2013-11-10T14:54:50+00:00

Restaurant recommendation of the day: Giulia in Cambridge, near Porter Square

November 10, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

Just like it says up top: you should go to Giulia, in that part of Cambridge that is equally inconvenient to both Harvard Square and Porter Square; in that same little area are Simon’s (formerly the best coffee in Cambridge until Crema came to town), Marathon Sports, and the West Side Lounge. M’lady and I have gone to Giulia twice now, and had an absolutely lovely time both times. They have delicious cocktails, and plenty of lovely Italian small plates that even vegetarians such as myself can enjoy. The décor is warm, cozy, and inviting, such that I’m sure Giulia will be a welcoming destination in the dead of winter.

Highly recommended.

Boston and race

November 2, 2013/stevereads/Leave a comment

(__Attention conservation notice__: 1400 words about the city I love and its baseball team.)

Speaking of the Red Sox, as we were … I’ve just returned from the jovial Red Sox victory parade, which was a blast (thanks to the two lovely people with whom I was attending it). Along the way, we got to talking about *why* the Sox just couldn’t win a World Series for 86 years. My friend Olivia relayed an idea from a 2003 documentary, namely that one big reason the Sox failed to make it is that they were the last team in Major League Baseball to admit black players.

This may explain why even today, among the 30,000-plus fans in the stands, it is often hard to find even one black person. As much as I love Fenway, and love attending games there, it reminds me of many things that disgust me about Boston: the 1970s’ busing crisis (which, on the positive side, yielded one of the two or three greatest books I’ve ever read); the fact that the city is largely run by, and despite every MIT and Harvard technocrat’s best intentions, will *always* be run by, the sort of people who attend Sox games; and the city’s parochial feel: it’s broken in a lot of very obvious ways, but it’s broken in ways that those who live here have grown comfortable with. I’ve long said that Boston is like a very well-worn baseball glove: sure, it’s careworn to the point of being threadbare, but it’s yours, and you know it practically as well as you know your own skin.

Except for a 15-month interval in Washington, D.C., I’ve lived in Boston from April of 2001 until now. I’m never going to be viewed as a native here; if I go into a bar in Charlestown, or along McGrath Highway in Somerville, I’m going to be eyed suspiciously or worse. Maybe it’s like this in every other city. Every city has its problems, and every city has racism to its core (New York: stop and frisk much?; I needn’t mention L.A.). I can think that other cities will be better than this one, and maybe they will be. But in all likelihood, they’ll just be bad in different ways. I don’t want to contend that the grass is greener elsewhere, but neither do I want to write off every other city because the grass there is likely to be brown. Best just to be honest about the flaws of the place you live. And I do think there’s virtue in finding a real *home*. Unlike anywhere else I’ve ever lived, Boston is very much my home. Fenway is “a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark”, wrote John Updike, and on its better days I think of Boston as a lyric little bandbox of a city. Much of the rest of the time, I agree with George Packer (who wrote a book about my specific neighborhood) that “The city has a thousand charms, but it has always been easier to like than to love.”

To the extent that they think about it at all (it’s fine; I don’t think about Denver much), those who live outside Boston likely think about it for only a couple of reasons. (I’ve long said that Boston needs a mythology.) It’s got the universities, and it’s got the Revolutionary War stuff. But a lot has happened since 1776. And a lot of ugly things have happened. I think everyone who lives here owes it to himself to read [book: Common Ground]; apart from being one of the very best books I’ve ever read, it’s a heartbreaking introduction to some parts of Boston’s history that many people would rather forget.

There’s still more to learn, of course. For my part, I think I’m going to spend the offseason reading [book: Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston]. One day after we honored Celtics great Bill Russell with a statue, I’d like to understand what led the man to write that

> To me, Boston itself was a flea market of racism . . . If Paul Revere were riding today, it would be for racism: ‘The niggers are coming! The niggers are coming!’ He’d yell as he galloped through town to warn neighborhoods of busing and black homeowners.

I often feel this sort of conflict about Boston: on the one side, filled with brilliant people and lovely places; on the other, closed-minded, provincial, and racist.

And yet. And yet. I haven’t written about the Boston Marathon bombing, but I’ve meant to. It’s hard to overstate the effect it had on me. Those outside of Boston might not be aware of just how special Patriots Day is. One year I woke up well before the crack of dawn to watch a re-enactment of the battle of Concord, which led into a pancake breakfast in Concord, which led into watching the Marathon from Coolidge Corner, which would have led into watching the traditional afternoon Sox game if I had gotten my stuff together early enough. It’s a joyous day. I almost always watch the Marathon from Coolidge Corner, a couple miles from the finish line, along with thousands of my friends. We’re cheering on strangers who’ve almost finished an incredibly difficult task, we’re welcoming the spring after a seemingly endless winter, we’re celebrating the start of a new Red Sox season, and we’re rejoicing in being Bostonians.

