heading south. maine to nyc
Well the season in Maine has ended and I have spent the past five days journeying home from Maine, stopping for 2 nights in Boston and spending four nights in nyc before heading to San Francisco tomorrow! Here is my take on two days experiencing some food in Beantown.
Danny, Josh and I headed to Watertown, MA to stay with Rachel for two nights, but also to try some food in and around the Boston area. The night we arrived in Watertown, we dragged Rachel to the South End to a trendy tapas eatery that has a great sounding menu, full of all kinds of interesting dishes that seemed to have an equally as interesting cocktail list. We waited for about 20 minutes for a table (on a Monday night at 830) and sipped some pretty decent Pisco Sours. Once we were seated at the table the four of us could immediately identify at least 15 tapas items that sounded both enticing and interesting. We decided to start with five menu items to pace ourselves. This turned out to be a great decision by the group. Of the first few dishes we tried all were under seasoned. It seemed as though not one cook had tasted the food they were serving.(a nig no, no) A razor clam, done simply on the flattop was like chewing on a large rubber band. Fried sweetbreads were over coated and way over cooked. The soft pillow like texture a well cooked sweetbread can posses in this version was grainy and unpleasantly dense, made worse by the overly crunchy and sweet sauce coating around it. (think really bad fried sesame chicken from a chinese take out) We decided to give the kitchen one more try, ordering a few more dishes. Unfortunately our first round of food was not a fluke. The next round of food fell into the same vein as the previous. We did have one great bite of food which was the garnish to the salt cod fritters. A round slice of lemon had the actual fruit removed form the center and was battered and deep fried. I could have eaten a bag of them. We left this meal greatly disappointed and still hungry, needless to say we went back to Rachel’s apartment and ordered in some chinese food.
The next day we headed to Sofra for some lunch. This great “coffee shop” in Cambridge is run and owned by Ana Sortun of Oleana fame. This place is really special. They serve Middle Eastern influenced breakfast, lunch and pastries and everything is truly delicious. We started with kholrabi pancakes (think cheesy, tender latke) followed by schwarma sandwiches done on their Lebanese style metal drum grills.
After lunch we headed further into Cambridge to check out Christina’s spice store which conveniently has an ice cream shop attached. After looking at some spices and a purchase of dried chili threads and tonka beans we headed next door to the ice cream store which featured over 100 flavors of ice cream. We sampled with carrot cake, the burnt sugar and the khulfi. All were pretty delicious. The khulfi was a bit heavy on the black cardamom which caused it’s flavor to linger throughout most of the day.
Finally, our last dinner in Boston was at a place I had been looking forward to eating at for a while. The service was great, our server was really fantastic. The meal started off great with 2 phenomenal appetizers, but after that, things took a drastic turn for the worse. After the first 2 courses we probably had 12 other dishes from the menu on our table at different points during the evening and well….i’m going to be as polite as possible here… The service was great.
So Boston, I challenge you to feed me great food.
