“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 2009 Devil's Dining Awards

I handed out a lot of recognition to Boston restaurants and bars in 2009: the annual Stuff Magazine Dining Awards; a Boston-centric “Ten Worst Dining Trends of the Decade” essay; and "2009: The Year in Cheap Eats", a year-end best-of list from my "On the Cheap" column for The Boston Phoenix. Seems like there's never enough room to shower kudos on every restaurant that deserves it: ditto the loud raspberries that ought to be sprayed at the crass, the ridiculous, the fraudulent and the shameless. But my blog has no space constraints or gentler-minded editors, so herewith I present a few more citations at year's end: call them the Devil's Dining Awards.

• Best new cocktail trend. Authentic Tiki drinks. Forget about Scorpion Bowls at the Hong Kong and Mai Tais at suburban Polynesian restaurants: craft cocktail bars like Drink and Eastern Standard are reviving the authentic, 30s-vintage Tiki-bar mixology of Don the Beachcomber and his heirs. This is not a trivial endeavor, requiring house-made infused syrups, fresh juices, and many obscure spirits and non-alcoholic ingredients, including a battery of unusual rums, pimiento dram, Cherry Heering, Velvet Falernum, etc. But the results are breathtakingly complex, beautiful, and potent. Kitsch plus craft equals serious fun.

• Worst new cocktail trend. Bars aping the trappings of craft cocktail bars and speakeasies but forgetting to bring the craft. Golden Age cocktails on your drinks menu, Prohibition era décor, and passwords at the door aren't enough. Building a real craft cocktail program demands training, hard work, study, and commitment, much like a fine-dining kitchen. Here's a hint: if you don't know how to consistently make a decent Sazerac, what glass it should be served in, why you might use Cognac instead of rye, and why the hospitality with which you serve it is as important as how well you make it, you're a faker with a very short shelf life. Here's another hint: if local cocktail maven Lauren Clark of the inestimable drinkboston.com isn't writing favorably about you, you probably suck.
  

• Saddest budget-restaurant closings. Oran Café, a homestyle Moroccan restaurant in East Boston that only lasted for an eyeblink; Uncle Pete’s, a fine little purveyor of barbecue in Revere that could not survive its owner/pitmaster's passing this year; Rangoli, the Allston restaurant that introduced dosas and other South Indian specialties to Boston; Reef Café, a fantastic Syrian joint in Allston that was the definition of family restaurant: mom in the kitchen, son out front; and Poppa B’s, the Mattapan soul food standout that served Boston's best fried chicken (and by extension its best chicken & waffles) – but at least will survive as a Codman Square takeout place.

• Worst trend for occasion diners. The death of the restaurant dress code. Nowhere in Boston does this hurt worse than at L'Espalier, whose new landlord, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, nixed a longstanding jackets-required rule. You can now spend $400 commemorating your silver wedding anniversary while staring at a table full of louts bedecked in Ed Hardy ballcaps, t-shirts, jeans and sneakers. One hopeful counter-trend, as recently reported in a New York Times feature, is that a younger generation, taking cues from pop-culture touchstones like Mad Men, is finding that a slightly nattier style distinguishes them favorably from older schlubs who can't be bothered to don a jacket. Here's hoping that inclination gains momentum: no one needs to see tracksuits and hoodies when they're dropping a bundle on a big-number birthday dinner.

• Local restaurant blog of the year. The tandem of Boston Restaurant Talk and Boston's Hidden Restaurants, a trove of restaurant reviews, discussion boards, and news of Boston-area restaurant openings and closings. Required reading for anyone obsessed with finding (and writing about) hidden gems in Greater Boston. Marc also does a great job of covering restaurants in lesser-known stretches of New England beyond the 128 beltway.

• Proof that the South End is over. The March arrival of Stephi’s on Tremont, an injection of bleached-blond Newbury Street faux-glamour into a once-colorful ‘hood already overrun with white-bread Chads and Muffys. Meanwhile, atmospheric inky-hipster hangout Pho Republique, an original trailblazer on now-restaurant-lined Washington Street, closed after eleven years of upholding the neighborhood's artier, funkier, more multi-culti heritage. Sic transit gloria.

