Soeurved » Ordering Out

The North End, Boston

CJR — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:52:46 +0000

Itinerary: lunch at Neptune Oyster, dessert at Modern Pastry

Seems like it’s hard to go wrong at Neptune Oyster. My only complaint was the stingy portion of sea urchin from the raw bar. We split one traditional and one Maine (hot with butter) lobster roll. Consensus was that the traditional was better, but that’s more a question of personal preference than quality of execution. One more word of advice: it’s a small space with limited seating capacity, so get there early. And don’t drive because it’s hard to park without a residential sticker.

Modern Pastry: you know what you came for. Keep your eye on the ball, and stick to the classics. Coffee, cannoli, and half moon cookies. These light, freshly frosted black and white cookies are a different species entirely from the pre-packaged bastardizations you find in delis.

Eleven Madison Park

CJR — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:51:19 +0000

This year marked a milestone birthday for me, and I commemorated the day with dinner at Eleven Madison Park. We began with cocktails at the bar, sat down at our table at 8:45, wavered between the “Three-Course Prix Fixe” and the eleven-course “Gourmand,” and lumbered out the doors, eleven courses later, around 1:00 AM. The Gourmand is a blind tasting, meaning chef’s selection, no written menu. Kudos Daniel Humm—our meal was superb. The restaurant sent me home with two boxes of petit fours and this personalized print of the menu:

Stone Crabs

CJR — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:04:18 +0000

Good food often tastes like the past to me. In fact, I think taste is my most nostalgic sense, even more so than smell. I spent the first week of December in Miami. Despite two recent articles in the New York Times and T Magazine lauding Miami as a gastronomical destination, the restaurants there disappointed me. Sure, I enjoyed my “Pulled Pork Sandwich with pickled red onion, creamy cucumbers & parsley sauce” at Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink, but not enough to forgive the 40-minute wait or the Pottery Barn-esque decor. Same thing at 8oz Burger Bar. The turkey burger was flavorful, but the TV-plastered walls and black leather banquette recalled a midwestern chain restaurant (the kind I would have begged my mom to take me when I was 12). My favorite meal came from Joe’s Stone Crab—an order of 5 large (albeit pre-cracked) stone crabs with “their famous” mustard sauce. I grew up eating stone crabs from Placida Fish Market near Boca Grande, Florida; squeezing the cracker as hard as I could with both hands to get at the meat inside; extracting the black-tipped claw slowly, so it came out in one piece; and dunking the flesh in my grandmother’s famous mustard sauce. Before my visit to Joe’s, I hadn’t eaten stone crabs for at least ten years—before my grandmother sold “the Beach House” on Gasparilla Island. Sharing my order of Joe’s claws with someone who had never eaten them before, I realized that, although stone crabs are delicious, they basically taste like other crabs. Unless they are infused with nostalgia. Then they are untouchable.

DQ

CJR — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:40:27 +0000

How to order Dairy Queen like a Pro

If you don’t mind browbeating the teenager behind the counter: “One small cup of vanilla with butterscotch dip and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups on top” (official rules prohibit employees from using candy as toppings, as opposed to mix-ins)

If you laugh in the face of bloat: “One medium butterscotch malted”

If you promised your dog the leftovers: “One vanilla kiddie cone with butterscotch dip” (eat only the ice cream, not the cone, and make sure to save the paper)