Boston Day 3: We Are Going to Screw Up!

Amy taught me a certain method traveling in Paris, and I use it pretty much all the time.  Every day have a good breakfast, loaded with carbs and (if you can get it) butter.  A croissant does just nicely.  Drink
juice and lots of water.  Walk everywhere.  Skip lunch, and instead eat some trail mix occasionally when you're hungry.  Then eat a really nice dinner rather early in the evening.  Doing it this way you don't have to exercise - it's taken care of by walking everywhere - and you don't spend gobs on food.

The problem in America is getting a good carb-loaded breakfast that won't weigh you down unnecessarily.  Dunkin' Donuts?  I don't think so.  Here in Boston there are two within 3 blocks of each other.  I'd rather eat my Oracle Student Workbook.  And Capitol Coffee House wasn't doing it for me, so I plugged in "Bakery" into my Smart Phone and let it choose my destiny.  I first ended up at Just Croissants across the Boston Commons ... closed.  Next stop the Vanille Cafe in Beacon Hill.  I walked past the swan pond and Cheers and spent about 10 minutes looking for the door. 

And the angels descended from heaven and said, "Lo!  I bring you tidings of great joy!" Butter everywhere!  Mille feuilles, strawberry kayaks, pastel-colored petit fours, and a display case full of French Breakfast pastry.  I got on my knees and thanked the Lord!  And I could order in ENGLISH!  I got a croissant and an Escargot Raisins (a raisin danish - it looks like a snail.)  It was about 90% of the buttery goodness of the Paris counterpart, which was close enough for me, and as good as you're probably going to get in America.  If the dough was just a tad tougher and the taste toward American butter instead of French (less dairy, clover flavor), .... well, it was still the moist, flaky, airy croissant that I had fell in love with.  Tony The Tiger says Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and even if his particular version of breaskfast sucks, he's quite right.  I felt satisfied all the way to dinner time.

Noontime was a bust.  I mapped out a course to In Your Ear, a record store with a supposed inventory of 250,000 CD's.  I need some Elis Regina and Bossa Nova is a little bit hard to find these days, even in the era of widespread digital music. I took the T to Harvard Square ... only to find the store closed for the winter break, being a student-led affair.  Bummer. 

But Harvard Square is refreshing, and I got to see the legendary Clover restaurant. Clover started as a squadron of food trucks that brought fast, flavorful vegan sandwiches to the masses of hungry students.  They were extremely popular, and opened a sit-down restaurant.  On the window was a hand lettered epistle in white paint, "When I opened this restaurant I knew just one thing.  'We are going to screw up.'"  It went on to tell what things did get screwed up, and offered a pleading for time to fix them.  Restaurants can be one of the most dishonest, covert places in society, so this was kind of refreshing. 

For dinner, I landed at Lineage in the very hip Coolidge Corner neighborhood.  I'm a big fan of the farm-to-table restaurant, which is the big thing in Ithaca these days.  From an environmental standpoint, it makes sense to get your food as close to where and when you eat it as possible.  But I think, like vegetarian food, it has its own merits that you discover only after getting into it.  (Choosing food solely on moral grounds is ... ironically, humanly unsustainable!)  First, I think the body craves things that are "in season" and
going against it, like eating peaches in the winter, makes it somehow taste non-peachy.  Second, food that makes a very short trip is fresher.  (Duh!)  Third, and I think this is the most important, art flourishes amidst restrictions.  It makes one think deeper,become more creative.  It provokes surprise.  It's anti-corporate, anti-consistent.

So we get to Lineage, where farm-to-table worked perfectly.  Everything was in sync, from the smell of wood smoke in a contemporary fireplace, to the daily-generated menus, to the enthusiasm of all the staff.  I had grilled salmon with bernaise on a bed of assorted vegetables and the freshness of everything was astounding.  Lemme talk about the parsnips for a second.  Parsnips are your quintessential winter root vegetable. Here they came in chunks.  I bit into one that was soft on the outside, then hard on the inside like an underdone potato chunk.  It was weird at first, but it's brilliant!  Parsnips cooked all the way through have no taste.  Raw parsnips are intense but hard to chew and swallow.  But cook them halfway and you get just the perfect amount of parsnip sweetness.  Incredible! 

Coolidge Center was very beautiful, and I stayed around for awhile.  An Oreo ice cream sundae, followed by a movie at the local arthouse (The Descendants - an excellent movie if you like Alexander Payne, who's one of my personal favorites), and a ride on the T back home ... man!  I could live here.