• Best replacement for a departed star. Trina’s Starlite Lounge. Cambridge and Somerville heshers and hipsters alike lamented the death of the Abbey Lounge, a unique hybrid of townie dive and live indie-rock club. Then an all-star lineup from renowned neighborhood-bars-with-great-food (like Silvertone, Highland Kitchen, and Audubon Circle) stepped in to create a retro-cool haven of lawnmower beers and casual Southern-inflected cuisine. Manny, I mean, Abbey Who?

• Nose Cut Off, Face Spited Award. To the former landlord of Bella Luna, the Milky Way Lounge & Lanes, and Zon’s, whose 85% rent increase convinced Bella Luna and the Milky Way to relocate (sans tenpin lanes) to a splendid new space in The Brewery complex, and forced Zon’s out of business. Cunning revenue-enhancement plan there, fella.

• Best use of a potato (tie). Tater tots at Garden at the Cellar and potato pancakes at Café Polonia. The lowly kiddie-meal croquette and the usually-soggy hash brown get exalted treatment at these two underpraised spots. In both cases, the result is ungreasy, crunchy outside, creamy inside -- tasty enough to mitigate a thousand freezer-case insults. Spuds got respect.

• Jean-Paul Sartre Memorial “Hell is Other People” Award. To Lord Hobo, for the licensing tribulations it endured from its abutting neighbors and the City of Cambridge, who apparently believe that all bars should close at 10pm and only serve food. We presume these folks have forgotten the Windsor Tap, the frightening drug bar that used to occupy the spot where Lord Hobo now serves fine food, classy cocktails, and what may be Greater Boston's best lineup of craft beers. Ingrates.

• Foie Gras Poutine Award for Extraordinary Food in an Unlikely Setting. To Pupuseria Mama Blanca, a superb little Salvadoran joint in a remote residential corner of Eastie, further camouflaged by operating in a space that looks like someone's house. Easy to miss it, but don't.

• Best actual poutine. The so-called “mix grill sausages” at Pops Restaurant in the South End, which tops beautiful hand-cut fries with cheese curds, short ribs, and sausages of rabbit, duck and wild boar. With too much quality in the ingredients and refinement in the preparation to be mistaken for the classic cheapie Québécois drunk food, it still hits all the requisite animal-fat-laden, guilty-pleasure notes. Fernet-Branca, please!

• Most Biblical disaster. The January fire that destroyed an entire block of beloved independent restaurants: Thornton’s Fenway Grill, Umi Japanese Cuisine, Sorento’s Italian Gourmet, The Greek Isles, Rod Dee Thai II, and El Pelón Taqueria. The fact that no one was hurt is small comfort to devastated owners and bereft locals. If there is a God, he’s an angry God, one who probably dines at Applebee’s. (Some faith-restoring news: a long-delayed rebuilding program for the block is apparently back on track.)

• Most lopsided hotness-to-skills ratio. The bar staff at Whiskey Park: undeniably fetching, but seemingly hired with mixology experience optional. With luck, your stylin’ barmaiden’s $300 hairdo, bewitching décolletage, and almost hoohoo-level hemline will distract you from the fact that your $14 Manhattan is as warm as bathwater, and possibly made with gin.

• Tom Brady Award for Best Upgrade at a Position. To Coppa Enoteca, the Italian small-plates spot that just opened in the South End in the former home of The Dish. The latter was a lovable but uneven little neighborhood joint that eked out an existence from its great patio and spillover trade from the Franklin Café across the street. Judging from the consistently amazing food (with house-made salumi and pastas a highlight), terrific cocktails (making the most of a beer/wine/cordial license), and early patronage by seemingly every chef in town, it's hard to imagine how Coppa's team of Ken Oringer (owner), Jamie Bissonnette (chef), and Courtney Bissonnette (GM) doesn’t repeat its flaming success at Toro.

