Wear Sunscreen in the Restaurant, or, Words of Advice for Hungry Young People

Allston Christmas
Photo courtesy of The Boston Herald

Here are a few dining-out tips for you kids who've just arrived in the Hub of the Universe to start school, from a longtime chaser of the high life who's lived in Boston forever -- like, since before PlayStation II, when the Internets were all 110 baud (don’t Google that now, pay attention):

• Get the hell out. Boston is no New York City, but it’s still a pretty great restaurant town, in part because you students support some excellent cheap-to-moderate places. But you'll still have to duck the many miserable ones aimed at the sorry philistines among you. If you have the iota of adventurousness necessary to rise above a life of mediocre food, you'll have to occasionally get on your bike or the subway or the bus to visit places like Chinatown, East Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Jamaica Plain, East Cambridge, East Somerville, and Allston. If you get off your ass, you can eat fantastic food for your entire four or five or twelve years here. Don’t blow this opportunity by settling for so-so burgers, pizza, and burritos. Example: check out the Super 88 Market at the corner of Commonwealth Ave and Brighton Ave in Allston. Its ten-stall food court offers phenomenal cheap eats from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Thailand, and India. It’s a low-risk, incredibly tasty way to start exploring. 

• Don’t overlook old media. While you still can, take advantage of professional restaurant reviews in publications like the Boston Globe, Boston Magazine, and The Improper Bostonian, where I currently serve as professional restaurant critic and food/drinks feature writer. 

• Check out local bloggers and social media. In addition to the MC Slim JB blog, Boston has many useful food and drink blogs -- start with my WORTHY BLOGS / LINKS section on the lower left -- and unlike this one, most have attractive photos, video clips, and illustrations. Hundreds of Boston restaurants, bars, food retailers, and the writers who cover them are now on Twitter and Facebook: you'll quickly figure out which ones are worth following/friending and which are annoying, one-note self-promoters. Two helpful primers on my blog include an intro to Boston's craft cocktail scene and a humorous look at the Phantom Gourmet, a cheesy local TV show that reviews Boston restaurants (sort of).

• Consume amateur reviews warily, and be a good critic yourself. I cover this topic extensively in my essay, "11 Reasons Your Yelp Reviews Suck, and 11 Things You Can Do About It." TL;DR: Be careful whom you take dining-out advice from, and recognize that you probably know less about restaurants than you think, so try not to be a prick.

• Try to observe some of our quaint, Colonial-era dining customs. Take off your baseball cap in the dining room, don’t spend the entire meal blabbing or texting on your phone, limit your public drunkenness to the pre-projectile-vomiting stage, learn how to tip properly, curb the public displays of affection, and consider that other patrons might not find your bare armpits, navel, or toes an appetizing sight, especially at swankier venues. I won’t tell you to sit up straight, but you really should do that, too.

So welcome to Boston, kids: it’s a wonderful place to eat, and we’re really glad to have you here. Now get off my lawn.

Doggie bags are a bitch

I don't care for doggie bags. Most people love leftovers from fine-dining restaurants (and we all know the dog isn’t getting them). When I open my fridge the next day to see an aluminum-foil swan or plastic tub or Styrofoam box, I find it depressing. You see, I think the doggie bag diminishes the experience of a beautiful meal from the night before.

To me, the contents of a doggie bag always look sad, forlorn: sauce all congealed, beautiful arrangement on the plate destroyed when the server haphazardly shoves the remnants into the container. Come the morning after, it's time to cue Peggy Lee: "Is that all there is?" How pitiful-looking are the remains of the entrée I paid $15 or $25 or $35 for last night? It can't just be reheating on my homely servingware that destroys the glamour and subtleties of flavor that made it so wonderful, can it? Was I just bedazzled by swank atmosphere and cosseting service, hoodwinked? The magic wreaked by fine-dining kitchens is an evanescent, nighttime thing: seeing its naked bones in the harsh light of day can be a cruel letdown.

The doggie bag presents other issues:

• It's a Petri dish. Unless it’s the dead of a New England winter and the bag goes directly into my car trunk to chill, it sits at room temperature while I finish my dessert, coffee, and digestif, and while I enjoy some live music or the last half-hour of the game or a nightcap at my local. It may spend hours incubating bacteria before it sees my fridge.

• I hate schlepping it around. I don’t drive to most restaurants (I often enjoy wine with dinner), so I’ve got to drag that thing along in the taxi, train or bus, and to any stopoffs on the way home. It may smell strong. Sometimes it leaks. It’s a pain.

It’s too bad that restaurants feel they have to cater to elephantine American desires for wretched excess, or our misguided sense that we’re being swindled if we don’t go home with a bulging, dripping bag. Casual dining chains like The Cheesecake Factory turn up that pressure: there are few dishes on those menus that wouldn’t feed two or three people with normal appetites. They contribute to an expectation that one dinner should be big enough for multiple meals, to which even our upscale restaurants often feel they must respond.

For instance, when Prezza, an excellent high-end Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End first opened some years ago, you could actually order an antipasto, a primo of pasta or risotto, a secondo, a contorno or two, and even dessert or cheese without needing to be wheeled home in a barrow. Their portion sizes were normative for Italy, normal in fact for just about anywhere but the USA, home of the SUV and the world’s most obese and morbidly obese populations. On a return visit, I was surprised to learn I'd significantly over-ordered. Prezza’s portions had been supersized, nearly doubled, doubtless because customers were bellyaching about “tiny” portions. When two of us dine there now, we split a single antipasto, pasta, entrée and dessert, and leave perfectly satisfied. We get a meal we can finish. No food is wasted. And we don’t need a damnable doggie bag.

I know mine is a minority viewpoint; I don’t expect the laudable portion-shrinking efforts of chains like TGI Friday’s to catch on. And I don't object to obscene portions because I'm worried about the other guy's health. If you want to hit the local casual-dining-chain hog trough, order yourself enough food for a small African village, and then take half of it home to gorge on later, by all means: knock yourself into type 2 diabetes. Nor is it a price issue for me -- I understand that my meal might only get 15% or 20% cheaper if there were half as much food on the plate.

Mainly, it’s that I want to remember that meal as it was meant to be enjoyed: all its ingredients at their peak of freshness and flavor, expertly cooked and beautifully plated, meticulously served amidst flattering lighting and pleasant company. I hate to besmirch a great meal's shining moment with a wan, warmed-over rerun, sitting in my bathrobe on the sofa. It's dispiriting, and dishonors the chef and line cooks and waitstaff who planned, sweated, and hustled, juggling 45 balls at once to make it arrive on my table at its absolute acme, at exactly the right point in my evening, smack in the middle of the dinner rush. So I will continue to explain to my server when dinner’s over and our plates are still half-full: “We’re done, thank you. Tell the chef we loved it, it was just more than we could finish. And, thanks, but we'll pass on the doggie bag.”