And then the bombing happened. I was in Vancouver at the time, with cell service on my phone turned off so that I wouldn’t burn through expensive foreign minutes. I was waiting for my girlfriend outside a bathroom at the Vancouver Aquarium, so I turned on WiFi and promptly received dozens of iMessages from friends who were both concerned about my city, and afraid that I — per usual — was waiting along the Marathon route. That was an extremely awful way to learn that someone had just shattered my lyric little bandbox. And outside the library, no less! My library. The various faces of that library read “MDCCCLII FOUNDED THROUGH THE MUNIFICENCE AND PUBLIC SPIRIT OF CITIZENS”, “THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF THE CITY OF BOSTON BUILT BY THE PEOPLE AND DEDICATED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF LEARNING A.D. MDCCCLXXXVIII”, and “THE COMMONWEALTH REQUIRES THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE AS THE SAFEGUARD OF ORDER AND LIBERTY”. Every time I see these, I choke up a little bit, even more since the bombing. It’s a “Commonwealth”, not some mere state. This land has been really special, the city upon a hill, for four hundred years. And someone had just torn bodies to shreds in front of what, to me, is its most beautiful landmark.

I took it very, very personally — much more personally than I expected. They did this to what David Ortiz immortally labeled “our fucking city”. This *is* our fucking city. Our busted-ass, conflicted, often intensely frustrating city.

I think of all of this after the Red Sox won the Series, not because of “Boston Strong” (which I’ve honestly found kitschy), but because the Red Sox are indissolubly part of Boston. It’s important that Fenway Park is tucked into a corner of Brookline; I can walk over there in about 40 minutes, and walk back after stopping off for a couple of cocktails at one of several amazing bars. Having moved here in 2001, I didn’t start following the Sox until their disastrous ALCS game 7 in 2003; after learning about the game and the players, I realized that I could start a conversation with virtually anyone who wore a Red Sox cap on the T. They’re in this city’s bones.

So congratulations, Red Sox, and thanks for a great season. Now we face the winter alone, as the late Commissioner of Baseball A. Bartlett Giamatti (father of the actor Paul Giamatti) put it:

> It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops. Today, October 2, a Sunday of rain and broken branches and leaf-clogged drains and slick streets, it stopped, and summer was gone.

Some thoughts on Adam Smith

April 19, 2013/stevereads/1 Comment

My memory of [book: The Major Transitions in Evolution] is a little hazy, but I believe the thesis is that there have been several important jumps in the history of life on earth, wherein life took a jump from a simpler form to a complex form in such a way that a movement back to the simpler form was impossible. (Synopsis on the wiki.) I seem to recall, for instance, a story going like this: a single-celled organism one day became parasitic on another, until they fused into a multicellular organism, and from that day forward the two organisms could only function in the presence of the other. Each of these transitions, as I recall the story going, involved a new mode of information transmission, which made the transition stick. (This synopsis is likely wrong. My knowledge of biology is even weaker than my knowledge of, well, everything else. “Symbiosis” is the keyword here; it’s associated with the late Lynn Margulis.)

I wonder whether complex market economies are a new transition, in the sense that we have simply ceased being able to function without a division of labor. None of us in Western capitalist democracies could even consider living as economic hermits, tending our solitary farms or whatnot, because all the components necessary to *even start* that farm presuppose so much from the society around us: a government to maintain the roads that bring our products to market; a state with a monopoly on violence so that we don’t need to pay off the Mafia every time we want to *get on* those roads; industrial corporations to manufacture the steel tools that we use to plow the land; miners to dig up the iron that the corporations convert into steel; other corporations to build the pickaxes that even primitive miners would use to extract the iron ore from the ground; and so forth.

All of which is just to say: Boston is shut down right now, and I’m out of food, and the restaurants are closed, and I’d really like to eat dinner. Thanks.

Is there any rational reason to buy books locally?

