75 Chestnut – Beacon Hill

When I think of Beacon Hill, I’m more inclined to think of it as a place with fashionable boutiques and good Instagram pictures, and not exactly a dining hot spot. I know there are a few restaurants and pubs in the neighborhood, but I’ve never really been there at a time that would have been convenient to have something to eat. Still, 75 Chestnut has been on my radar for a little while now, and this weekend seemed like a good time to go and check it out.

Tucked one a side street just off Beacon Hill’s main thoroughfare and featuring well-manicured window boxes, 75 Chestnut’s dimly lit interior has comfortable booth-style seating along wood-paneled walls. It’s a tasteful fusion of all the aspects one could expect from a comfortable Boston Brahmin haunt. The food reflects this, being an upscale take on American comfort foods. 75 Chestnut has a solid array salads, sandwiches, and entrees that, while nicer than the standard pub grub fare you could expect at a local bar, are still quintessentially American favorites. They also have a sizable cocktail menu made up of just the sort of drinks you would expect a place like this to have, with a focus on gin and whiskeys, along with seasonal drinks (currently strawberry-based summery cocktails and sangria).

The whole menu looks really good, but eventually we each settled on a single dish. Yue had a New England-style seafood soup, with a full-bodied red broth full of shrimp, scallops, chopped potato and haddock, while I chose the honey Dijon pork chop, served atop a bed of fingerling potatoes, mushrooms, carrots and asparagus. Yue and I have been eating a lot of eastern food lately, so I was happy to have a change of pace to such solid, hearty, American fare. The portions are a good size, enough to fill you up without overfilling you. We’ll have to go back, if only to try a few other things on the menu that caught my eye, and next time we’ll hopefully get to sit near the large picture window that takes up much of the front of the restaurant.

75 Chestnut makes for a good lunch or dinner stop if you have been wandering Boston all day, or are looking for a quiet place to grab a bite after work, away from the hustle and bustle of the happy hour crowd. It’s just a stone’s throw away from the Charles River, which makes for a nice after-dinner stroll.

Maison Soule – French Quarter, New Orleans

The French Quarter is packed full of dining options, but I think my favorite place we ate (besides my birthday dinner at Muriel’s) was Maison Soule. Tucked away on a cross street in the French Quarter between the riotous Bourbon Street and the gallery-packed Royal Street is Maison Soule, an unassuming hotel with a small bistro on the ground floor. When we found it, it was almost empty, and gave us a quiet place to get our bearings and plan our night out.

Yue ordered a crawfish etouffe: shellfish served over rice with a roux sauce, it’s name coming from the French word for “smother”. The salty red sauce was quickly absorbed by the rice once mixed in to help balance out the flavors of the dish. It’s a distinctly Creole dish, rarely found outside New Orleans, and Yue and I are always up for trying some of the local flavors.

I chose something a little less overtly NOLA, but still with its roots heavily in colonial French cuisine. Ever since having a wild boar crepe on a family trip to Quebec nearly a decade ago, I’ve always had a soft spot for savory meat-based crepes, so when I saw a duck crepe with raspberry vinaigrette on the menu, I knew I had to order it. The side of garlic fries was an unexpected but welcome bonus, especially when I realized I could dip them in Yue’s etouffe.

The red drink in the background of the crepe picture is a sazerac, a particular pride and joy of New Orleans, and reputedly the original American cocktail, made of whiskey, bitters, sugar, and just a bit of absinthe. It’s said that the sazerac was created in pre-Civil War New Orleans by a local bar owner with bitters imported by a local apothecary, the sort of man who would prescribe you the cocaine you needed to get the demons out of your blood, or however they balanced your essential humors back in the 19th century. It’s a simple cocktail, not entirely unlike a Manhattan, making it well suited for drinking along with dinner, or for a stroll down Bourbon Street, where the blood alcohol levels are made up and open container laws don’t matter. As a fan of whiskey-based simple cocktails, this became my New Orleans drink of choice, though now that I’m back up north, I’m quite content to slide back into my Manhattan-sipping ways.

