tamerlanenj's Recent Activity
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Baltimore hound seeks Friday lunch en route from Logan Airport to Hanover NH . . .
I like the Liberty Bell roast beef place in Stoneham
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Worthwhile Chinese food in the Boston Area?
I always want to drop by the Gourmet Dumpling House for lunch but it is always JAMMED with no tables available around lunch time. Place is a big hit!
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Worthwhile Chinese food in the Boston Area?
Here in western Maine we have some downright bizarre chinese food traditions. Needless to say, authentic chinese food is not to be found, but neither are even some of the modest developments to Americanized chinese food (more spice, more sichuan flavors, etc.). It's straight up 1950s style Americanized cantonese, heavy on the duck sauce and the egg foo whatnot.
My favorite thing is that all the cantonese dishes that are traditionally served with roast pork are here made with ham. Ham Lo Mein, Ham Fried Rice, Mushu Ham, etc.
Hilarious! Even the Kowloon would be a welcome site to me now.
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Worthwhile Chinese food in the Boston Area?
Fu Loon's steamed beef szechuan style is the stuff of chilihead dreams.
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best pizza in boston area
good point. I bet it would be an issue in the city proper, though. I know that in NYC you can only have a coal oven if you get one that already exists (it;s why the manhattan Totonno's locations are so bad compared to the original). Frank Pepe's without coal would be pointless. PEPE'S! Maybe I'll take a drive to New Haven toda!
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best pizza in boston area
Maybe we can lobby the Frank Pepe's people to open up a location here. Would zoning laws allow for a coal oven?
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best pizza in boston area
I see the opened an Upper Crust next door. I hope they survive. They were always nice enough fellows an UC is totally overrated.
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Grille 23
ugh, what a waste of money. This place sucks. You'll spend just as much but at least geta better steak at Smith and Wollensky's.
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Capital Grille
Luckily, even if you want an overpriced steakhouse experience, there is no reason to go to this awful, awful place. The equally exorbitant but at least better quality Morton's, Abe and Louie's, Oak Room, and Palm are only a few blocks away from the Boston location.
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Pushback on Red's Eats Lobster Roll
I love their haddock sandwich!
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Reasonable food at Copley Place or nearby?
Vlora: a Greek/Albanian place on Boylston Street, is a great value for the neighborhood. My favorite steak frites in all of Boston!
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8/09 Gran Gusto: An Inflexible "No" Kitchen
Pizza should be eaten with tomatoes, cheese, and salt. No other toppings. It ruins it. Anyway, that's my personal feeling. If you wanted sausage, the chef should put some damn sausage on it.
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Pushback on Red's Eats Lobster Roll
I know that it is practically a religious truth that Maine's best Lobster Roll is at Red's Eats in Wiscassett. I've eaten there several times, most recently a couple of weeks ago, and I feel the need to push back a bit.
I absolutely do appreciate that you get a TON of lobster for the price. However, I find something about this sandwich to be less appetizing than it absolutely should be. First...can it rightly be called a lobster roll? i'm no fan of a mayo-drenched "lobster salad" roll, but I do believe there should be some kind of dressing or something to bring it all together. The little bit of mayo you get is too difficult to apply to the sandwich yourself. I usually use the butter instead.
Also, I find that the chunks of lobster are simply TOO big, especially the tails. They are really almost impossible to bite like a sandwich; you end up yanking on something ice cold, chewy, and stringy. The only feasible way to eat one of these is with a knife and fork...but if I'm going to do that, I'd just as soon have my lobster freshly steamed and hot, rather than refrigerator cold.
i do like the ambiance, the seats by the water, the batter-fried onion rings, and the very friendly people...but the roll just doesn't quite do it for me.
Can someone recommend a great lobster roll that's a bit more lobster-rolly? Something I can actually eat like a hot dog?
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In Augusta, ME next week...
I actually live in Farmington and we get lunch from Soup For You fairly regularly. It's a dependable standby--I really enjoy the BBQ chicken chili--but more a fallback than a standout, in my opinion. The Granary is overpriced, not much better than decent pub grub, though they do have a nice beer selection.
There is some good chow to be found in the Franklin/Kennebec/Andrascogin areas, but ethnic food is tough. That's why I lament the closing of Sakura for an Amanto's. No Indian; no authentic Chiense, and not really any good Americanized Chinese (New Great Wall in Wilton is OK); The Thai places in Waterville, Hallowell, and Rangeley are all subpar by Boston standards...though Thai Dish in Auburn is pretty good.
My favorite food going on right now is the hot dog place right between Augusta and Hallowell on 27...the name escapes me; it's on the left just before you cross the town line...?
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In Augusta, ME next week...
Sigh.
Sakura, the only decent sushi place within an hour of most of Western Maine, has closed down and been replaced by...an Amato's.
Just what we need...another F***** Amato's.
Sigh. The sushi at Cafe de Bangkok in Hallowell and the Thai place in Waterville is close to inedible. Looks like it's now Portland or bust for Sushi.
God I hate living in Franklin county.
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Best bagels in Tristate area?
Alas, Steins is no more. There's a new bagel shop in the old storefront but I haven't tried it.
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uburger?
Uburger is pretty good. I've given them some grief in the past because I think they overcook their burgers, but they are pretty tasty and they have a good house spread. More significantly, the fries are the best in the city. Really fantastic. I prefer Flat Patties burgers: still cooked well, but thinner, drippier, and greasier than Uburger, which can be a bit dry imho.
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uburger?
Grilled? Boooo...
Here's an experiment for the summer...take the exact same burger, however you liked to make it (thick thin, lean fatty, whatever), and cook one on your outdoor girll and one in the kitchen in your skillet. I defy you to tell me the grilled one will taste better!
