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?

From the Archives: My Dirty Secret -- I Like the New Bar that Killed the Old Man Bar

Sullivan's Pub, Charlestown, MA

Here's a 2005 food/drink feature of mine that's no longer available online. I wrote it in response to several articles bemoaning Boston’s relentless tide of gentrification. I’ve echoed that line myself, but found some reasons to dissent from it here, in the process reviewing a few bar/restaurants I liked. It's also notable as my first piece referring to Boston's embryonic craft cocktail scene, then just gaining momentum at The B-Side Lounge.

MY DIRTY SECRET: I LIKE THE NEW BAR THAT KILLED THE OLD MAN BAR
By MC Slim JB
[originally published in Boston's Weekly Dig, November 16, 2005]

Everywhere I turn these days, someone’s howling about the death of the neighborhood bar. Longstanding hangouts like the Littlest Bar on Province Street in Downtown Crossing are headed for oblivion, or worse, conversion into upmarket boîtes. The new Alchemist Lounge that will soon replace Triple D’s in Jamaica Plain is still under wraps, but the name alone is enough to nauseate the folks who’ve been drinking in that spot for 15 years. They can guess what The Alchemist will be like: soigné bartenders straining pink concoctions into delicate glassware, small nibbles of weird ingredients at $10 a plate, alien downtempo electronica wafting from a DJ booth in the corner.

Triple D's, Jamaica Plain, MA

I share some of their pain, having passed many hours in B&B’s (my Somerville-native pal’s shorthand for “Beer and a Beatin' bars") since I moved here after college. I don’t qualify as a townie, but I still believe every neighborhood needs a place that locals can call their own, where transplants like me are the minority -- a bar where you might order a PBR because your dad drank it and it’s $2.50 a throw, not because snarky hipsters think it confers ironic blue-collar cred.

Consider the venerable Sullivan's Pub in Charlestown, just down Main Street from the yupscum fine-dining hellhole that Olives has become. One night, my crew and I sat drinking draft High Lifes and watching the Bruins on the tube while two retirees shared a half-hour harangue about the game that slowly boiled into a shouting match over the merits of some long-retired winger. The barman insisted they take it outside, and they did, proceeding to swap four or five slow-motion punches, then fall down and wrestle feebly on the sidewalk for ten seconds. Then they helped each other up, dusted themselves off and shakily returned to resume drinking and yakking, which is how we left them two hours later. I’d guess they were both about 68 years old, friends since they were five. Now that’s an Old Man Bar.

I’ve bent an elbow in a few nearly-forgotten Boston saloons. How many Back Bay residents ever ventured into Jack Lynch’s Webster Lounge on Dalton Street? That crepuscular little cave featured Fifties-vintage rec-room paneling, the same five ancient patrons glued to stools molded to their buttocks, and a jukebox of 45s unchanged since the “Theme from Hawaii Five-O” was a hit. Better yet, I could get a Scotch and soda for $1.60, no brows furrowed at my mangy vintage threads, and the same surly service that the regulars got from the ex-boxer-looking barkeep in the ratty black bow tie. Here’s the odd thing: that singular Old Man Bar whose passing I mourned is now Bukowski Tavern, a place I admire for its hundred-strong selection of beers, ear-splitting punk-rock soundtrack, and decent, cheap food.

The Hammond Lounge in Brookline was a similar haunt, a seedy dump plopped in the middle of a nice block, windowless and cigarette-befogged. My brother-in-law and I nearly cried the day the smoking ban and creeping rents finally killed it for good, buying our last $2 Buds and some logo-emblazoned sweatshirts that had been stapled to the wall for years and took 20 washes to get the nicotine reek out of. I still miss it, but I also really enjoy its successor: the Washington Square Tavern, a convivial, upscale pub serving excellent, unfussy fare.

Which isn’t to say that these places were all chummy. I once strolled into the Windsor Tap near Kendall Square one sunny Saturday with a pal, looking to enjoy a cold one and check the Sox score. What seemed not-too-dubious from the curb turned out to be dark and dank within, airless and claustrophobic. A knot of leathery, inky bikers across the bar gave us the cold fish-eye. We ordered longnecks from the stony barman (“Um, no glass, thanks”), downed them in two minutes and fled. A friend who lived around the corner winced at us later: “The Windsor? That’s the best place in Cambridge to pick up an eightball and a stab wound.”

