Category: Restaurants & Stores

Take note, Logan airport travelers: Lucky’s Lounge in Terminal A has food that does not suck.
I was flying on Northwest for work but encountered flight delays and was rebooked onto Delta, and so found myself in Terminal A, mildly cranky due to idiotic security screening policies, two hours early, and hungry. Saving my brown bag for later when I might not have access to food, I poked over to Lucky’s, drawn by the promise of a lobster roll.
Said lobster roll has zero celery, just enough mayonnaise, and chives, all nestled in a rather nice ruffled leaf of green lettuce in a toasted hotdog roll. Perfect, if you are willing to overlook the fact that the lobster is frozen, which I most certainly am whilst dining in an airport.
And you can have it with fries or a salad, and they’ll make that salad into the wedge salad for $3 extra, which means you can also have a pretty solid rendition of that classic salad, with bacon and big crumbs of blue cheese, a creamy dressing with a nice hit of celery seed, crunchy iceberg and some fresh cucumber chunks (and some sad-ass tomato slices, but you can’t have it all).
I would have been happy with this meal in a regular restaurant. The rest of the menu is heavy to rich bar foods (burgers made with half sausage half beef, cheeseburger pizza, chicken wings, tuna melt), but that’s fair enough: cranky travelers need happy food, and the stuff on other patrons’ plates looked pretty good too. There’s nice eye candy on the walls (vintage black and white photos of Sinatra, Elvis, et al). And there is a power outlet at EVERY SEAT.

apparently everyone is going gaga over the new Cambridge restaurant Hungry Mother, and since we ate dinner there last night with a group of friends, i see why. We pretty much had one of everything, and all of it was fantastic.
They do a mini-starter course, which of course I am rabidly in favor of, then starters, then mains and dessert, and the wee post-dessert sweet that arrives with the check. Also cocktails, which are inventive and rather lovely — I had the #1, which is rye + dr. pepper + bitters, and the bitters override any overly-sweetness to make a pretty awesome drink.
If you’ve not guessed it from the ingredients of that cocktail, there is a strong appalachian theme to the cooking at this restaurant, combined with fine dining service and presentation, and strong haute cuisine execution. The overall feel is comfortable and rich, relaxed and refined.
The mini-starters:
deviled eggs, satiny, spicy and fresh-tasting, the equal or better of my own, topped with crispy bacon.
very spicy pimento cheese with toast triangles and celery sticks. i could eat vats.
boiled virginia peanuts with gray sea salt. lovely with the cocktails, i must say.
the “real” starters:
shrimp & grits, dark, savory and spicy with very nice creamy grits.
salad greens with radishes and almonds and goat cheese – sounds boring, wasn’t.
barbecue ribs with some sort of orange-peel relish and cornbread with no sugar, huzzah!
summer sausage & tasso ham with fantastic pickled peppers and ramps, spicy grainy mustard and more grilled toast.
fried oysters, dear sweet jesus, so yummy. The equal of the amazing ones we had on the California coast at Duarte’s Tavern. Came with some sort of buttermilk-dressed salad, also tasty but I was distracted by the oystery goodness.
the mains:
roasted chicken with kale and beets and red-eye gravy. delicious, just a shade oversalted.
flatiron steak with super-creamy roasted yukon golds & crispy fried vidalia rings.
french gnocchi with peas and mushrooms and pea tendrils.
fried catfish with mustard-caper sauce (yum), rice and collards.
grilled bluefish with olive sauce, potatoes, arugula and sea salt.
the desserts:
bourbon pecan sticky bun with sorghum ice cream
perfectly light yet rich chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and a glass of milk
buttermilk pie in a graham crust, lemony and creamy
fantastic rhubarb sorbet with strawberry sauce
It was all very good, but if I went back tomorrow, i would get the eggs, the pimento cheese (maybe two), and two orders of the oysters and call it a (very happy) day. Yow!

I am clearing out my email, and i ran across something i wrote up for a colleague going out to do some work at Apple. When I was out there, I was there alone for long periods of time, and I consoled myself with the free happy hour cocktails at The Cupertino Inn, but mostly with constant meals at the chinese mall nearby. I’m posting the notes here so I can find them again, and so you may find them useful.
The chinese mall is at the intersection of Homestead and Wolfe in Cupertino (or possibly just over the town line into another town, but close enough). If you are staying at the Cupertino Inn, it will take 20 min to walk there, or a really quick cab ride.
Places to try:
A&J – good chinese caf