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Quebec City Report
We also stayed at Place D'Armes. Wonderful staff, very nice breakfast, and they let us bring our little red spaniel Gatsby. When we arrived they had a little dog bed, dog toys, and food and water dishes in the room. So wonderful!
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Quebec City Report
I guess QC just isn't a poutine town! good crepes though ;)
Anyway, being in Maine, I can get Poutine at Duckfat in portland made with duck gravy. Que sublimo!
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Quebec City Report
Thanks for the contrasting viewpoint on Anciens Canadiens. It certainly is a fascinating looking building!
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Quebec City Report
My wife and I just returned from an impromptu weekend in Quebec City and we wanted to post some of our experiences, since it is very difficult to get reports from locals in a city that is almost exclusively French-speaking.
First, thank you to everyone who recommended Toast. We pegged it for our one upscale meal, and in almost every way it was a success. We opted for four courses for $75 per person, which turned out to be a bit too much food, but we could not decide between cheese and desert. For starters, we had the pork belly and the poached lobster and mushroom risotto. Both of these offerings were superb. The pork belly provided three distinct textures: crispy skin, a layer of fat, and the actual pork meat: getting all three textures on the fork, along with the homemade mustard, made for a bite of pure perfection. The lobster perhaps was not as perfectly cooked as some I've had (I live in Maine!), but the risotto was absurdly flavorful.
Entrees were a cassoulet and rabbit stuffed with blood sausage. The cassoulet had three kinds of pork, with rib meat, two small pieces of loin, and little pork and fois gras sausage. The sausages and rib meat were divine, though the loin was less exciting. The rabbit also quite good, though the texture of the blood sausage was not what we were expecting (it was our first time eating it). We had a small accompaniment of seared fois gras that was perfectly executed.
Lobster, pork, pork, more pork, rabbit, and fois gras, and by this point we were close to our richness limit.
The cheese course followed. The standout was an oven baked chevre drizzled with truffle oil on olive crostinis. Wow. I wish we were still hungry enough to do it justice.
Dessert followed. A maple souffle was a nicely executed expression of the local flavors of syrup season. Creme brulee was good but not memorable.
All in all, a fantastic meal for under $200 Canadian. (we only had glasses of wine).
Breakfast was a simple affair at Le Pain Beni: bread pudding, french toast, eggs, bacon, excellent maple syrup and jams. Nothing too memorable but good.
We had two different crepe lunches, the first day at Le Casse-Crepe Breton on rue St. Jean, and the next day at Le Petit Chateau in the Frontenac. Of these two, I preferred Le Casse-Crepe Breton. We had an apple and swiss crepe that was very good, and a butter and sugar crepe that I happily drizzled with creme fraiche. It was hard not to retreat to the hotel room for a food-coma nap after that, but we pressed on to hike down to the old town and the St. Lawrence to take in the architecture (no fenicular for us!). The crepes at Le Petit Chateau were a bit overpriced, but still decent: much darker than Le Casse-Crepe Breton, and since I am not an expert, i cannot really say which were more authentic.
One of the standouts for us was a trip to a little chocolate shop outside the walls of on Rue St. Jean called Erico Chocolate Frais. My wife was blown away by some of the chocolates, especially a pistacchio and spicy szechuan truffle that actually tasted like szechuan peppercorns!
Our horse-cab driver recommended the Poutine at Ashton. That turned out to be the lowlight of the trip: very mediocre poutine, not even up to New Jersey diner standards. That was a disappointment, as it was the only poutine we had on the trip. I did not find a place in QC serving fresh montreal style bagels, something which I guess will have to wait until our trip to Montreal!
Finally, we picked up some cheese to bring home from a wonderful specialty food store on Rue St. Jean in the new city. I can't quite remember the name, but the standout was a goat cheese wrapped in a black wax called "chevre negre."
All in all, we had a wonderful time in QC. Good reporting is essential, because there are certainly plenty of touristy traps that don't have to worry about repeat business (we were warned by CH to avoid Le Anciens Canadien, which a local recommended to us). It is such a beautiful little city: I won't demean it with the old "it's like Paris you can drive to" cliche, as it is really its own wonderfully unique place with a charm that is as much "new world" Quebecois as "old world" French.
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Best Cupcakes, for sure!
You forgot to mention ice cold and hard re: party favors.
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Best Cupcakes, for sure!
Oh come on? Party Favors? home of the rock hard ice cold refrigerated cupcakes with the mountain of cheap frosting? I know it's cool to be against the hip place but Sweet really blows PF out of the water for quality. The regular vanilla cake with white buttercream at sweet is an almost perfect cupcake, I think. Better than Magnolia.
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Winter 2008/2009 Openings and Closings
This thread is pretty depressing. Seems to be a lot more stuff on the red side of the ledger than the black...including some good places (Reef, Rangoli, Highland Cafe, Brown Sugar...)
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Shake Shack Fries Suck Horribly
You know, this is really crap excuse making by SS; I've been to plenty of burger shacks in Boston with great hand cut fries. There is no substitute. They need to be cut that day, par fried, and then fried a second time to order, and salted right after coming out of the oil. It ain't that hard! Again, the burgers are good, but I've had great burgers at Flat Patties and Uburger in Boston with real double fried fresh cut fries, and it does really add to the experience.
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Best Boston Burger
I disagree entirely. Quality has nothing to do with style, AT ALL. U Burger uses fresh, house ground beef. Shake Shack uses brisket from Eleven Madison Park. These are quality burgers that just happen to be "fast food style."
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Antico Forno - Not what I imagined
haha, I would hope they understand that I am referring to the dining scene, NOT the people or the neighborhood in general. For what it's worth, I was a Back Bayer, and the Back Bay was a terrible restaurant neighborhood.