The B-Side Lounge, Cambridge, MA

Just saying -- not every Old Man Bar deserves protection from the wrecking ball. I’ll venture an unpopular corollary, too: not every OMB replacement will necessarily become a trendy hive of yuppie villainy. Even revered old gin-mills that have been mercilessly cored and polished and refitted with craft-brew taps can become superb hangouts. In fact, some of these upstarts rank among my favorite places for a drink. I don't hold it against them that they are pretenders, resented by old-timers, too free of grit to be deemed genuine neighborhood places yet.

The B-Side Lounge is a favorite example, and not just because it superseded a harrowing bucket of blood (the aforementioned Windsor). I love it because it features some of the most serious, skilled bartending in the city. Spirits are top-notch, fruit juices fresh-squeezed, each carefully-crafted drink served in the proper ice-chilled glass. The cocktail menu includes classics as well as creative updates of standards like the Stardust: Nicaraguan rum, fresh lemon juice and the rare, violet-tinged Parfait Amour. These guys know why you shake some drinks and stir others, that Manhattans are traditionally made with rye whiskey, and what my usual is, even when I haven’t been by in a while. The fact that the food is good -- solid, modestly-priced New American served up by a cute and sassy waitstaff ‘til the wee hours -- is a bonus. A cast-iron skillet of baked gouda with garlic crostini ($10.50) makes a rustic fondue: hearty, delicious, easy to share standing at the bar. Brunch is also fantastic and served until 4pm for late Sunday risers.

The Mission Bar and Grill supplants the old Choppin’ Block Pub, long a hideous, dingy slab of a building that nevertheless was a versatile venue for live jazz, hip-hop, noise and metal. Now fronted with wide, tall windows, The Mission is warm, airy, inviting. The menu is American bistro by way of Irish pub. A perfectly cooked medium-rare burger ($9) has a beautiful char, grilled red onions and mushrooms, a good roll and a side of fine fries. Sweet-natured staffers pull pints at the long wooden bar while the game blinks from flatscreens, and small groups and couples fill the tables. A few Choppin' Block veterans rub elbows with the college kids and new homeowners. Seems they’ve forgiven the slick changeling that took their ugly old baby’s place. That amazing burger probably helps.

I’m too young to remember the scary juice joint that the current Franklin Café replaced. Long before they received the odious label “SoWa,” the adjacent blocks hosted dozens of decrepit rooming houses, and the Franklin opened daily at 6am to a brisk shot-and-beer trade. That onetime war zone was gentrified away years ago, and the area now risks teetering too far the other way into pricey, vanilla dullness. With its United Nations mix of straights and gays, the Franklin is now the throwback to an edgier, more diverse South End. It remains a godsend: a softly-lit space with booths, great cocktails, cool music on the sound system and a creative menu served ‘til 2am. The turkey meatloaf with fig gravy ($14) is as satisfying as it was before the tight-assed empty-nesters from Wellesley and Weston started to drain the funkiness out of the neighborhood.

I witnessed one indelible example of the Franklin's unique charm on the night a cherubic blond bartender decided she’d had her fill of some yelling-into-his-cellphone suit who was dumb enough to insult Southie, her boyfriend's 'hood. She flew out from behind the stick, and with a series of sharp forefinger jabs to his chest -- “GET! [poke] the FUCK! [poke] OUT! [poke] of my BAR! [poke]” -- drove him stunned and backpedaling right out the front door. It was a glorious moment; we practically cheered. No one wanted that jackass in our place. Hmm, maybe I do have an old neighborhood joint to defend after all.

The Waltham Tavern, Boston, MA

I can’t extend the same sentiment to the Waltham Tavern, a tiny Mob-owned dive just down the street, the last fading relic of a far-shadier South End. Despite my six years of regular visits for beers and billiards, nobody ever makes an illicit bet or buy when I'm around. I'm the square interloper there, a tolerated outsider. I could live right across the street, but I didn’t grow up on the block. By contrast, the folks at the Franklin treat me as one of their own, and I’ve returned the favor by making it my local. I can’t stop the OMBs from disappearing, but maybe the next best thing is to give my custom to a place where someday I'll rate as one of the true regulars, a righteous Old Man myself.

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.

From the Archives: Five Reasons to Dine at the Bar

I'm republishing a piece here from June 2005 that hasn't been available online for years. This one is special to me: it's the first food/drinks story I ever published professionally, a cover feature for Stuff Magazine (then known as Stuff@Night) on why bar dining is often superior to a table in the dining room. See if you think it still holds up.