For dessert, we had the old New Orleans staple of bread pudding. Unlike the one we profiled for Muriel’s, Maison Soule’s pudding is firmer, and their drizzle is caramel rather than rum based. Yue was less than impressed with the texture, preferring the softer pudding, but I had no qualms with Maison Soule’s, nor with their presentation.

Gumbo Shop – French Quarter, New Orleans

Like I mentioned in my post the other day, Muriel’s was actually the last place we ate in New Orleans. For today’s feature, I’m turning the clock back to the first meal we ate after landing down south, Gumbo Shop in the French Quarter. Apparently a haunt for locals and travelers alike, Gumbo Shop sits right on the edge of Jackson Square, a stone’s throw away from the more touristy shops. They offer both indoor and al fresco seating, and having just landed in balmy southern climes, we opted for the latter, sitting in Gumbo Shop’s tiled courtyard surrounded by old brickwork, fountains and plants.

Dining out in New Orleans is quite a different experience from what I’ve come to expect in the Northeast. It’s one thing to take your meal on a patio or sidewalk, but so many places we saw in NOLA had elegant little courtyards for diners, something that would obviously be impractical in a place like Boston, where we spend eight months of the year wondering what it was like to feel the sun, and the other four wishing the sun would just go away already.

Since it was our first meal, we wanted something as authentically New Orleans as possible. Yue ordered a shrimp po’ boy, but unlike the standard po’ boy, the shrimp in this one were sauteed, rather than fried. I tried a bit, and I think I prefer the sautee to fried, with the bread of the sandwich soaking up some of the sauce to add an extra dimension to the flavor and giving it a bit of unexpected texture. But Yue is a bit of a purist when it comes to this kind of thing, so she was disappointed that she wasn’t able to get her fried food fix.

Personally, I opted for the jambalaya; chicken, shrimp and sausage all lightly spiced and tossed together with rice. I didn’t want something as heavy as a plate of gumbo so early in the day, with so much walking left to do, but this seemed like just the right thing to refuel after a flight and to give me a protein boost to explore the rest of the French Quarter. It was also here that I had my first sazerac, a New Orleans specialty cocktail not unlike a Manhattan, but with a bit of absinthe mixed in with the bitters for good measure.

Assagio – North End

With the warm weather we had this weekend, Yue and I decided to venture out from our comfortable neighborhood Allston haunts into the great unknown… or at least the North End, which is basically the same thing. We hadn’t eaten in the North End since late last summer, and the best way to enjoy it seemed to be to make a trek all the way to the other side of the city. We didn’t really have a specific place in mind, and since we hadn’t bothered making reservations, we figured we would try our luck with whatever didn’t have too long a wait.

We wound up at Assagio, tucked behind a church just off Hanover Street, a cozy trattoria with whitewashed walls that balances the old, simple architecture of the North End with whitewashed walls that give it a modern and chic ambiance. We started with a mushroom and herb bruschetta, served on thick slices of Italian bread, and followed that up with a pasta course.

I ordered an Amatriciana, made with tomatoes, onions and bacon, while Yue went with the vongole positano, made from specialty Italian pasta and served with imported clams in a red sauce. The pasta courses are served in pans, and lived up to my high expectations for Italian food. (After growing up in a place where it seemed like every other block had an Italian place, Boston’s lack of trattorias outside of the North End is a bit of a disappointment, but I digress)

Towards the end of our meal, we were told that the restaurant was expecting a large party, and they would need our table to accommodate. We told them it was no issue and moved to another table nearby. In recompense, the management gave us each a limoncello, a plate of tiramisu, and the rather large fruit platter you see above. Both Yue and I thought that the fruit was for the 20-seat party that we moved for, so we were a little surprised when it wound up on our table.

Assagio certainly went above and beyond to earn our loyalty and gratitude, so it’s been enshrined as one of our favorite Boston spots, and one that we will certainly return to.

The Abbey – Washington Square

Yue and I are apartment hunting, which means we have less time to linger over breakfast in the mornings when we go out to look at a place. We’ve been getting lunch at pubs lately, and trying out different kinds of sandwiches as part and parcel of that. Today we were looking at a place near Washington Square and stopped for lunch in the Abbey just a little ways up the road. The Abbey is a quintessential neighborhood pub with a solid sandwich menu and draft list, and doesn’t have any pretensions at being something it’s not.

