some of his dishes, like corzetti with rabbit ragù, were also extraordinary. I found it refreshing to see a few nods to the cuisine of Liguria (like a hand-rolled trofie with hand-mortared pesto), a region of Italy that gets short shrift in the US, especially hereabout. On the whole, I really liked the food.

• Location. Rocca had a great spot in a corner of the South End that had become gentrified with neighboring luxury condos and helped by the success of nearby restaurants and pubs like Gaslight Brasserie du Coin, Myers + Chang, Oishii Boston, and J.J. Foley’s Cafe. Locals no longer considered that stretch of Harrison Avenue dangerous to walk around at night, and visitors could take advantage of free parking, a rare amenity in the South End.

• Ambience. I considered the upstairs dining room and bar a bit cramped and more than a little tacky, with shifting-colors LED lighting that was about ten years too late for hipness. But the first-floor bar and lounge was beautiful, airy and inviting, and the spacious patio, secluded comfortably away from street noise and car exhaust, was my favorite in the South End.

• Wines and spirits. I found the wine list pretty useful, with good range in Italian wines and enough price breadth to meet both my weeknight bargain-sipping and weekend splurging needs. Bartending was never extraordinary but generally adequate, not distracting enough to be a minus.

• Service. Okay, some major blood spatter here. Rocca’s service ranged from very good to adequate to thoroughly incompetent. There were nights when we experienced flawless attention, others where we felt not especially well-treated but not ill-used, and at least two occasions when I thought, “This is the worst service I have gotten anywhere in a long time.” There appeared to be a persistent expediting problem, an inability to get food quickly from the basement kitchen to tables. During one particularly maddening stretch in the Fosnot era, I was so consistently served lukewarm to cold food that I stopped ordering anything that needed to be hot to be enjoyable. The biggest problem was that you never knew which Rocca service experience was going to show up. It could be great and awful on successive nights.

• Management. I can’t speak directly to management competence at Rocca except as reflected in my service experiences, but one Chowhound poster made an observation that hadn’t struck me but I recognized as true: co-owners Michela Larson and Gary Sullivan weren’t a strong, visible presence at the restaurant. I didn’t often catch them working the room after the first few weeks, didn’t see their hands-on presence in the front of the house. That stands in marked contrast to many successful restaurants in the neighborhood.

There is doubtless more to the story than what customers can see; I can only share a customer's impressions. Great first experiences: loved the food, brought many friends there, spent a bunch of pleasant summer evenings on the patio. An ensuing pattern of frustration, as mediocre and poor experiences alternated with strong ones, leading me to drop Rocca from my rotation of reliable neighborhood standbys. A second chance granted under the new chef: another great first impression, with relief that it seemed to be on the upswing. Then another series of wildly inconsistent dinners, with service quality varying from good to so-so to my worst single fine-dining service experience of 2010 -- which I described as "so bad it was almost comical, until the $170 check arrived." Similar woes reported by friends I’d dragged back to the “new Rocca” but were no longer thanking me for it. We all have less dining-out money to spend and fewer free nights to spend it: why roll the dice when there are a dozen places within a few blocks that are less risky?

More than anything else, that inconsistency is what did Rocca in for me. In my experience as a customer and industry employee, it’s the one pitfall that is the most difficult for a restaurant to avoid. Inconsistency is the key reason so many places like Rocca that appear to have all the factors necessary for success – great location, attractive physical plant, veteran management team, loads of talent in the kitchen, strong concept – still fail. I really liked it, yet I couldn’t depend on it, and so found it difficult to recommend to others. The lesson in my mind is that it’s better to earn a B-minus seven days a week than an A on some nights and a D on others. Above all, consistency is what keeps restaurants in business.