FIVE REASONS TO DINE AT THE BAR
by MC Slim JB
[originally published as the cover feature of the June 9, 2005 issue of Stuff@Night]

As a longtime Bostonian who loves to dine out, I struggle with conflicting goals. I want to eat well, but can’t afford to patronize luxury establishments every week. Fast food is cheap and tasty, but I hate the nausea and regret a half-hour later. One of my best strategies is to frequent mid-priced places and dine at the bar. It’s low-fuss, you often get better food and service, and it’s friendly and fun, especially if you’re dining solo.


My Belly Doesn’t Need Ms. Right; It Needs Ms. Right Now

There are few civilized pleasures as sublime as the two-hour-plus weekend prime-time dinner. Consider Union Bar and Grill, one of the South End’s sleeker, more well-oiled dining entertainment machines. Sliding into a glossy banquette for a Friday 8pm reservation, the four of us are a little dressed up and a lot revved up. We kick off with expertly-made cocktails, dulling the keen edge of hunger with the gratis cornbread and excellent butter.

We uncork a Chianti Classico to go with appetizers of short ribs, beet salad, and chorizo-and-corn risotto. Next, we attack entrees of lamb rack, pork tenderloin, roast chicken, and codfish. We pause a bit to take in the scenery before lingering over a five-item cheese plate with perfect accompaniments, washed down with a couple of glasses of port and an espresso or two. By the time 11pm rolls around, we’ve passed an entire languid evening of very pleasant food and solicitous service, amplified by a little hot-spot atmosphere, for a mere $350.

While lovely, this pricey scenario doesn’t quite play on Wednesday night, when it’s just two of us wandering into Union at 9pm, looking not quite daisy-fresh in rumpled work clothes, feeling irritable with stress and hunger. This moment calls for our light, tight, weeknight strategy:

1. Pass on the hosts’ offer of a ready dining room table in favor of bar seats.
2. Get a beer, a glass of wine, and two sandwich plates – a hefty Rueben and an Andouille-flecked hamburger with excellent frites. Appreciate the real care in the preparation (a burger actually cooked medium rare as ordered, and mmm, those frites).
3. Wrap it up in under an hour, for about $50 including tax and tip.
4. Feel good about minding our mid-week budget, avoiding delivery of bad Chinese or pizza, and not dreading the alarm-clock detonation we face in a few hours.
5. Congratulate ourselves on being frugal, canny urban diners-at-the-bar.
   

My Folks Told Me Never to Talk to Strangers

There seems to be an unwritten rule at fine dining establishments in this town: you don’t chat much with nearby tables. Near as I can tell, there are two exceptions: 1) wishing someone a happy birthday or whatever occasion was just signaled by a candle-lit dessert (and hopefully, not a song); and 2) asking them what enticing plate just arrived at their table, so you can order it, too. At best, any other topic is likely to get you a look of polite forbearance that is clearly two seconds from curdling into disdain. We don’t mind looking at the pretty strangers next to us, we just don’t want them talking to us.

If you crave a little bonhomie with your steak-frites, you’ll have to dine at the bar. (This also applies to the comparatively rare communal table, but we’ll save that one for another time.) Maybe it’s that you are sitting close, or have better access to the social lubricant of alcohol, but bar diners converse far more easily than their dining-room counterparts.

Consider my recent visit to Dedo, a year-old little sleeper of a New American restaurant near Park Square. I come looking to sample the cuisine of its new chef, Jason Santos, whose work I admired at Tremont 647. Dedo serves some great-looking small plates in the bar, but not in the dining room. I love the Spanish custom of nibbling tapas early in the evening, so I opt for the bar.

It isn’t long before the parade of little bites I’ve ordered gets my neighbors sharing dining-out stories with me. Everyone oohs at my “cappuccino” of sweetbreads and black truffles in a stiff sauce and a blanket of chestnut foam, served in a china latte cup. Despite the precious presentation, it’s a rocking little stew, a minor symphony of richness and slightly spongy textures. I marvel at the deviled eggs (here, done with tuna sashimi for filling, with nary a hint of mayonnaise), and recall other favorite versions (Mom’s, which hews to the circa-1960 Good Housekeeping canon, and Oleana’s, which adds poached tuna and olives to the filling.) A businessman from L.A. boasts of the dining palaces out West he’s visited while chasing the perfect poke (pronounced “pokey”), a raw tuna salad of Hawaiian origin – he rates Dedo’s very highly.