• Most deserving of a wake-up call. Any restaurant in 2010 that still has a busy, gimmicky, Flash-heavy website. If you have a slow-loading video for a top-level landing page, your web designer has sold you a bill of goods: Web surfers have hated that hokum for ten years now. If diners can't access it on an iPhone or Blackberry, your whizzy, music-playing, over-animated website is putting you behind the times – and deflecting potential customers.

• Smartest decision by a big local chain. Legal Sea Foods' hiring of Patrick Sullivan, former owner of The B-Side Lounge and a major progenitor of Boston's craft cocktail revival, as its beverage program manager. That's good for Legal, and good for anyone who wants to see serious cocktails brought to a wider audience.

• Wrong Place, Wrong Time Award. To Guillaume Schmitt, food/beverage manager at Sensing Restaurant, the Fairmont Battery Wharf's pricey, pedigreed French restaurant, who greeted a guest wandering around the bar looking for help with a snarling “Go wait back at the front door!” That guest turned out to be Mat Schaffer, the Boston Herald's lead restaurant critic, who duly name-checked Schmitt to lead his review of Sensing. Oopsie.

• Most wished-for return. Copley Square's charming food stand Jack & the Bean Bowl, which brought some much-needed al fresco deliciousness to the stodgy and street-food-averse Back Bay. Their summertime run of serving up fresh, tasty, cheap bowls of vegetarian and vegan beans, rice and fixings was way too brief. Come back, Jack!

• Pimpin’ Ain’t Easy Award. To the Brothers Andelman of Phantom Gourmet fame (Dan, Dave and Mike, a/k/a Smarmy, Greasy, and Bobbleheady), for their lucrative whoring on behalf of their TV show’s advertisers. This kind of naked money-grubbing ineptly fig-leafed as unbiased reviewing might be easier to take if the boys could authoritatively discuss anything that wasn’t “ooey-gooey, smothered with cheese”.

• Best doubling of menu options. The new charcoal-grilled pastrami sub at Speed's Famous Hot Dog Wagon, which before served only a hot dog, albeit Boston's best hot dog. Grilling makes this sandwich a bit lean for deli purists' tastes, but terrific pastrami from Newmarket Square neighbor Boston Brisket Company helps. We'll be keeping our ear on the rumor that Speed's may seek a permanent home in a South End storefront, which would make its fabled street food accessible to many more Bostonians.

• Most embarrassing bit of Bostonian provincialism. The pitiful hand-wringing accompanying the news that legendary restaurateur Danny Meyer might convert the Pink Palace, a shuttered Boston Common restroom, into a Shake Shack. Sample objections: “He's from, gasp, New York!” “We call them 'frappes', not 'shakes'.” “We need something 'Bostonian'” – never mind that the competing proposal is from a one-time operator of a failed New York restaurant whose theme-parky concept includes hawking “Freedom Trail ketchup”. Forget about doing actual research on Meyer's reputation for restaurant hospitality (on which he literally wrote the book), sustainable sourcing, and upstanding citizenship in the neighborhoods in which he operates – let alone actually sampling the food that his much-admired kitchens produce. How did we get our reputation as unworldly, navel-gazing bumpkins, again?

• Cleverest new street-food concept. Clover Food Lab, a vegan/vegetarian food truck for people who aren’t vegetarians or vegans. With the vivid flavors of Clover’s sandwiches and salads, nobody seems to miss the meat, and its fresh-baked popovers and hand-cut fries are shockingly good.

• Funniest unattributed restaurant criticism. Found in TV ads for Strega, in which owner Nick Varano continues a longstanding promotional campaign based on third-rate mobster-wannabe shtick that leans heavily on paid-for endorsements by bit players from kaput-in-2007 series The Sopranos. The hilarity stems from one TV spot in which Verano claims, “Shtrega serves what some people call da bes' Italian food in da city." This conveniently ignores the large body of professional and amateur critical opinion that calls Strega's décor hideously kitschy, its Italian-American fare thuddingly average, and its prices breathtaking, e.g., $43 for a veal chop. There's “some people”, and then there's “some other people”.

