1. Went to Harvard Square on Black Friday. The entire “Black Friday” concept is annoying. First all traditional and possibly religious associations are removed from Christmas and then the holiday is diminished as an empty celebration of materialism. But It was a different sort of Black Friday for Harvard Square realtors, and maybe Cambridge taxpayers. On the day after Thanksgiving the only people to be seen in the Square were Chinese grad students. You could park in front of any business but be sure to have quarters because there were almost as many meter maids as grad students. I parked in front of Harvard Bookstore and found a single quarter. Don’t dawdle when you’re riding that parking meter. I saw a man who acted like he might be the new owner of the bookstore but I didn’t want to have a $30 ticket attached to my introductory conversation. When you so the South Shore Shopping Center there are no meter maids banging your car for staying too long. Not all the businesses were even open. The addidas shop was closed. The Apple store was open but the Apple store is in the Cambridgeside Mall. Isn’t there supposed to be an Apple store in Harvard Square? People forget that the old “Square” was Cambridge’s downtown and the Cambridgeside Mall and the malls in Watertown have removed a lot of people from the sidewalks of Mass. Ave. Emerge Global Holiday Jewelry Sale Th De 4 & Fr De 5 MIT, Lobby 10 10am-5pm Emerge is an organization founded by MIT students in support of marginalized and abandoned young women in Sri Lanka. This jewelry show has beautiful things. There is no better cause. Fr De 5 08 5PM to 7PM Throughout the winter, from dusk until 2:00 a.m. the MIT Museum presents an exhibition of contemporary, 3-dimensional holographic artworks displayed in the windows viewable only from outside the Mark Epstein Innovation Gallery, on the street and sidewalks of Massachusetts Avenue. Featured will be works by six international artists whose varied imagery represents artistic and technical advancements in the field of display holography. I love the MIT Museum, and this is one reason why. MIT glass show Holiday Glass Sale Mo De 8: 10am-8pm Tu De 9: 10am-5pm Lobby 10 The annual show of the MIT Glass Lab might be my favorite unusual place to buy holiday gifts. Buy glass and then take the No. 1 bus to Bodega, near the Christian Science Center. They have great sneaker laces and offbeat clothing and design items. 6 Clearway St. Boston Ma. 02115 Tu De 9 08. Early sunsets are bad for the human spirit and bad for business. If you go to the wonderful website http://www.starchamber.com/2003/12/the_earliest_sunset.html you will find an explanation about why today is the earliest sunset even though the days continue to shorten. “On December 10th, it sets exactly two seconds later, and on the 11th it sets a further four seconds later still.” We will be celebrating both days. Since the day before Thanksgiving I have been sick. Let me share the small number of foods that have helped deal with this. First of all Tapioca Pudding from Whole Foods. This is the only food that tastes good and tastes the way I remember it. In the past I liked Tapioca Pudding. Now I am in awe of it. Matzoh Ball Soup. This stuff really is amazing and while enjoying a particularly wonderful version I fantasized adding matzoh balls to Vietnamese pho. And then I dreamed a movie plot about a woman in Miami who opens a Vietnamese Matzoh Ball Soup chain. Duenjang Chigae is an angry looking soup from Koreanna at the corner of Prospect St. and Broadway in Cambridge. The color is an indication of the hot Korean peppers and it also contains lots of tofu. Oddly the soup is accompanied by a foam hot dog container that contains five sides of Korean vegetables and kimchi. And there is rice. Koreans ascribe medicinal qualities to different foods. If service at Koreanna can seem indiffferent mention to the host that you are sick. Every Korean waitress aspires to be a doctor or at least represent the nurturing qualities of the national cuisine. I’d pay extra for this kind of attention. Finally Texas Monthly is a great magazine that everyone should read. Calvin Trillin is a great and funny writer about food. In the New Yorker’s recent Food issue Trillin writes an article about the almost unknown Lexington TX barbeque joint that Texas Monthly named the state’s best barbeque. I hope they make a movie out of this.
Forbestraveler.com has a nice article about America’s best ice cream stores and Toscanini’s is included. http://www.forbestraveler.com/food-drink/americas-best-ice-cream McConnell’s of Santa Barbara is on the list as is Capogiro of Philadelphia. Not on the list is Amy’s Ice Creams of Austin, Texas, Princeton’s Bent Spoon, Cold Fusion of Newport, RI, and the poorly named Purple Feather in Provincetown, MA. All of which are very good places to get something cold.
