Archive for the “culture” Category

I’ve spent some time analyzing the comparison of the Mass Bay area with the SF Bay Area, and occasionally even commented on the Red Sox – Yankees rivalry, but a recent trip to Europe has brought to the fore another instructive comparison.

You may not realize it, but it turns out that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is almost exactly the same size as the autonomous Italian region of Sicily – 10,555 and 9,926 square miles respectively.  Mass has the edge in population – 6.5 million vs 5 million – but that won’t stop me from pointing out…. five reasons why Sicily is better than Massachusetts:

Sicily has the largest active volcano in Europe. (That’s Mt. Etna, which is 10,890 feet high) Massachusetts has the largest Federal highway project in the USA.  (That’s the Big Dig, which is about $22 Billion deep)

In Sicily, shops close in the afternoon for a long lunch. In Massachusetts, banks and bars close early.

Sicily was colonized by the ancient Greeks over 2,000 years ago and later became an important part of the Roman empire. Many of the events in the Iliad and the Odyssey take place in Sicily.  Massachusetts was colonized by uptight English religious fanatics 400 years ago.  Many of the events in Ally McBeal take place in Massachusetts.

In Sicily, you can get a good espresso almost anywhere for about a Euro. In Massachusetts, you can get Dunkin Donuts coffee almost anywhere.

Sicily gave the world the Cannoli. Massachusetts contributed, um, well, there’s no cuisine section in the wikipedia entry on Massachusetts, so I’ll just stop here.

You know how some locations just seem cursed?  Those odd retail or restaurant locations that just can’t seem to support a business no matter what?  Sometimes it becomes a sport to guess how long the next one will last and sometimes you just stop bothering to even try.  That used to be the case at 187 Elm Street in Somerville, just a bit too far out of Davis Square and not quite close enough to Porter.  In my memory it’s been Carberrys, O’Naturals, Boloco, and Green Tomato at least.  And now it’s Pizzeria Posto, and I think the curse might be kaput.

Posto is a Neapolitan-focused slow-food influenced joint with a wood-burning pizza oven, a wine bar, and several impressive menu items beyond pizza.  It’s been packed on each of my three visits. The minimalist website is little more than menus and links to Facebook and Twitter – an interesting development I’m seeing more and more for businesses.

1. Pizzeria

Pizza is Posto’s main attraction.  They serve just one size, a generous personal pizza, in ten classical and modern varieties with a handful of options from $12 for the Margherita to $18 for some of the fancier pies, with some add-ons that can take you to $25 and beyond.  Fresh farm egg, anybody?  The ingredients are top-notch and the crust is about right on the chewy-crispy continuum.  I keep meaning to ask for mine well done to get more of the wood-fired char.  Maybe next time.

2. Vinoteca

With 19 red wines by the glass (yea, and some whites and pinks and fizzies too), this is a pretty serious wine bar.  What really impressed me was the mix of prices – you can get a decent glass of wine for $5  In fact there are four reds and six whites for under $10 a glass.  And there are some $20/glass reds too.  The only odd thing – and maybe it’s only odd to geeks like me – is that there’s a gap in the red wine price curve between $6 and $11.  Random omission, statistical aberration, sinister anchoring ploy?  Who cares – drink up.

3. Et Cetera

Posto offers some attractive appetizers, including some nice arancini, classic calamari, and a delicious burata.  They also offer some crispy fried pig’s ear.  Yes, you read that right.  Like the saying goes, you can’t deep-fry a silk purse.

With sea salt and lime, how could I resist?  Well, let’s just say it’s probably nor for everybody. There’s a real difference in the texture of the thin end of the ear and the thick end, and I’m not sure if either one is what I had in mind.  But I’m glad I tried it and for $7 it was well worth checking out.  There’s no shortage of other pig parts on the menu, from roast pork and prosciutto on the pizzas to guanciale (that’s jowl, folks) in one of the pasta dishes.

4. Pasta?

I’ve tried two of the three pasta dishes on the menu.  Very impressive for a pizza joint, but it’s obvious that we’re not dealing with a regular pizza joint here.  Agnolotti with veal, chard and savory herbs were delicately lemony and beautifully hand-made.  Tagliatelle with braised rabbit, fava beans and peas was also a spring-themed winner.