July 15, 2012/stevereads/1 Comment

There’s a good argument against buying books locally. Consider my beloved local bookstore, the Harvard Book Store. I buy books from them, and I pay a premium to do so — happily, I might add. But a large part of my brain knows that this is irrational. If I want a book, why not buy it where it’s cheapest? It’s one thing to buy something local that is legitimately local and can’t be made by anyone else — for instance, cocktails from Drink or food from Craigie On Main or produce from a CSA that supports local farmers or ice cream from Toscanini’s. Books aren’t at all like that; they’re not local, and a large chunk of my book dollar is going to publishers in New York City. Why not take every penny that I spend at the Harvard Book Store and instead donate it to my local library? Or buy the books on Amazon?

Three answers come to mind:

1. Local bookstores support new authors in a way that Amazon does not. I don’t think there’s much evidence for this, though I’d be glad to hear it if there were. And come to think of it: if you spend less on a given book by buying it where it’s cheapest, you can then *buy more books*, including books by upstart authors. So buying from Amazon might, in this sense, be *better* for new authors.

2. The Harvard Book Store brings speakers to the local community, and in general runs author events locally that Amazon does not. True. But in the absence of local bookstores, wouldn’t this happen anyway? Those authors aren’t coming to the HBS out of community altruism; they’re promoting a book. I assume that they’d continue promoting their books even if HBS weren’t there. Authors like Paul Krugman come to Cambridge because they think that the audience here would buy their books. Krugman would likely continue to do so.

3. A general love of local commerce. Sure, no doubt. But that’s not really what we’re arguing. Hollywood Express had a local video store in Central Square in Cambridge, which went out of business because of (among other things) Netflix and YouTube and Hulu and Vimeo. It was an outmoded business model. The Hollywood Express was replaced by Life Alive, a delightful restaurant whose first outpost was in Lowell. An outmoded business was replaced with a business that still makes sense. If local bookstores don’t make sense, replace them with local businesses that do. It’s not as though the alternative to the Harvard Book Store is the Wal-Martization of Cambridge.

But as I said, I spend a good chunk of money at HBS, and I intend to continue to do so, irrationally or not. Anyone want to convince me that it’s actually rational to spend my dollars at HBS rather than spend less money at Amazon and redirect the surplus to other worthy local businesses?

__P.S.__: Writing this out has really made me question whether I *want to* continue spending money at HBS.

__P.P.S.__: My friend Josh, on Facebook, made a good argument in local bookstores’ favor: they, and local cafés, are places where like like-minded people congregate. If you really love books, you’re likely to buy from a local bookstore rather than, say, from a grocery store. And if you love coffee, you’ll go to a place where others who love coffee go. Josh prefers to support the places that support real lovers of the book (and of the cup). I do, too. This seems like an excellent argument in HBS’s favor.

One counterargument is that this is a temporary state of the world, and that the market always wins. People will increasingly be buying their books on e-readers like Kindles, or from Amazon, so as time goes on fewer and fewer book lovers will buy books from places that self-identify as “book lovers’ retailers”. As the community moves elsewhere, these places lose their character.

But of course that’s a ways off, and in the meantime we should support homes for that kind of community.

Because Backbar, in Somerville’s Union Square, is remarkably un-webbable, I give the world this

December 31, 2011/stevereads/Leave a comment

Backbar, in the Union Square neighborhood of Somerville, is on Facebook, but I’ll be danged if I can find their website through any combination of reasonable search terms. So let’s try this:

* Backbar is on the web.

* You can find directions to Backbar, and even a map!

Perhaps this will do some good. I see that the indispensable Boston Restaurant Talk included Backbar’s URL, but for some reason didn’t actually provide the link.

Quick note on Boston-area ramen

October 12, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

I’ve had ramen now at two Boston-area establishments: Sapporo, within the Porter Exchange; and now Ken’s, within the Super 88 Market in Allston. I’d heard from multiple sources that Ken’s was the best around here, but I was sorely disappointed. One item on the menu advertised a rather more intense pork flavor, and the waiter recommended that, so I got it. It was not intense. The broth was thin and uninspiring. The only real plus side to their ramen was the combination of boiled egg and nori. Plus the noodles were maybe a bit more substantial than Sapporo’s.

Sapporo … I’m kind of obsessed. They advertise their broth as being filled with “rich collagen” after cooking for “over ten hours.” It really is an intense, flavorful, buttery, full-bodied broth. That’s broth you want to bring home to mother. But you wouldn’t, is the thing, because it is soup rather than a person.

Next time I’m at Sapporo, I’ll ask them if they can throw in a couple sheets of nori to their house ramen. With that added, it won’t even be a contest.

