Posts Tagged “north end”

Talking pastry with stylish eyed media maven M, I heard her kvell about  something called “shfooyadell” which I had never heard of.  Or so I thought.  It turns out that we were talking about sfogliatelle in a more casual – and probably realistic – pronunciation than I was used to.  However you want to say it, sfogliatelle are delicious.

Many swear by Modern Pastry – and they are very good – but this example came from Maria’s Pastry Shop.  I’ll be running a head-to-head comparison as soon as I get clearance from my cardiologist.  The sfogliatelle has its origins in Naples and is made of flaky dough in many layers filled with a citrusy cheese mixed with sugar and eggs, sort of like the stuff in a cannoli.

Some pastry shop offer something called a Lobster Tail in addition to (Modern) or instead of (Lyndells) sfogliatelle, but I find those to be much less interesting, too large and too creamy.  Apparently, they are an American creation adapting the Italian sfogliatelle.

At Maria’s there were only the original sfogliatelle, crisp and flaky with just the right amount of orange lemon flavor.  There’s also a cat, named cookie, which I think is a plus in a neighborhood business.

After a brief tour of St. Lucy’s feast, I was joined by Professor M at Nebo, a a nice little enoteca and restaurant at the cusp of the North End.  We enjoyed a crisp Gavi bianco, eggplant timballo and a pizza bianco con rucola.

Next to the bar was a painting that looked oddly familiar and we racked our brains but couldn’t quite place it except that it had something to do with the PRC.  We asked the waiter and he brought us the names of the artists of both sets of paintings in the restaurant.

On the far wall were three by Arlayne Peterson, landscapes with an inset of another version of the same landscape, but those weren’t the ones we were wondering about.

Next to the bar, the painting was by Richard Ehrlich, depicting the interior of a house filled several feet deep with sand.  Both artists are represented by the Miller Block gallery on Newbury street, but neither one quite rang the bell.

Hours later with a little googling and distance, I finally realized — I had seen photographs of the same sand house (in Namibia) by Cary Wolinsky at the PRC’s satellite at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics.  Small art world indeed.

I suppose the sand houses of Namibia might be like the Slot Canyons, one of those iconic spots that lots of photographers have shot over the years.  A quick Flickr search shows enough slot canyons and sand houses to fill a class on postmodernism.

A scene from St. Lucy’s feast, a somewhat less grand appendix to St. Anthony’s feast held in the same North End streets.

I managed to get some decent sound this time. For those keeping track, St. Lucy is patron(ness?) of the blind and often pictured holding a dish with her eyes on it.

What’s better than rice? Risotto.  What’s better than risotto? Fried risotto, that’s what.  Fried balls of rice with cheese, meat and sometimes other stuffings are called arancini (“little oranges”) in Italy, and I was lucky enough to stumble upon some at St. Anthony’s Feast in Boston’s North End this weekend.  It’s like a Brigadoon where old immigrant Italian-America comes back to life for a few nights.

I enjoyed a baseball-sized arancino with spinach and some tomato sauce, and some wonderfully light fried calamari.  Besides arancini and calamari, there was an array of pizza, pasta, sausage and pepper sandwiches, and gelato, plus a healthy (well, probably not that healthy) dose of not-so-Italian dishes like fried dough and cherrystone clams.

Saint Anthony, or Santo Antonio di Padova della Montefalcone as the local Boston version has him, was paraded through the street first in banner form and then as a larger than life-sized statue garlanded with banners of money and watches.  I think the watches are symbolic of St. Anthony’s job as the patron of finding lost things and people.

The grand procession started with a prayer in Italian and English, then at a signal, a confetti canon was fired and St. Anthony was on the move.

Boston’s North End is home to a series of feasts and festivals all summer long, and there are just a couple more, but St Anthony’s Feast is often cited as the largest Italian religious festival in the US.  St. Lucy is up next on Monday – don’t miss her if you’re having trouble seeing.

I had been tipped off to the opening of a new deli in the North End, and despite being rather skeptical of a new business that calls itself “famous,” I checked out Nick Varano’s Famous Deli at lunch today.  I ordered pastrami.  Hot, on rye, no funny business. The place was staking a pretty good claim on oldness, but it was the cleanest, newest old restaurant I’ve seen in a while.  The walls were papered with shiny new old posters and the television was playing one of the greatest movies ever made, The Godfather, Part II – the scene with the gold phone.  And the sandwich?

Unlike a classic New York deli sandwich, this one was of an edible size.  Unfortunately the meat seemed to have been selected by a cardiologist – way too lean and lacking the characteristic blackened pastrami edges, too.  Not sure what’s up with that.  The taste was pretty much right on though, and the bread was the usual unimpressive deli stuff.   Not even a pickle spear accompanied the sandwich, which was probably a start-up oversight, but at $10, one might feel a bit let down.  Not bad for Boston if you can’t get over to Rubin’s in Brookline, where things are actually kosher and they probably won’t be screening The Godfather, Part II.