• Best tribute dish. Short-rib tacos at Myers + Chang, which accurately mimic the phenomenal flavor of Kogí truck tacos, the L.A. street-food sensation. Unlike many of its upmarket-taco competitors in Boston, M+C has memorized a crucial page from the taco-truck handbook, the one that specifies two tortillas per taco to avoid a drippy, disintegrating mess. And like Kogí, M+C tweets a lot, though arguably this seemed hipper before nine hundred other Boston restaurants got on Twitter, too.

• Gigantic Balls Award. To Barbara Lynch, for moving forward with plans for a springtime opening of Menton, her empire's new flagship restaurant in Fort Point. This luxury establishment will feature Italian cuisine, French rigor in the preparation and service, and eye-goggling prices: $85 for a 4-course tasting, $145 for a 7-course tasting. The online kibitzers seem evenly split between “That's insane in this economy” and “If anyone can make a success of it, Lynch can.” Me, I'd welcome another occasion-dining venue in Boston that isn't a steakhouse and maybe asks guys to wear a jacket. Whichever camp you fall into, you have to admit: gigantic balls.

• Little Guy Triumphs Award. To South Street Diner, for successfully defending its right to operate 24 hours a day, something it has done since 1947. Rich-jerk owners of nearby luxury condos, newcomers to the diner's Leather District neighborhood, tried to crimp its hours to 2am but couldn't turn back the tide of popular support. Moral: folks that crave perfect silence shouldn't move to dense urban neighborhoods.
  

Here's hoping 2010 finds you not believing the hype, supporting local establishments, getting out to Chinatown, Eastie, Allston and Dorchester to sample authentic traditional cooking, treating servers with respect (as documented in Patrick Maguire's fascinating new blog Server Not Servant), and tipping large. Na zdraví!

Support your local restaurant: dine out Sunday to Thursday

A friend of mine runs one of the neighborhood associations in Boston's South End. He related the story of how one local restaurateur -- Felino Samson of Pops Restaurant, which I think is one of the neighborhood's better fine-dining values -- is seeking approvals to expand his seating to include a bar area. Pops loses a lot of business on weekends from walk-ins who'd like to dine there but have no comfortable place to wait 30-60 minutes for a table at peak hours. Rather than cooling their heels on the curb, these folks often just mosey along to one of the other dozens of nearby restaurants to see if they can get in on shorter notice, or at least relax with a drink indoors while they're waiting.

While I hope Samson gets his wish to expand, his problem points to a broader one with Boston restaurants in the current economy: many diners have greatly curtailed their dining out on weeknights. I can confirm this just walking around the South End from Sundays through Thursdays: one dining room after another sits largely empty, with perhaps a handful of patrons dining at the bar. People are still dining out, but are heavily concentrating their business into Friday and Saturday nights. That leads to weekend crushes and long waits for those without the foresight to make reservations. For places like Pops (and I suspect other restaurants), it means further lost business because they're close to capacity on those nights, and the business goes elsewhere, but doesn't return on a weeknight when they've got ready seats.

I live in the South End and have long avoided weekend dining out in the neighborhood because the character of the crowd changes too much: it feels like a Weston/Wellesley cocktail party. Unlike weeknights, I see few people I know from the neighborhood. With the recession-driven shift in habits, weekend dining out has gotten worse: the crowds in the bars, the extra-long waits even for reserved tables, the general harriedness of the service and the kitchens all add up to a sub-optimal experience for my limited dining-out dollars.

So I'm dining out mostly on weeknights now, not just in the South End, but everywhere. I'm getting better service, avoiding the exurbanite masses, and supporting my favorite restaurants when the business means more to them. If you want your most beloved places to stay in business, and to have a better time for yourself, I encourage you to do the same.