One of my favorite foods is no longer available to me. The green posole at Bright Food Shop is no more, because Bright Food Shop is no more.
This is VERY BAD.
Every time I would go down to New York to visit friends, I would try to finagle an excuse to head over and get posole. Sometimes I would just get takeout and schlep it home on the bus. One friend lived just a few blocks away and I could walk there. I have a photo of me and the tallasiandude, early in our dating, standing outside the Bright Food Shop just after lunch, and I am grinning like a fool, doped up on love and delicious soup.
Some of their Mexican-Asian fusion seemed a little weird. But everything Mexican on the menu and in the little grocery/takeout shop next door was terrific, not that i ventured much past the posole myself — that posole was my first introduction to the soup, and I’ve never seen the verde style with greens and turkey anywhere else, despite an ongoing addiction to posole in general ever since that first bite.
The place was jammed every time I went. Now, if a tiny little joint like this that packs ’em in and also offers takeout can’t make enough money — in CHELSEA — to pay their rent… then the rent is TOO FUCKING HIGH, assholes. Stupid greedy jerk landlords.
I am sad.

Tonight i was feeling a vague, unformed craving for sushi, but tallasiandude wasn’t feeling that, but he was feeling like we should go to Target, and I agreed, so we cast about for someplace in Watertown to go eat dinner. I was tired of everything in the fridge, and it’s been a long week at work, and i wanted some yummy happy food-joy. Molana is where we usually go in that neighborhood, but for some reason i didn’t feel like it tonight. Dithering ensued. And then I remembered the weird random burger place just outside the square that has always seemed like i should check it out, if only to know that it is horrible for certain.
And the more i thought “burger” the more i didn’t want to go anywhere else.
So we found ourselves at Wild Willy’s Burgers. I gave us the option of ditching if it turned out to be wretched theme-mediocrity, like a burgery version of Bugaboo Creek, but the moment we walked in, there was a huge sign advertising the fact that you can have a grass-fed local-beef patty on any burger they offer.
SOLD.

Big soft tasty burgers with various toppings, nothing too wacky or foofy, cooked as requested. Mine had smoked vermont cheddar, lettuce, tomato (red!) and lots of mayo. Tallasiandude’s had entirely-respectable chili and american cheese (you can take the boy out of LA…). The fries are a little soggy, but very delicious even when cloaked in melty cheez-whiz. The onion rings are fine, with very tasty onions but that fine, floury style of breading that neither of us cares for much. Draft root beer and hand-squeezed lemonade. It made short work of my savory-fat-salty happy-food craving, and I am totally going back to this place.
These are not my preferred super-skinny burger, but they are the way I like my hand-formed burgers to be: not too thick, good soft texture, moist and juicy (even when cooked well-done), well-balanced with their toppings and bun. The burgers actually remind me a lot of the burgers at Jubilee Juice in Chicago, big and flat and soft and fresh and all kinds of yummy. And if I can have a good gooey drippy cheeseburger that also happens to be locally-sourced, grass-fed, and cooked to order, I am very much in favor of that.
Do not be put off by the random franchise-y exterior or the chuck-wagon kitsch or the clumps of college kids. These people are hewing closely to the principles of In-N-Out Burger and provide a well-sourced, well-cooked, good quality product. Yums.

This is the view from the sidewalk next to Toby’s Tavern in Coupeville, WA on Whidbey Island.
I stopped there with my brother and his sweetie-pie for beer and mussels of very high quality, in a snug divey setting with a great view and barely-marginal service. Eh, whatever. Mussels yummy. Beer good. Ogg like mussels and beer.

Ogg not take very good low-light pictures. Internet forgive Ogg?

extra special temporary contest, while you wait for me to get around to the actual post: can you identify the beer? the rectangular sushi? the brace of sushi next to the beer?



Ha! You are awesome! Chris wins the prize for correctly identifying two out of three (see comments), and really, the photo is too small to get the beer. Yay, I love the internet!
Those photographs are from I Love Sushi on Lake Bellevue in Bellevue, WA, and show a Koshihikari Echigo rice beer next to some hamachi toro (allow me to assure you that it IS indeed all that), and also a plate of what they called saba battera, or pressed pickled-mackerel sushi, a treasure I have been trying to find since I came back from Japan in 1996. It’s a regional preparation from Kyoto & Nara, inland places that needed to more thoroughly preserve their fish and rice, and so they pickled the fish, and pressed it tightly into rice blocks, and the two kept each other fresh on the trip inland. And tasted damn good when they got there, as pickley, fermented things tend to do.
I watched carefully at the sushi bar as these were made, as it’s not just saba and rice. There is also a thin yellowish slice of kelp, apparently slightly sweetened in cooking, laid over the top, and mitsuba leaves underneath the fish. I was so happy eating these, and drinking my vat of mild, pale, faintly rice-tasting beer, idling my evening with pleasure looking out over the tiny lake and chatting with my new pal Joe the sushi chef who used to live in Vancouver when he first came to North America from Tokyo.