__P.S.__: I need to check out Men Tei, it seems. I’m always glad to explore the area’s ramen.

__P.P.S. (14 October 2010)__: Verdict on Men Tei: Nice noodles, and a lot of noodles, but uninspiring broth. Also not much *in* the broth. I got the pork cutlet, which definitely felt as though it came from a package of frozen cutlets. This is of a piece with the octopus balls, which people on ChowHound suggests really do come from a frozen package. Men Tei seems to have very little kitchen at all, so this isn’t surprising. But in any case: nothing to write home about. I think my Sapporo homecoming will come soon.

The abridged O Ya report

March 18, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Stephanie and I went to O Ya last night, one of the items on the Laniel 2K10 Post-Full-Time World Dominance (aka Y’All Just Rentin’ This World From Me) Tour. [1] [2] I hope it’s not gauche of me to sum it up as “good, but not $267.56-per-person-with-drinks-and-tax-and-tip good.” I mean, a meal has to be pretty over-the-top good to be worth that. I’ve not yet had a meal at that price range that justified itself.

The last time I was in that price range was at L’Espalier, where the meal ended up costing about $750 in total for two people — so far above and beyond the realm of the comprehensible that we could only laugh. In fact Stephanie and I laughed about that one for the next 20 minutes as we walked away from the place. And the food wasn’t even that outstanding: of the 10 or so courses that L’Espalier brought us, two were really outstanding; they overwhelmed us with tastes and textures flowing over our palates more quickly than we could process them. There was smoky, crunchy, popping, astringent, smooth, fatty, liquid, and dense, all at once. This little one-ounce morsel was something I wanted to spend the next hour eating, though it would still have left me in the same dazed state.

But still, I must return to the moral: $750 for a meal that was 20% overwhelming?

O Ya was similar, though less absurd for a couple reasons. First, I knew going in that it would cost about what it came to. Second, O Ya doesn’t try as hard to make you think that you’re having a Fine Dining Experience: rather than L’Espalier’s sumptuous opulence, O Ya looks like a relaxed Japanese bar. O Ya’s exterior door is, on first glance, so dingy-looking that I assumed it was the entrance to a run-down warehouse rather than to an exalted restaurant. (On closer inspection, the door is supposed to remind you of the entrance to a humble Japanese home. It’s a very nice touch, in retrospect.) Inside, they’re playing rock music, and the chef is bouncing his head in time with the music.

The chef, I should note, isn’t doing all the things you expect a sushi chef to do: he’s not assembling rice balls or cutting large filets of fish from a newly dead animal; those jobs are left to the servants, who are off in a mostly obscured kitchen. They would periodically come out and receive a scornful glance from the chef, who clearly functions as the [foreign: prima donna] in this opera.

Anyway, to the food: 16 courses, each two bites (one for me, and one for my lovely dining companion). Most were standard sushi-sized pieces of fish, drizzled with oils, topped with preserved Japanese oranges, and so forth. They were delicious. But (and again, I feel like a clod for saying this) not $500 delicious. One particular dish was a few pieces of Japanese beef, seared, dressed with just the right amount of salt, and served atop a special (artisanal? heirloom? [foreign: sous vide]?) potato chip. This dish on its own was $61. There is just no reason for that.

I wish I didn’t have to spend this much time discussing the money aspect. I actually didn’t spend much time during the meal thinking of it: I knew going in that it would cost that much, and I didn’t want to spoil the mood. Plus I was there with my girlfriend, who is my favorite dining partner in the world [3]. And in one or two cases, the dishes were so good that my eyes actually rolled back into my head. But for $500, your eyes should do something even more awesome, like evaporate and re-coalesce, or colonize Mars.

Honestly, if you’re looking to have a really special meal around here with a loved on, there are better bets: Craigie on Main for extraordinary food (Excuse me? 10-course *vegan* tasting menu?) in a boisterous atmosphere with some of the best cocktails in the city; Oleana for a more subdued, self-consciously exquisite meal; or Number 9 Park if you want to go all out.

When O Ya sets its prices that high, it gives itself an entrance exam that it then proceeds to flunk.

[1] – Uh, yeah, I might could have mentioned that they hired me full-time.

[2] – We’re going to the Bahamas at the end of this month — the second bullet on the Y’all Be Rentin’ Tour.

[3] – You also will never find a better person with whom to watch a movie on the big screen. There’s a particular “Stephanie’s jaw agape” photo that I’ve surreptitiously taken five or ten times now in the theatre; it never ceases to make me smile.

The MBTA doesn’t want my money

March 15, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

One thing I’ve always found weird about the T is that you can’t buy a monthly pass whenever you want. Suppose that on the last day of February, I decided that I wanted to get a monthly pass for February. That’s $60. Surely no one in his right mind would do that, right? But suppose I wanted to. Why would the MBTA stop me from giving them $60 for a day’s worth of rides?