Something that irks me a little about the Boston bar and pub culture is that so many places try really hard to be a quaint local bar, but wind up seeming like they’re trying too hard. They Abbey feels like a good pub should feel, the kind of place you like to go to for lunch or a late-night stop to carbo-load to stave off a hangover. It just feels good.

For lunch, Yue ordered a fish taco while I went with one of the daily specials, turkey and Swiss on a toasted flatbread with spicy mayo, paired with an English oatmeal stout. Neither of us were in the mood for anything too heavy, and the portions were the perfect size. The menu also caters to several different vegetarian options, and there should be something to everyone’s taste. I found the food to be less greasy and heavy than other similar pubs in Brookline, and each of the different menu options was familiar but had a bit of a twist to make it just unique enough.

If you go for lunch, try to sit at a high-top near the windows for quality people (and dog) watching with all the foot traffic in Washington Square.

Brick Alley Pub – Newport, RI

Over the holiday weekend, Yue and I went home to my parents’ place in Rhode Island. On Saturday, we decided to take a drive down to Newport to take in the ocean air and enjoy the first bit of spring. We did lunch at a Newport hallmark, the Brick Alley Pub, located just off Newport’s main drag of Thames Street and within throwing distance of the shopping district and harbor.

Brick Alley Pub is easy to spot, with its towering facade and bright yellow banners and awnings. The restaurant is a sprawling complex covering several floors, with several different dining rooms and bars. It’s always bustling, but we happened to get there between the two lunch rushes. Yue ordered Rhode Island-style fried fish and chips, which are more lightly battered than other fried fish would be. I suppose that makes them healthier, but when you’re talking about fried foods, that always a matter of degrees. I opted for the Gourmet burger, which was a towering colossus stacked with the traditional lettuce, tomato and red onion, but supplemented with applewood smoked bacon, portabella mushrooms, and bleu cheese.

Brick Alley has a wide selection of beers on tap and several specialty house cocktails, most of which are in the spirit of a coastal city that thrives on the commerce the ocean brings. Brick Alley can be counted on to have any sort of beer that the Newport Storm brewery is currently offering, owing to their close proximity (although this is hardly unique to Brick Alley, almost any pub in Newport worth its salt would do the same).

We’re fortunate that Newport has such a walkable shopping district, because after a heavy and hearty meal like our lunch on Saturday, we both needed a long stroll up and down the boardwalk to walk off the lethargy that a full meal brings.

We’ll be back in Boston soon, so stay tuned for our next restaurant write-up.

Umai – Back Bay

 

Umai is a quaint little sushi restaurant on Newbury Street that Yue and I go to fairly regularly, as it’s conveniently located near both of our offices. While it’s hardly a hole in the wall, we’ve never had to wait for a table, and the sushi is excellent. It makes for a great impromptu date night after a long day, and offers a great chance to unwind.

We’ve always ordered two maki and split them, but this time we decided to do something a little different. We ordered a maki as usual, but we also went with a bowl of gyu don, beef with onions over rice. I thought it tasted kind of like beef stroganoff, though obviously without the mushrooms. It also comes with a egg on top, a bit like eggs benedict. The sushi we went with was the Newbury maki, a signature roll made with salmon, avocado and tempura, severed beneath a layer of grilled crab and squid. The smokey flavor and taste of the crab helped to draw out the other flavors of the dish, blending together in a pleasant medley that takes a few seconds to process as it all goes down.

The restaurant itself has a very relaxed vibe with friendly and attentive servers. It’s a great place to pass a quiet meal, in view of the hustle and bustle of Boston’s main commercial avenue, but removed from the actual press of the crowd. Try and sit in one of the tables right in the window for great views up and down the street, making it perfect for a bit of people watching while you sip miso soup.