*This year the James Beard Foundation gave out as many awards as they do for the Oscars. The big news was that Corby Kummer of The Atlantic Monthly won an award for his monthly foodwriting in The Atlantic. He also does video blogs for The Atlantic’s website. **Specifically cited were Corby’s stories on sardines, aging beef and the briefly notorious Clover coffee brewer. The winner as best regional chef was Patrick Connolly of Radius. Other nominees included the chef at Hugo’s in Portland, Me, the chefs at Arrows in Ogunquit, ME, Michael Leviton of Lumiere and Persephone and Marc Orfaly of Pigalle in Bay Village, Boston.* *One of the nation’s best food sections is published on Wednesday by the LATimes. Last week they wrote mean reviews of new resta*urants by Todd English and Gordon Ramsay.
Working at Toscanini’s we wonder what our hard-working customers are up to. This spring we decided to ask some of them what they have been working on so intensely, at the Big Table and the surrounding little tables. Two people were working on nano-tubes. We feel like we should work on nano-tubes. One Chemical Engineering project, for Course 10, involved the design of nanotubes for absorbing mercury in high temperature, high pressure conditions for environmental cleanup purposes. Another woman worked on a doctorate for the Harvard School of Public Health, studying Biostatistics: thesis title: Novel Methods for Efficient Surveillance and Monitoring blurbs from abstract: This body of work addresses some of the challenges in surveillance and monitoring by providing means of maximizing information while minimizing time, cost, and human resources. All three methodologies we present in this thesis
Last weekend I drove down to New York and New Jersey. Driving to New Jersey is always a good and appropriate idea but driving in NYC has an aspet of extreme sports to it. If there is a single area where Bostonians do better than New Yorkers it is driving. And parking. All the New Yorkers I met were amazed that I had driven to the city and still possessed my car. “Put it in a garage quick” was their emphatic advice. New Yorkers have been brutalized by signs and meter maids into thinking that they can never hope to park their cars anyplace but a $75 a day garage constructed to be a stable. I kept my trusty Japanese mini-van and tooted around town, saving those daily $75 hits, and also the necessary cab fares if you want to efficiently visit a lot of different places. Adam Simha designed the formidable metal chairs at Toscanini’s as well as the comfortable, snuggly sofas. He was showing a lot of work at the big Furniture show in the Javits Center. Adam had brought the best piece in the show: an oversized yellow chaise lounge designed for two romantic Floridians. We’re hoping to put a pair in the new park across the street. The Javits Center has created its own death zone of inactivity on the West Side. I was able to park my van two blocks from the Center and when I left the Javits it was still there, without a ticket. Earlier in the day I used the minivan to visit New York’s hip new neighborhoods in Brooklyn. These hip new neighborhoods will remind a Bostonian of Somerville with higher taxes. I was with the famous artist Steve Solomon and we were hoping for a clever breakfast in Williamsburg. That didn’t happen and soon we were in Greenpoint, historically Polish and now under combined assault from new immigrants from Mexico and new immigrants from the tribe of Pabst Blue Ribbon drinkers. Steve and I were using out spider senses to find that clever breakfast place when I saw a cop. “Let’s ask the cop. They always know where to get breakfast.” I said to Steve. I then met my first South Asian member of the NYPD. I asked him where to get breakfast. His eyes widened. “I’m not from around here,” he said. “I don’t know where to go.” The experience would have been heightened had he been wearing a blue turban like one of those controversial new Canadian Mounties. We shuffled away, wondering if he was carrying a ceremonial dagger as well as his 9 millimeter. And do Sikh cops carry extra ceremonial daggers to “throw down” at crime scenes. I’ll have to watch Law and Order. Finally we came to a handsome building and Cafecito Bogota. It is New York when you go to a Polish neighborhood to have a Columbian breakfast. And a very good Columbian breakfast. Cafecito Bogota has great arepas which are close to a South American English muffin but no food writer will ever describe them that way. I had huevas parecitas and I asked the owner what “Parecita” meant. “It means many things in diffierent parts of my country.” That got me interested. “Such as…” “Well in some parts of Columbia it means coffee with cream, which you ordered and in some parts of the country it means Parrot and is some parts of the country it is a word for “crack cocaine.” That conversation made up for the missing turban.
Fred Waring had his Pennsylvanians, plural, but we only have Chef Thalia Large who has returned to cook Breakfast@TheBigTable. The big controversy among the good, hard-working white people of Pennsylvania has to do with privatizing the fabled Pennsylvania Turnpike. Thalia baked a pie and sold it at the Fireman’s Fair before she went to the Famer and Mechanics Bank in Holidayburg and bought two rolls of quarters for the tolls. If the road is privatized she’ll need to sell more pies to get more rolls of quarters in order to escape the 19th Century’s greatest industrial landscape. We didn’t change the menu. Usually we skip Breakfast on holiday weekends because so many people leave town. Remember if you lived in Holidayburg every weekend is special. We’ll be making creamy egg sandwiches and cornmeal pancakes throughout June and make a decision about the Fourth of July weekend.