While we talk mostly of food that night, the scenario echoes a thousand similar moments I’ve enjoyed: a few strangers holding a friendly debate over dinner on the finer points of baseball, movies, music, drinking, and/or the attractiveness of the bar’s other patrons. What’s nearly taboo in the dining room is welcome in the bar. I’ve made many pleasant acquaintances and business connections this way, enjoying what might otherwise have been a dull hour or two. Actually interacting with your fellow man: it’s one of simplest and most accessible pleasures of dining at the bar.


The Best Server in the Room

In a handful of places in Boston, the bartender is such a multi-talented, genial host that you hate to hazard the dining room. Joe Carbonaro at Caffe Umbra is one of these, the rare barman who can deftly juggle responsibilities -- mixologist, wine steward, waiter, busboy, raconteur, and confidante -- and make it look easy, with grace and aplomb, like a professional athlete.

I rate him the best pure bartender in the South End (no faint praise -- there’s a lot of talent with shakers nearby): he just plain pours a beautiful drink. He crafted the restaurant’s signature cocktail menu, placing his own stamp on the classics, like a Negroni punched up with Punt e Mes. He’s on intimate terms with the wine list, quick with thoughtful food-and-wine pairings, slow to push the most expensive stuff, able to hold forth on esoteric dessert wines. That’s in between making drinks for everybody in the place, and serving dinner in the bar.

Joe approaches the food side of the job with similar seriousness and relish. He’s a subtle and effective salesman for Laura Brennan’s innovative rustic Italian and French cuisine, telling you exactly what he loves about each dish. He shows a Sicilian-American’s appreciation of the simple, beautiful ingredients on most plates here, like the asparagus shoots that accompany a torta appetizer. Despite a trim frame, he affects a gourmand’s lust for the pastry chef’s work. “You didn’t order this, but you have to – it’s off the charts”, say Joe of one of several nightly homemade ice creams, a melon-Sambuca number. We trust him, despite the unseemly combination. He’s right: it is spectacular, with a big upfront melon zing that fades almost completely to make way for an extended anise finish. Strange and utterly wonderful. Thanks, Joe!

Not to knock the dining room staff at Caffe Umbra; I’ve eaten in the back many times, and they too are skillful, polished and personable. But they’re not as much fun to watch work, and aren’t in the same position to regale us with stories about neighborhood goings-on. The wait staff doesn’t have the dedication to the art of tippling to solicit patrons’ opinions on the latest crazy super-premium liquor to hit the market (anyone for a sample of the new cherry-flavored rye?). If it’s Joe’s night off, or there are no seats at the bar, we head someplace else. We can barely imagine eating any other way there anymore.


The Food Here Sucks, Let’s Eat at the Bar

My beloved is giggling at a laptop in the next room. “What’s so funny?”, I call out. “Oh. My. God. Have you seen the glamour photos of Todd English on toddenglish.com?” “Yeah,” I reply: “Don’t hate him because he’s beautiful. Hate him because he’s too busy flogging his latest casino venture to stand at a stove in the town that put him on the map.”

Maybe that’s not fair; Todd probably does don a toque occasionally hereabouts, but I know few once-rabid fans like myself who aren’t in mourning for the days, now more than a decade past, when he was the deserving, white-hot focal point of the Boston fine-dining scene. The Charlestown Olives created some of the most exciting food I’d ever seen, and served it up with real verve, the kind of experience for which we’d tolerate a hateful no-reservations policy and two-hour waits in the packed bar. Currently, that kitchen cranks out obviously premade, not-always-fully-reheated appetizers to a crowd of undiscriminating tourists. Latecoming locals must wonder what all the fuss was about.

Worse still are lackluster outliers of the English empire like Bonfire, a steakhouse that has Todd’s brand but none of his formidable virtues (I’m talking about cooking, not marketing.) My several underwhelming meals here have featured grotesquely oversized slabs of over-charred pork and beef, brought by staffers who seem mightily self-impressed for no reason related to their actual service skills. I think the dining room looks fantastic – I’ll admit to a soft spot for that Phillipe Starck-designed bordello vibe -- and I admire the wine list’s South American depth. But the food regularly disappoints, at really high prices. I just kind of hate it.

