Archive for the “urbanism” Category

Just about two years ago, I wrote about Cambridge’s Cronin Park, a triangle of green near Central Square. These days, location-based stuff is all the rage, and I was pleased to note that Cronin Park is a place on Foursquare.  I quickly became the mayor.

But when I was taking screenshots for this post, I noticed that something was off. Foursquare’s Cronin Park pin, if you zoom in on it, turns out to be across the street from the actual place – in an adjacent green patch that is authoritatively labeled by Google Maps as… James Cronin Park.  Didn’t I add James Cronin Park to Google Maps two years ago?  What gives?

A search for “Cronin Park” shows two places: map point A is next to Google’s mislabeled Cronin Park; map point B is the center of the actual Cronin Park as added to the map by yours truly in 2008.  Indeed, you can see my car parked across from the park on Franklin street.

Just to make sure, I visited the site today, and “my” Cronin Park – the triangular one – is indeed, still James P. Cronin Park, still marked by a big rock with a plaque on it.  The park across Franklin Street has no name that I could find on site, but it seems to have been anointed by Google Maps.  Neither place is mentioned at the City of Cambridge’s DPW page of parks or shown on the Park Maintenance district 2 map.

What does this all mean?  Probably not much you didn’t already know.  Google Maps isn’t perfect, crowdsourcing with curation cuts both ways, the City of Cambridge website isn’t encyclopedic.  We’ll see if this post or my efforts with Google and Foursquare make any progress in getting Cronin Park properly located and noted.  In the mean time, be sure to check in if you’re passing by.

A lot of the people who said that microblogging or Twitter was the Big Thing of 2008 or 2009 are saying that location or Foursquare is the Big Thing of 2010 or beyond.  I don’t know if Foursquare is played yet, or if Twitter already has jumped the shark, but I’m starting to worry that the actual, physical concept of location might be on the way out as businesses evaporate from downtowns, especially in my own Central Square.

Earlier this week, I noted a bit in xconomy singing the praises of Central Square as a new startup hub, singling out a particular office building and featuring a couple of its startuppy tenants.  I’m all for it, having previously noted Beta House and OpenCoffee among others.  Plus, Central is home to Harmonix Music.  Good news, to be sure.

But the day before that article, Hollywood Express closed their Central Square store, adding to a distressing list of businesses vacating Central Square and its environs.  In fact, I was both pleased and saddened to discover an entire blog devoted to the disappearance of businesses along Cambridge’s Massachusetts Avenue.  Compare for example my February 2009 post on the decline of the furniture cluster to Empty Mass Ave’s post on the same topic in February of this year.  Apparently, we’re all in this together.  Empty retail space around Central now includes the long-gone Gap, Pearl Paint, all those furniture stores, the space next to the Central Square Theater, and I’m sure more.

The other good news is that restaurants seem to be thriving even as retail suffers – Rendezvous, Four Burgers, Craigie on Main and Garden at the Cellar are all great –  but I can’t help worry that we need a bit of everything to make a neighborhood that all those fancy startup types will actually want to inhabit.

We can blame the economy for some closures, especially the furniture stores.  We can blame changes in technology and media for the demise of record stores, video stores and maybe even bookstores. We can blame landlords, that’s always popular.  I think we often forget to blame ourselves for not shopping, working and doing business enough in our own neighborhoods and cities.

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.

Ever wonder what the difference between tortellini and tortelloni is?  Scale.  Stuff with -ini are small and stuff with -oni are large.  And you probably know that stuff with -issimo is superlative – biggest, bestest, most expensive, and so forth.

So you can imagine my interest in an event called POLENTONISSIMO.  Something about the most giant polenta.  In Dorchester.  How cool is that?  Just look at this giant polenta.  Just look at it!  And that’s after 20 people stuffed themselves.

To give you an idea of scale, you can see part of the Ashmont MBTA station at the lower left and a military-issue parachute at the top right.

OK, I exaggerate a bit.  Anyway, the point is, chefs Max Thompson and Chris Douglas brought a Pietdmontese tradition to Tavolo in Dorchester.  The story goes something like this:

Well, the legend goes a little something like this: in sixteenth century Piedmont a little band of coppersmiths got stranded in the teeny village of Monastero Bormida thanks to a pesky spring storm. They asked and received edible aid from the Marquis in the form of maize, flour, eggs, onions and sausage, which they then cooked into frittatas and a gigantic polenta. And thus Polentonissimo, an annual celebration of this fable, was born.

Now you know.  Apparently, in Italy, these gigantic polenta can run into the metric tons.  My grasp of Italian units of measure has been called into question in the past (witness the terrible Florentine steak error of 2003 and the unfortunate Chianti mis-estimation of 2006), but I’m sure you get the idea.

Arriving a bit late with Prof. M, I was just in time to see Douglas and Thompson add a stunning amount of butter to a huge vat of cornmeal mush.  They went on to make sausage right before our eyes (it’s true what they say about the making of sausage, by the way) and concoct a red sauce with perfectly poached eggs.  Look at the results, just look at them!

As if that wasn’t enough – and believe me, it was a dayenu-level of sufficiency – there were starters and dessert too.  Among the starters was frico, a delightful Friulian cheese and potato pancake.  I would happily truck out to Tavolo for Friconissimo if such were offered.  Dessert was a perfect trio of gelato – chocolate, hazelnut and pistachio.

So Cambervillians (and Cambervillans) who never cross the river, there’s some good reasons to find out about the pot of polenta at the end of the red line.