5. Basta!

Yes, there’s even dessert.  They make their own cannoli, of which I was initially suspicious – how could one restaurant do all this?  Well, for $5 I ended up with two good-sized cannoli.  No silly dipped shells, no campy candied fruit, just the shell, the cheese and the powdered sugar, folks.

Time will tell if Posto can overcome geographic destiny, but I’m rooting for it.

I recently posted about an amazing vegetarian meal I had in Chicago at Green Zebra, and pondered why such a high-end vegetarian restaurant somehow exists in Chicago but not Boston.  I stick by my assessment that there’s nothing quite like Green Zebra around here, but let’s spend some time seeing what’s sort of like it.  For more why isn’t Boston more like someplace else soul-searching, see last month’s post Talent Wants to be Free.

First things first.  Vegetarian food is available.  You can make it yourself, for one thing.  Between pizza, burritos and falafel, no vegetarian is going hungry anywhere around here.  But what I’m looking for is a sit-down dinner, white tablecloth, table service, wine list, grownup restaurant where vegetarians get more than one or two choices.  Preferably places where the menu is seasonal and local too. So what does the greater Boston area have to offer?

OpenTable (far from exhaustive, but pretty good for the nicer places) gives just one search result for “vegetarian” and that’s Tantric Indian Bistro.  Like most if not all Indian restaurants, Tantric has a selection of vegetarian options but does not otherwise qualify as a vegetarian restaurant.  If they are listed as vegetarian, lots more places on OpenTable should be too.  For my Indian restaurant money, veg or otherwise, I prefer downscale Punjabi Dhaba or upscale Tanjore.

Elephant Walk (Boston, Waltham and Cambridge) is worth mentioning for a good list of vegan items, most but not all of them on the Cambodian side of the French-Cambodian menu.

Vegan options are a whole other discussion, and almost all the “fine” veggie options I’m discussing are reliant on dairy and eggs, but I’ll call out Grasshopper in Allston and Grezzo in the North End.  Grasshopper is of the possibly-buddhist “mock meat” school where you can order “chicken teriyaki” on the menu and get some seitan-simulation thereof.  If that’s your thing, you’ve lucked out.  If not, you may find it disturbing on many levels.  Grezzo is not just vegan, it’s raw.  Nothing is cooked anywhere near boiling.  If that’s your thing, you’ve lucked out.  If not, you may find it disturbing on many levels.

I haven’t personally tried either Veggie Planet at Club Passim or the new Pulse Cafe vegan place near Davis but neither seems to be what I’m looking for.

As an omnivore with both friends all over the eating map, and also as somebody who’s trying to pay attention to what I’m eating, my ideal choice would be a place that serves a reasonable variety of options – like the Indian places, but more upscale, seasonal, local and of course, with a good wine list.  In this category I nominate VeeVee in Jamaica Plan.  ”Vee Vee serves mid-priced, modern American food, with a focus on fresh seafood, vegetables and grains. The menu, which will change seasonally, features local products whenever possible.”  So says their website, but they may have backslid on the meatwagon a bit – of the six entrees on the menu right now, three are fish, two have no evident animal parts and one is a pork shank. Even Green Zebra in Chicago has one or two seafood items on the menu most of the time.

In this vein, we also have to discuss omnivore restaurants that have off-menu or little-known vegetarian options. The better a restaurant, the more likely it is that the chef will accommodate diners’ preferences when possible.  Sure, lots of fancy places play the “no substitutions” game, but I find that the very best will do almost anything, especially if you give some notice.  (By the way, asking for a substitution or a change is a surefire way to find out what’s made to order and what’s been stewing since yesterday!) Here are some that I’ve noted.

Craigie Street Bistrot – now Craigie on Main – is well-known for an “everything but the squeal” approach to eating a pig, but they also have a superb vegetarian tasting menu buried in a footnote on the menu.  It seems to be chef’s whim of six or ten courses for the same price as the omnivore version, $90 and $115 respectively.