But I join Bonfire’s often-lively bar scene on occasion, resisting the staff’s insistent promotion of their over-sugared travesty of a Caipirinha. To my bemusement, the same kitchen that fails in the dining room succeeds in the bar, where it serves up lip-smacking tacos and small plates like tempura green beans. Even better, you can get these nice-priced gourmet snacks at an hour when few places in the Back Bay are still hopping (till 1:30am Wednesday through Saturday).

I haven’t forgiven Todd for big-timing his local former devotees. But late-night grazing at Bonfire’s bar does help me to forget for a moment how success spoiled a one-time favorite. “Gimme an El Tesoro Plata margarita straight up, please, and some smoked-duck taquitos -- hold the Vanity Fair spread.”


Don’t Look at the Pitiful Lonely Freak -- Maybe He’ll Go Away

Business travelers, stop me if you’ve heard this one: after a long workday in a strange city, you let your hosts go home to the bosom of their families for dinner. You’ve done enough homework to dodge the room-service turkey club: trusted local sources have pointed you to some worthy restaurants. A quick taxi ride later, and you’re greedily surveying an interesting menu, proud to be an intrepid, globetrotting epicure.

But before the appetizer arrives, you notice the unwelcome glances. That mooning, hand-holding couple across the aisle give you matching tight smiles that say, “Someday, modern medicine will cure your scrofula or whatever it is that keeps you in your sad prison of one.” The wary glares from the next booth’s klatch of sharply-turned-out young professional women send a rather different message: “Look at us again, pervert, and we’ll stone you to death with our teeny cellphones”. Mercifully, you have a paperback to bury your nose in, thus avoiding further eye contact.

Now the weird part: the next time you’re out to dinner in Boston with a group of your attractive friends, you espy some poor benighted soul at a table for one. And despite having walked several miles in those moccasins, your first thought is, “Oh, the poor leper! Why didn’t the maitre’d just lead her quietly out back where she could shoot herself?” Remember this moment the next time you’re out on your own. Preserve your dignity, and avoid harshing the buzz of diners who are trying to share laughter and witty conversation as well as fine food and drink. Eat at the bar. You already have enough other good reasons to do so. FIN

N.B. After this was published, women friends of mine pointed out that solo bar dining doesn't work nearly as well for women as men -- that unwelcome attention from boys on the prowl is often an unfortunate consequence of sitting at the bar without a companion. Shame on me for not considering this issue and mentioning it. (It was my first feature.)

N.B. 2 Special thanks once again to Scott Kathan of Stuff@Night for plucking me from the ranks of amateur reviewers on Chowhound.com and giving me my first shot at writing professionally! I've published hundreds of pieces since, and now write food/drinks features and two Boston restaurant-review columns (On the Cheap and Food Coma) for The Boston Phoenix and Stuff Magazine. See my blog for links to most of my professional work.

Todd English sobs quietly into a big pile of money

In a fascinating and funny article in the April 2009 issue of Boston Magazine, Amy Traverso makes a winking, half-ironic case for reconsidering the reputation of Todd English, Boston's most famous and successful celebrity chef. English is now derided by many locals for reasons Traverso aptly captures: “The English brand has come to eclipse English the chef… These days the high priests of the food bloggerati, in particular, seem to take special pleasure in framing him as the epitome of a sellout celebrity chef. ‘Yeah, Chowhound has beat me up a lot,’ English says. ‘I don't even read it anymore. It probably took me a couple of bad articles to realize that maybe I was misunderstood.’"

Mea culpa: I’m one of those Chowhound.com contributors who excoriates Olives Boston as a pale facsimile of the days when English actually cooked there, and thinks other English outlets like Bonfire are pretty terrible, too. I recently wrote a piece in Stuff Magazine in which I revisited Olives and other former It Places to see if they still deserve the crowds they get. I was relatively kind to Olives, not mentioning the sight of men’s-room partitions falling off the walls, nor how the giant bucket of deep-fried onion strings called to mind The Cheesecake Factory, nor that the tagliatelli Bolognese was the worst fine-dining pasta dish I’d tasted in years: an ugly, gloppy mess grossly overseasoned with cinnamon, frankly disgusting.