Ay yi yi, tallasiandude points out to me that there are NO POSTS again. I SUCK. My profoundest apologies to all of you who actually read this blog, since the fact that any of you actually do that is a source of much pleasure for me. Work stuff has gotten a little out of hand again all of a sudden, just as the spring has been springing, and the last thing i’ve wanted to do when the day’s last mole has been whacked is stay in front of the computer. So I offer my apologies, and this photo, of my latest meal:

I ate this at Scooter’s, on NW 24th in Ballard (Seattle), for lunch just now. I came out to Seattle for a training course, and stayed a few extra days to visit my brother and let him point me at all the edible treasures Seattle has to offer. (The nice thing is, after fighting like cats and dogs much of our lives because of a 5 year age difference, we have come out as very similar adults: i’m a foodwhore, he’s a foodwhore. we have the same kitchen implements, down to the peelers and the shape of our cereal bowls. it’s a warm fuzzy, really.)
anyway, lunch was a cheeseburger, small fries, and a mini-blackberry-shake. With ketchup and tartar sauce for the fries. Yums. It’s just the sort of burger I like, all flat and skinny, with american cheese and “scooter sauce” all mushed in with the pickles and lettuce and tomatoes. Crispy fries. Creamy shake, with just a shade of berry flavor peeking through the creamy, though I can tell there was real fruit in it since I had to pick the blackberry seeds out of my teeth when i got home. Not bad for walking distance from home…

We took C out to Hot Chocolate, since he’d never been there, and we love it, and J&D also love it, and it was just a lovefest all around.
German pretzel with cheddar/smoked beer dipping sauce, to die for. Bowl got licked.
Green salad with pears and goat cheese, very nice. Spinach salad with duck salami, extremely nice. Wedge salad with thousand island and crabmeat and lardons, frigging perfect. YUM.
Somehow some breadsticks with herbed butter showed up for free. Also tasty, particularly since the butter seemed to have some green garlic in it.
Pleasant Ridge Reserve cheese baked inside brioche and served with roasted turnips and sauteed kale was just dreamy. Normally I wouldn’t order something so theoretically mundane, but we’d had dinner at Custom House the previous night (more on that to come), and I felt like something a little less insane, particularly given the chocolate madness I knew was coming. This cheesy little morsel is worth giving up the exotica for: the brioche is dark brown and almost nutty, the cheese just stinky and melty enough, and the vegetables keep it all from getting too out of hand.
Lamb with krema kase and flatbread: this i thought was tasty, but perhaps a bit salty. It’s a bit like gourmet gyros, which is perfectly fine, but not the best thing on this menu.
Roast chicken was lovely, though I only had a bite of the perfectly crisp, salty skin. Nothing left on the plate once D got through with it.
Braised short rib with brussels sprouts was moist, tender and delicious, though i’ve not been feeling much in the mood for braised meats of late.
Mac and cheese was actually slightly under-awesome this time, lacking some indefinable thing that has in the past pushed it from yummy to mind-bending.
Dark chocolate hot chocolate: yum. Half-and-half with espresso: mocha yum, vroom vroom.
Warm chocolate souffle cake with salted caramel ice cream and pretzel continues to be the perfect dessert. Be still my heart.
Sorbets were amusing, since we ordered coconut and passionfruit, but received spiced pear (excellent) and something quite odd but definitely not passionfruit. When we mentioned it to the waiter, he checked for us, and it turned out the kitchen hadn’t been happy with their passionfruits and made kumquat instead. To make up for that, he brought us two more, a green apple and a blood orange, both good, but that blood orange was best of show, mmmmmmmm.
At that point we were so full we were waddling, but we still managed to get up to Metro in time to see a middle-aged X rock a house full of middle-aged punks…. which was totally awesome. \m/

[this post has been waiting a MONTH for me to get off my keister and upload the pictures that go with it. sigh. better late than never, i suppose.]
NOODLES BY TAKASHI YAGIHASHI
(in the Seven on State food court)
MACY’S
111 N STATE ST, 7TH FL
(312) 781-4483
Hours: Mon – Sat 11am to 4pm, Closed Sunday
We needed a quickie lunch in the loop before heading to the airport, so i went to this website which lists out a huge lot of loop restaurants. It was quite useful, and we thought this japanese noodle shop might not suck too bad, and it was within a few blocks of the hotel.

Turns out the ramen is delicious! Good quality noodles, tasty broth (we had shoyu) and the moistest, most flavorful slices of pork we’ve ever had in a bowl of ramen. Slightly smallish bowl, but not everyone has the vast noodle-eating capacities of tallasiandude.

I ordered a braised-pork fried rice, which was also delicious, tasting strongly of the wok’s heat and of white pepper, with fresh bits of bok choy and egg and carrot and shiitake and bean sprout, and more lovely moist soft pork.