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Spicy Tagliolini & Clams at Pazzo

MC Slim JB — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Bill Bradley is a longtime Boston chef with a string of successes — restaurants like Carmen, Bricco, and Rustic Kitchen — who recently found himself cooking in the remote Boston suburbs. However good Incontro Restaurant in Franklin might be, I suspect the switch felt like being demoted to the Triple-A Pawtucket team after years of playing at Fenway Park. Or perhaps it was more like a mercenary stint in Japanese baseball: collecting a fat paycheck, enjoying the locals’ adoration, but knowing he...

5 Courses with Marie-Claude Mendy, owner of Teranga

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

It’s dinner hour, and my accomplice and I are dining in the South End’s newest hot spot, a Senegalese restaurant called Teranga. We’re deep into the appetizers, the nems (the West African take on Vietnamese spring rolls, stuffed with finely chopped shrimp, beef, and vegetables), and fighting over the last accara (a black-eyed pea fritter with a talk-back-to-your-tongue tomatoey dipping sauce). Meanwhile, we’re contemplating our next course. Perhaps the thiebou djeun, the national fish...

Survival of the fittest

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

All anyone wanted to talk about a few weeks ago was not the bankruptcy of GM or even the relative merits of Conan O’Brien vs. Jon Stewart — it was the death of fine dining in Boston. What about Aujourd’hui, Great Bay, Icarus, and the others that will follow? It’s a big deal, yes — but perhaps not as big a deal as you might think. Tastes change. Times change. Diners make different choices about what constitutes a fun evening, how dressed up they want to get, and how much they want to spend....

Wild ramp & morel mushroom risotto at Temple Bar

MC Slim JB — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

If there were trading cards for local chefs like there are for baseball stars, I’d collect ’em. I cheer as my favorite restaurant-scene players rise from the bush leagues to their first break in the majors to their signing of that big free-agent contract. One of those champs-in-a-toque is Michael Scelfo, who I’ve been following since his days at the North Street Grill, a little-known North End bar that he elevated to cult status with terrific casual American fare. I was glad to see him get a...

5 Courses with Peter and Robert DePesa

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Recently, some producers put out the call through Boston Casting for a new reality show, now called Chefs vs. City. It was billed as a cross between Iron Chef and The Amazing Race. They were looking for one perfect pair of Boston food people, along with teams of two from half a dozen other cities, to compete against a duo of Food Network phenoms. For a few antic days, hordes of Bostonians were buddying up for a chance to be on the show. After completing the two-minute taped audition, more than...

The Dentist Disaster Sundae at Cabot's

Sara Faith Alterman — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Old-fashioned ice cream parlors serve as the nostalgic backdrop for many New England summer scenes — especially on those sweltering 90-degree days spent cooling off with a silver dish of frozen treat, topped off with a dollop of whipped cream and a cherry, if Mom was feeling indulgent. Ice cream is a classic hot-weather comfort food, especially when it’s covered in gooey hot fudge or sprinkles and crunchy candies. Hell, how about all of the above? The Dentist Disaster sundae ($8.99) at Cabot’s...

The rice stuff

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This is a story about excellence. Truthfully, I was never planning to write about o ya. With the amazing press kudos the restaurant and owners Tim Cushman and Nancy Cushman had received — like #1 Best New Restaurant in the United States, according to the New York Times in 2008, and Best New Chef, according to Food & Wine in 2008 (not too shabby for a 47-seat sushi bar on a side street in the Leather District) — I figured that I’d be more than a little late to the table. But then, I had a...

Five-Spice Crusted Monkfish at Gargoyles on the Square

MC Slim JB — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Jason Santos has a bit of the mad scientist about him, and I’m not just talking about the apparent laboratory mishap that is his hair. Rather, he’s a rare local practitioner of molecular cooking (MC), the application of avant-garde cooking techniques to fine dining. (If you’ve tasted a dish involving foamed food, you’ve experienced one MC cliché.) Depending on who you ask, it’s either a) awful foodie pretension that substitutes flash for well-grounded technique or b) the next logical step in...

5 Courses with Matt Curtis and Chris Lutes of Tory Row

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

The year is 1991. Two unemployed young guys have good degrees but, thanks to an economic slump, no immediate prospects. One is a mathematician, the other an economist with design skills. Both avid bar customers, they figured that with all the time they spent in various watering holes, why not build one of their own? And so they did. It was called Miracle of Science. Now Matt Curtis and Chris Lutes have just opened their sixth bar/restaurant — Tory Row — in the heart of Harvard Square, next to...

ArtBar

Sara Faith Alterman — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Are you the light, summery bites type, while your mate is more into oinking and gobbling? If so, ArtBar (40 Edwin Land Boulevard, Cambridge, 617.806.4122) might be your ultimate date spot. Tucked modestly in the belly of the Royal Sonesta Hotel and bedecked with artwork (duh!), the restaurant boasts a versatile bar menu packed with gloriously finger-licking platefuls of sin that come in the form of small bites. Start with the duck confit spring rolls ($13), accented with papaya and sweet chili...

Cooking for dummies?

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 14:00:00 GMT

You can be smart, really smart, and still not know how to boil water — let alone grill a steak or stir fry asparagus. Here’s proof: this spring, while preparing for their June move from cushy dorm living to rented hovels, a dozen graduating Harvard seniors (smarties by definition, no?) received the most useful and least known Harvard degree — Chef Emeritus — for graduating from Cooking for the Culinarily Challenged. The 12 students, some of whose cooking skills were maxed out by ramen...

Estrogen Central

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 18 May 2009 18:01:00 GMT

As I chat with the two new women chefs at Tremont 647, sunshine streams through the open French doors on what seems a perfectly tranquil spring afternoon. Then whoosh! With her antelope-like peripheral vision, executive chef Izzy Sarto sees gold-red tongues of fire roaring up from the stove, spreading from burner to burner. She leaps into action, grabbing a fire extinguisher, spraying and shoving, yelling “Fiero!” at the top of her lungs. By the time the prep cook lumbers up to respond,...

Game Food at Audubon Circle

Leslie Kilgore — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:38:00 GMT

It’s springtime, which in Boston means that many of us have one thing on our minds: baseball season! (Seriously, what other sports team has fans so obsessed that they would actually declare themselves a nation, one with its own president, vice-president, and governors, no less?) Locals here will do whatever it takes for our beloved team — but those seats behind home plate, the ridiculous parking prices, and all that new gear from the souvenir shops can make showing your support one pricey...

5 Courses with Charlie Radoslovich

Louisa Kasdon — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:31:00 GMT

Charlie Radoslovich would like to talk to you about your yard. He wants it. For farming. He dreams of making Boston one big victory garden, with everyone doing their part to make front yards more edible than ornamental. Imagine: instead of little green plots of tended grass, we’d be surrounded by a salad green necklace, sprouting harvests of mesclun, radicchio, and Brussels sprouts instead of crab grass. (Wouldn’t Frederick Law Olmstead be proud?) That’s the idea behind Radoslovich’s new...

Bavette steak at Ten Tables Cambridge

MC Slim JB — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:24:00 GMT

Hard times call for careful choices when a guy’s steak craving kicks in. That $50 NY strip at Grill 23 may be impossible to sneak onto your newly throttled expense account, but you needn’t settle for some cheesy chain serving leathery choice-grade steaks, either. So how do even the most tight-fisted of Frenchmen eat so damned well? For one, they entrust less-tender cuts of beef like hanger, flat iron, and flank to gifted chefs. That’s the angle taken at Ten Tables Cambridge (5 Craigie...