Road Trip: Baaaahston
Posted by Ruth on August 18th, 2010
As mentioned in my previous post, I recently visited Boston to accompany The Boy to a conference there (also: free holiday).
I mapped our journey on the napkin provided by Southwest Airlines (the only in-flight entertainment the airline provides):
Given my New York round-up was so freaking long, I thought I’d take a different approach to this one, and use what we in the news-making industry call a “listicle”.
Five things I learned about Boston
1. It smells like fish. Well, the area we stayed in — South Boston waterfront — smelled like fish. I do not recommend staying there. Unless you like the smell of fish and enjoy being far away from anything interesting.
2. People in Boston are rude. Which I think they know, but they pride themselves on being less rude than New Yorkers. So when people in Boston ask you what you think of Boston, you have to say, “Everyone’s so much friendlier than in New York!” and they will beam and nod approvingly. It’s bullshit, though: they’re all equally rude.
People in Portland are inordinately polite. I already knew this before visiting the East Coast, but I never really appreciated it before. By the end of the week, I missed their smiling faces.
3. Boston traffic is fucking retarded. Which you’ve probably heard, but I’ve sat in it and can confirm.
BUT
4. Boston is an eminently walkable city. I strolled from South Boston to Cambridge without a hiccup.
You’re supposed to walk the Freedom Trail — which leads you around “nationally significant historic sites” of the American Revolution — but that sounded like it would involve reading lots of plaques, and I have the attention span of a gnat. I still passed a few, though.
This cannon was abandoned by British soldiers during the Revolution. I’m pretending it’s a penis.
5. The local beer is called Sam Adams. Don’t bother.
Five things I saw in Boston
1. Lightning! I went to the Boston Museum of Science. It was pretty much the exact opposite of the NY Natural History Museum I’d visited the previous day — this one was all about the hands-on, interactive exhibits, which I happily played with while digesting precisely zero actual science. I also saw great exhibits on George Washington Carver (mmm, peanuts) and Escher.
The museum is also home to the world’s largest Van de Graaff generator, which is basically a pair of giant metal balls that create lightning. The museum put on a great demonstration, zapping all sorts of shit with electricity and explaining what to do in a lightning storm (get inside a metal garbage can and put the lid on, believe it or not).
2. Nerds. Harvard Uni is as big and grand as you’d expect. I’m not sure I actually saw many Harvard students, mostly tourists (plenty of hopeful future students with dreams yet to be crushed), but it’s a lovely campus to wander around and I saw frat houses and it was just like Revenge of the Nerds.
This is Harvard Yard, where it is customary to sit (and park your car). There are complimentary chairs and everything. I didn’t sit (that aforementioned attention span), but I took a picture of others sitting:
MIT is less like Revenge of the Nerds and more like Real Life Nerds Studying Really Hard. It’s less campusy and ivy-covered, and more just a bunch of funkily designed buildings filled with very earnest looking kids in polo shirts and chinos who can probably build rockets. It has a small but cool museum, featuring lots of robots and holograms, and excellent bookstore, and their official uni tshirt says “Nerd Pride”.
3. The Cheers pub. Yes, I walked to the Cheers pub and took a picture. Here it is:
Then (literally) bus-loads of other tourists arrived, and I left.
4. Fancy pants houses. The Beacon Hill neighbourhood is so picturesque and full of twee little boutiques, cobblestone paths and hand-stitched American flags, I wanted to hurl. Instead, I window shopped and bought some salt-water taffy.
5. A real Boston Irish pub. I was adamant that I must visit an Irish pub in Boston — even though I half-suspected they would be like Irish pubs everywhere else in the world — so a friend took me to her old university drinking haunt. It was, in fact, like Irish pubs everywhere else in the world, except the Red Sox were playing on the TV, so it felt uniquely Boston Irish enough to sate my touristy yearnings.
Five things I ate in Boston
1. Deep-fried pickles. A discussion about bagel dogs on my Facebook page a few weeks back had wound up in a discussion about deep-fried pickles, which my Boston friend insisted I must try. So we went for a big breakfast at a proper greasy-spoon diner, which we finished with a big plate of deep fried pickles with sour cream and ranch sauce for dipping.
They taste pretty much as you’d expect, but the sourness of the pickle is a surprisingly nice contrast to the crust, especially slathered with some good cream cheese.
2. Not deep-fried pickles. I took a lovely stroll through Boston Common, which is the rather large park in the middle of the city that really felt like a central hub for the town — tourists gawked at statues and took tours led by guys dressed embarrassingly as 18th century colonialists, teenagers skulked around like teenagers, kids splashed about in the big public pool and rode a rickety old carousel, office workers ate lunch, beggars begged.