Likewise, I have this habit where, if I get a small windfall (a particularly large contracting check, say), I try to find upcoming expenses that I should pay so that the money doesn’t burn a hole in my pocket. So I was in the T station the other day and decided that I’d put April’s T pass on my CharlieCard. The machine told me that I couldn’t do this, because only tickets up to March were available.

Suppose I wanted to buy passes a year in advance. Why wouldn’t the MBTA want that? They’d get about 720 of my hard-earned dollars, which they could put in a bank and earn interest on. I guess they’d have to add a bit more code to their kiosks, but that seems like a small price to pay.

While they’re at it, how about allowing recurring payments through their website, so that I don’t even *have to* interact with their kiosks?

Oh, and also: how about having their commuter-rail-ticket-dispensing machines ask you which *town* you’re going to, rather than which *zone?* I have no idea which towns are in which zones.

Boston Phoenix, you need more best-coffeeshop nominees

February 26, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

Dear [newspaper: Phoenix]:

Here’s your list of available local coffeeshops:

1. Ula Caf
2. 1369 Coffee House
3. Diesel Cafe
4. 2nd Cup Caf
5. Espresso Royale Caffe
6. True Grounds

You are missing so many cafés. 1369 isn’t even the best café in Central Square; that honor has to go to Toscanini’s. Up in Harvard Square is Café Pamplona, which possibly had the first espresso maker in Cambridge. A bit further into Harvard Square is Crema. A 10-minute walk up the street toward Porter is Simon’s.

Head the other way, into Boston. In Post Office Square you have Sip Café. Right next to North Station you have the world-class Equal Exchange Café. It’s a particularly egregious sin to leave out EECafé.

[foreign: J’accuse!] and other such condemnations. Waggy finger of disapproval and all that.

Some recent, scattered discoveries about Boston bars

February 14, 2010/stevereads/Leave a comment

* I’m half-convinced that the notion of a “bar” is like a “nation” or a “corporation”: a conceptual fiction masking lots of variety underneath. The real atom of a bar is the bartender. This rather shocking discovery came to me after visiting Clio with a friend, and encountering a bartender who was not-Todd. Todd is amazing. All Clio bartenders who are not-Todd are now suspect.

* I get the feeling that Drink is, in the above regard, [foreign: sui generis]. Every bartender at Drink makes spectacular cocktails. I have ordered many a cocktail from Drink, from many a bartender; all have been amazing. I like having the confidence to order from any of their bartenders and know that I’ll enjoy what I get. Though try to get Scott. Scott is awesome.

* I should note, by the way, that if you’re reading this blog, if you’ve not met me, and if you’re in the Boston area, we should grab a cocktail at Drink.

* I ordered a rye flip from the not-Todd bartender at Clio. It was pretty poor; she confessed that it had been a long time since she’d made one. I had never had one before, but I could only assume that rye flips had to be better than that. It tasted like a thickened and diluted glass of whiskey. When I ordered the same drink from Drink last night, they made it with rye, a raw egg, and a blend of spices that they concocted on their own; it tasted like a very eggy — in a delicious way — glass of eggnog. This seems more in keeping with how J. Random Website describes a rye flip.

* My friend Scott tells me to try this experiment:

> Try making a familiar drink, such as standard margarita — 2:1:1 of tequila, cointreau, lime juice. Now make another one with an egg white in it (shake very vigorously). Taste them side by side to see the effect.

* Speaking of shaking drinks vigorously, that seems important to the egg-based drinks. Without a vigorous shaking, the alcohol and the egg separate. Some bar around here made me a pisco sour that was insufficiently shaken; I got a cocktail that was half egg, half pisco, never the twain meeting.

* Eastern Standard Kitchen also never harmed anyone. Though I’ve not plumbed their depths nearly as much as I should have.

* Rendezvous in Central Square was earth-shatteringly good one night when illustrious SteveReads contributor mrz and I went there together. The drinks were spectacular but the food only so-so, so the next time we went back we decided to sit at the bar and only consume their drinks. The bartender was supercilious and not all that great at his job. Plus they were missing the cigar bitters this time around. I was disappointed. If I’m going to spend $10 on a drink, it practically ought to contain precious metals, and they ought to deliver it with a striptease. Or at least a smile.

I think the moral from that second trip to Rendezvous is a restatement of the first bullet: get to know your bartender.

Steve Reads

Category: Boston