But why would English care what Bostonians think at this point, anyway? He’s a multi-millionaire, a national celebrity. As Traverso documents, he has 21 restaurants (including an L.A. joint venture with Eva Longoria), a deal for more restaurants in Thompson hotels, Top Chef appearances, his own TV show Food Trip, and so on and on. English could just say, “Please. My job hasn’t been about being a chef for years. My role is to promote Todd English, The Brand. Expecting the original Olives to maintain its old quality is naïve. Don’t hate the player; hate the game.” That kind of candor and self-awareness would be refreshing, wouldn't it? No such luck -- English actually wishes the masses could appreciate his ambition as something noble. Says English, "Go to Dallas, go to Tampa. I go to Tampa once a month because of my Home Shopping Network gig [where he flogs his own line of cookware]… and it's chain city. I don't eat for three days." Can't you feel his pain? You see, he just wants to help people in culinarily-benighted towns across America.

Look, we all tend to rationalize the compromises we make in life. But I get a little incensed when English's rationalizations extend to why he couldn’t settle for being a one-restaurant, one-town kind of guy: “‘I watched the stars [at NYC's bygone French restaurant La Côte Basque] fade away and the ambition fade away. I learned from a ton of really burned-out chefs at the Culinary Institute. That's what this business will do.’" (Aha: so it wasn't about chasing rock stardom, but running away from burnout.) Traverso continues: “English never wanted to end up in a precious little bistro, recalling his glory days while plating his millionth serving of steak frites.”

To me, this fish story is not only lame, but belittles the dedication and staying power of many talented Boston chef/owners who have chosen to helm a single restaurant precisely because it's so hard to scale up those qualities that make their cooking unique and wonderful. I’m guessing Gordon Hamersley hasn't done a casino or cruise-ship restaurant because he recognizes that if he’s not at the stove, it’s not really his cooking -- and he's too proud to collect a check just for stickering his name over some lieutenant's work. Bostonians know the real deal when they taste it, too, which is why Hamersley’s Bistro landed in the Top 10 of Boston Magazine’s recent ranking of Boston's 50 best restaurants and Olives didn’t even crack the list. That’s a long tumble down for a place that many critics and consumers, myself included, once called the best restaurant in the city.

So when English expresses chagrin at not feeling the hometown love, I have scant sympathy, though I'm kinder than my friends who speak with the bitterness of the jilted: “We loyal fans put Todd on the map, and he never shows up anymore. We're like the first wife who slaved to put her husband through medical school, then got dumped for a young hottie with big fake boobs the minute he finished his residency.” While you can't blame those folks for burning their old snapshots, I think their attitude unfairly discounts English’s net-positive influence here, like his mentoring of some bright young chefs. But it partly explains why many of us who fondly recall Olives' heyday just shake our heads when English cavils about being misunderstood. We understand his real motivations perfectly, and we don't fault him for grabbing the brass ring. But the bottom line for Bostonians is that a chain -- no matter how gifted the man at the top, nor how skillfully and glamorously he markets it -- is still a chain. Maybe you can fool your new fans, but it's tougher to put one over on the old ones.

Trying to dine Chez Ozymandias, or: Seasons Restaurant died and nobody noticed

I recently contributed an article entitled "Leftovers: Testing the enduring appeal of some of Boston's old-school dining favorites" to Stuff Magazine, in which I revisited several Boston restaurants (Olives Charlestown and Anthony’s Pier 4 and Locke-Ober) that were once considered “It Places” but have slipped in the dining public’s consciousness, though they’re still packing in the customers (and still occasionally get my business).

Due to length limitations, the last part of my submitted article, a visit to a fourth former It Place, was cut. But I thought it was a useful cautionary tale about being an It Place -- and being the kind of diner who spends all his or her time in It Places -- so I scooped it off the cutting room floor to post here:

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

My last stop on my tour of former “It Places” was Seasons at the Millennium Bostonian Hotel, which in the early 1980s was an essential station on the Boston fine-dining circuit. The owners had a knack for hiring immensely talented, fast-rising chefs to execute the restaurant’s innovative New American menu, many of whom left to attain local and national stardom on their own. Among its storied alumni are Jasper White (Jasper's, Jasper White's Summer Shack), Lydia Shire (Biba, Pignoli, Locke-Ober, Scampo), Jody Adams (Rialto), Gordon Hamersley (Hamersley's Bistro), Scott Hebert (Troquet), Peter McCarthy (EVOO), Tony Ambrose (Ambrosia, Blackfin), 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 (Craigie on Main) or Barry Maiden (Hungry Mother). 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 the current Flavor of the Month, you’re neglecting a solid old standby in your back yard that may be dying. And guess which one you’ll miss more if they both disappear?