Bergamot – the newcomer to EVOO’s old space near Inman square – offers a $20 vegetarian entree that for some reason is not printed on the menu.  They were willing to serve the nuts on the side with several dishes so I have to assume they would also make meatless versions where practical.

Upstairs on the Square offers five and seven course vegetarian tastings with optional wine pairings ($55-$115) which are very very nice.

Ten Tables (Cambridge and JP) offers a four-course (three savory and a dessert) vegetarian tasting for the remarkable price of $30 (Cambridge, where the omnivore version is $40), and at least the JP location will whip up a vegan version with 24 hours notice.  I had the vegetarian version earlier this week in Cambridge and it was wonderful – first of the season english peas in a lettuce salad, cavatelli with wild mushroom ragout and pea tendrils, purple potatoes, squash and radicchio with spinach puree, and for desserts, chocolate terrine with sea salt and basil ice cream and toasted pound cake with jam and cream. (It’s extra nice that even when the whole table had to order the tasting, we got two different desserts at the end)  I must say that I missed the sardines from the regular menu, but three veggie courses left us more than full.

And there are plenty more like those.  They don’t quite fill the bill because there’s essentially just one vegetarian option, but the multiple courses and ever-changing nature of that one item makes it a good choice if you go once or twice a season or less.  And with prices like those, who goes that much more often?

So we’re still on the hunt for the Green Zebra experience in the hub, but it seems there’s still a lot of meatless fun to be had here.

I was editing a blog post at work the other day –  it may surprise you to learn that writing this blog is not my job – and I amended “the data says” to “the data say” because as everybody pedant knows, “data” is the plural of “datum.” I didn’t think much more about it.

Then somebody “corrected” me and said it was wrong.  I fired back some citation or other and didn’t think much more about it.

Then a consultant making a pitch for our business chided us in his pitch presentation on our lousy grammar by citing that very post. (Dear consultant guy: 1. you really should make sure your client is unambiguously in the wrong, and 2. there’s a sentence fragment in the middle of your own blog post on the subject of grammar. At least we agree that grammar counts.)

Every geometer knows that two points determine a line, and now – counting the original author – I had at least two smart people saying that data should take a singular verb.  I needed to think more about this.

There’s plenty of evidence that I was right to write “the data say” but also plenty that “the data says” is not wrong. The estimable Grammar Girl has a good blog post that begins by complicating things – it’s not about data being singular or plural; it’s about data being or not being a mass noun – and ends with some good guidance about picking your path and sticking to it.

I’ve come around to a different idea.  Using a possibly controversial construction is a no-win situation.  You either earn points with antiquarian scholars and sound overwrought, or you please the crowd and sound dull to the nitpicky.  It’s a bit like the forcefully correct use of “whom.” Either way you risk some people thinking you’re careless or ignorant.  If you’re got a sentence, especially a headline or title, that forces the reader to think about whether a word in it is right or wrong, I think it’s time to choose a different word or write a different sentence.

Perhaps instead of

…the data say… or …the data says…

we might try

…the survey says… or …my research reveals… or …4 out of 5 dentists agree…

Have I given in to the forces of the incorrect by avoiding the issue?  I hope not.  I don’t suggest anybody stop correcting errors of “you’re” vs “your” or allowing “alot” to slide by for “a lot” but when there’s room for common usage to differ from correct usage or where usage is evolving, making your readers think about grammar instead of reading and digesting your point is a bad idea.

I couldn’t help but notice the estimable Jason Scott’s profane and precise review of the new(ish) US passport design, not least for his use of the word “glurge.”  I completely agree, and the RFID chip makes me sad, too.

The Mac’s dictionary app drew an amusing blank, and the OSPD claims ignorance of glurge.

It turns out that glurge comes from Snopes.com, the great debunking website.  I quote therefrom:

Glurge is a term specific to snopes.com, coined in 1998… The word was invented by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with this site. At a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, she fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.

Glurge … is the body of inspirational tales which conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and which undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering “true stories.” Glurge often contains such heart-tugging elements as sad-eyed puppies, sweet-faced children, angels, dying mothers, or miraculous rescues brought about by prayer. These stories are meant to be parables for modern times but fall far short of the mark.

So now you know.