The whole park is peppered with vendors, mostly selling cheap tourist tshirts and ice-cream, but one more distinctive vendor caught my eye — a sign that said “pickles $1″. The owner told me they were “Italian pickles”, though they tasted a lot like American pickles, which taste a lot like Australian pickles. My dollar bought me two spears, one regular and one hot. The regular was a good sour pickle with nice dill flavour, while the hot was indeed seriously spicy. They weren’t a patch on the ones I ate in New York, but they were good, and I really like the idea of simple pickle spears as cheap, refreshing street food on a summer day.
2. Fresh burrata. Burrata is a magical cheese. It is a ball of mozzarella filled with cream. Mozzarella is best when it’s super, super fresh, but this is doubly true for burrata. In Melbourne, you can (and should) get it at La Latteria in Carlton, who make it fresh every day, but I’ve never seen it in Portland (although a lot of restaurants make their mozzarella in-house, which I love). We had an excellent meal at uber-trendy Italian tapas restaurant Coppa; pretty much everything was good — perfect pizza crust, inspired mascarpone ice-cream — but the fresh burrata, which came garnished with olives, salt and raisins, was easily the stand-out for a cheese-fiend like me, and a great reminder that Italian food done well is sooo good (but sadly rare).
3. Food cart food, East-coast style. As Boston is known for having a good food cart scene, I decided I should check some out. The cart with far and away the most hype online was one called Clover Food Lab, which is conveniently vegetarian and has vans in both the city and MIT. They have separate breakfast, lunch and dinner menus, offering fairly simple sandwiches, salads and fried things made from seasonal and house-made ingredients, plus a bunch of weird home-made sodas (basil lemonade, hibiscus, cinnamon). I visited the city truck for lunch. They closed for about ten minutes between breakfast and lunch to restock and prep, during which time a fairly daunting line formed. Unlike the more laid-back, one-or-two-man operations you generally find in PDX, this was a serious kitchen working seriously hard to get through the rush. Two employees stood in front of the cart, one taking orders and one handing out meals. The former would shout each order to the six or so cooks, as well as the entire cumulative orders still waiting: “I got six egg and egg, three chickpea, four iced teas, six fries!” he’d yell, urging them to hurry, hurry, hurry. I also ended up visiting the MIT cart during an afternoon, which was far quieter and less frantic.
I tried the most popular item, the chickpea fritter sandwich — which is basically just a falafel to you yanks or a vegetarian kebab to the Aussies. It was a good falafel, but eh, I’m just not that into falafels (pitfall of being a vego; you get served them so often, you get sick of them. Or I have, anyway. I’ll even get my drunken late-night Melbourne souva or kebab sans-falafel [hot tip: ask them to replace it with dolmades]). My rosemary fries were also pretty unexceptional (Portland has spoiled me for good, hand-cut fries, though) — a bit flaccid and not particularly rosemary-y. But BUT, their BBQ seitan sandwich (seitan is a type of mock meat, like I discussed here. It’s made from wheat gluten, and is very dense and chewy) was sensational.
House-made pita stuffed with huge, tasty chunks of soft seitan (I have eaten seitan all over Asia made by people who dedicate their lives to perfecting it, and this was the best seitan I’ve ever had) mayo, cheese, lettuce, tomato and caramalised onion. This was just one of those things that pushed all the right buttons for me: cheesy, tangy, fresh, chewy, slathered in sauce, not too much bread and a good serve of protein (seitan is basically all protein). I could happily eat this every day.
4. Maíz Asado con Alioli y Queso Cotija. That’s a fancy foreign way of saying “corn with aioli and cheese”. We went to another much-vaunted tapas place called Toro, which turned out to be run by the same chef as Coppa. He apparently has five other restaurants in Boston — one French, one Japanese, one Mexican, one steakhouse, and this, a Spanish eatery — which would normally make me think “Jack of all trades…” (and also now I’ve seen this picture of him, I kinda want to punch him in his smirking face), but both were very good, so it’s probably lucky I didn’t know this before we went. More delicious cheeses, good wine list, decent cocktails, generous servings, and great flavours in every dish. But the plate that had everyone moaning was these corn cobs — char-grilled, decadently buttery and smothered with rich garlicky aioli, the salty, crumbly kind of cotija, and a fresh bite of pepper and lime juice.
5. Dodgy veggies at Boston Logan Airport. After a solid week of eating super rich food, all I wanted was something plain and fresh. Waiting for our plane back home, I found a place selling bowls of plain grilled veggies and undressed green salad. It looked OK in the bain-marie, but I could see it was a bit greasy and cold once it was in front of me. Ah well, it’s just vegetables, right?
Yeah, tell that to the poor people sitting around me on the plane an hour later as I hurled it all up again.