Most of the time Harvard University can be counted on to maintain a restrained tastefulness in its built environment. New buildings may be boring but they usually avoid silly missteps. Now though, when you exit Storrow Drive at the Larz Anderson Bridge, and you look to the left you can see a grotesquely glowing jumbotron screen that has been affixed to Bloodget Pool. This enables Harvard’s Athletic Dept. to promote itself in insignificant ways by noting which house won the undergraduate sports championship. The City of Worcester is dotted with these vivid minor eyesores and Harvard now joins Bunker Hill Community College in displaying them in Boston. Maybe this indicates more banal democratization of Harvard and we can look forward to bumper stickers saying “My Son made Law Review at Harvard”. Alex Beam likes to sarcastically refer to Harvard as the World’s Greatest University. I think of it as The National High School. A few years ago half the students started wearing varsity jackets (Harvard Platform Tennis) and the Undergraduate Council spends a lot of time plotting dances and lobbying for an undergraduate center. Just like other high schools, um, universities.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Hydrox cookies on We May 28 08. This is the cookie Toscanini’s uses to make Cookies ‘n’ Cream. The article recites the entire sad saga of Hydrox being surpassed by a lowly imitator -the bland, goyische Oreo- and finally discontinued after a series of uninteresting corporate asset shuffles. When I was growing up in metropolitan New York Hydrox cookies were slugging it out toe to toe with Nabisco’s Oreo cookies. At that time Hydrox were always vegetarian and Kosher while Oreos were sometimes made with lard. It was a surprise to move away from the New York area and discover that Hydrox cookies were a very regional product. “A web site that recentled the top 25 things people miss ranked Hydrox at No. 4, just behind in-store lunch counters and ahead of Howard Johnson restaurants and the popcorn snack “Screaming Yellow Zonkers.” They don’t make Zonkers anymore. Long ago a friend named John Costello launched a campaign to restore purity to Zonkers when they stopped using butter and switched to vegetable oil. John was defeated but in the end The Screaming Yellow Zonkers company lost as its market share disappeared.
“In Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else,” explains M. Emmet Walsh in the voiceover that opened the Coen brothers’ first film, Blood Simple. “That’s the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here you’re on your own.” Made for less than two million dollars in 1984, the fierce, meticulous thriller launched not only the Coens’ career, but, to a significant degree, the neo-noir revival and the modern indie movement. Yet it has taken a dozen films and nearly two dozen years for the Coens to return their attention to the lawless byways of the Lone Star state. We may be forgiven for wondering what’s taken them so long.
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A perennial subject in Cambridge is what is wrong with Harvard Square. Plainly something is wrong with Harvard Square. It is not as busy as it once was. There are fewer street musicians and more available parking spaces. A large number of empty storefronts go unrented. The Square has a lot of banks and a lot of Mexican food places. If the Banco de Mexico opened a combination taqueria/ATM hotel it would win the 2007 award for Retailer of the Year.
Harvard always says that they’re not to blame for the Square’s problems and point out that many of the worst things to be found are located in buildings others own. But when the Harvard Credit Union relocated to the bottom of Holyoke Center it ruined half of Holyoke Street since they are closed after 5PM and on weekends.
And something you can only discover on the internet is that Harvard Dining runs 13 cafes in addiition to the residential dining facilities. 13 cafes can feed a lot of people who would otherwise be eating in private businesses. Harvard also has its own eyeglass shop and a big print center. It even runs the worst bar in the city, beneath Memorial Hall. In a very handsome space you can wait five minutes for the bartender to digitally copy your license and then wrap a little plastic bracelet around your wrist, just like you were at an all-ages concert. A five-minute procedure for every beer assures the party atmosphere once found in Bulgarian post offices. Harvard has plans for more restaurants and more glacially-paced bars.
Another factor is that the state’s population is in decline but the metropolitan area is sprawling like a sunbelt city. Once people move beyond 128 they are very unlikely to come into central Boston, including Cambridge. Some of this is due to the discouraging efforts of Massachusetts’ small towns which actively discourage new housing. I’d give the hopeless MBTA a lot of credit for running an increasingly irrelevant transportation system.
And of course the internet has directly affected a lot of businesses, most obviously photo stores, bookstores and music stores. The number of Cambridge bookstores that have closed is amazing and a sad comment on the book-buying habits of the nation’s biggest college town. Maybe the most unique factor is the disappearance of music-buying as a sociable activity. Before file-sharing and the iPod thousands of people would come to Harvard Square’s many music stores to peruse and shop. Much of it was pointless. You might save thirty-five cents if you went from The Coop to NE Music City to Discount Records (which never had a discount on anything) but the weekend music promenade was a social fact on a par with an evening walk in an Italian piazza.