Buttermilk and Bourbon – Back Bay

This weekend, my little sister was on her spring break from college and came up to visit. After several months of subsisting on unappetizing dining hall food, I decided to take her out for some soul food. We went to Buttermilk and Bourbon, located on the Commonwealth Ave Mall, for some New Orleans-style tapas, and came away feeling stuffed and satisfied. The general rule of thumb I try to abide by is to order about two dishes per person when ordering tapas, but with food as heavy as what Buttermilk and Bourbon serves up, we only managed five.

Like all good southern comfort food, Buttermilk and Bourbon specializes in heavy and/or deep fried fare, and interesting twists on old favorites. To start off, we ordered a bowl of Cajun guacamole, served up with blackened shrimp and barbecue kettle chips. The cool guacamole helped serve as a counterbalance for some of the spicier stuff we ordered later on.

My sister absolutely loves mac and cheese, so Buttermilk and Bourbon’s aged Gouda macaroni was a must. It’s served with a generous helping of creamy melted Gouda along with bits of pork and capped off with hot Cheetos to give it a bit of extra texture and flavor. The first time Yue and I tried this place out over the summer, it piqued our curiosity, and we were pleasantly surprised by the taste. My immediate thought after trying it was that I had to get my sister to try this, and when I pitched it to her for dinner, her response was, predictably, “You had me at mac and cheese.”

We also ordered pork croquettes and a plate of fried chicken, served with a bit of sweet and spicy sauce, because no Cajun style meal is complete without something fried and battered. We rounded out the rest of the food with a batch of honey-glazed biscuits with a cinnamon spread. They were absolutely delectable, though I’m a sucker for anything honeyed.

Though we sat in the bar area, Buttermilk and Bourbon has a few distinct seating option. The most intriguing to me is the Voodoo Lounge, a room all decked out like a tarot reader’s parlor in the back of the restaurant. But the whole place is decked out in funky New Orleans-style decor, making the most out of the restaurant’s exposed brick walls. It’s an interesting space, and a breath of fresh air and inventiveness in a neighborhood where the food options can feel a little same-y. While variety is the spice of life, it’s hardly the only spice Buttermilk and Bourbon brings to the table.

It will, however, leave you wanting a long nap afterwards.

Aquitaine – South End

It’s been a little while since Yue and I went out to brunch, so this weekend we trekked out to the South End to eat at a place I’ve had my eye on for a while. Aquitaine is a chic French-style bistro on Tremont Street, serving up elevated French fare for dinner service and a large spread of options for brunch. It’s widely hailed as one of Boston’s premier brunch destinations, and I would have felt remiss in my duty as a food blogger if I didn’t try it out at least once.

We were seated at a corner table in the back on a comfortable wrap-around bench, and the waiter was cheerful and attentive as he took our order. We opted for their brunch prixe fixe menu (which runs until 3 pm on Saturday and 11 am on Sunday), which offers a choice between two different kinds of omelettes or a brioche french toast, along with coffee, freshly squeezed juice, and a cinnamon roll, all for about $12. We went a little later than usual, and they were out of the cinnamon rolls, but they substituted in a fruit cup, and I certainly won’t complain.

Yue ordered the omelette occidental, which is served with ham, peppers, and cheddar, along with a side of potatoes and toast. I ordered the french toast, and then we both split our orders to share. I will be honest with you, dear reader: it was the worst trade deal in the history of trade deals, possibly ever. Don’t get me wrong, the omelette was good enough, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

It’s just that the french toast was simply phenomenal. Without a doubt, the best I’ve had.

The exterior crust was just solid enough to give it a satisfying texture and consistency, but the inside was warm and soft and the perfect contrast without being too sweet. We’ve been thinking about it all weekend, and we will almost certainly have to make a return trip just for that alone. I can see now why Aquitaine has the reputation it does, and I encourage all of our readers to make the trip to the South End to experience it for themselves.

Ganko Ittetsu Ramen – Coolidge Corner

It’s finally time for a write-up of a place I’ve wanted to feature on the blog for a long time. Ganko Ittetsu Ramen is just down the street from my place in Coolidge Corner and it is, hands down, the best ramen spot in the city. Tucked into the Coolidge Corner arcade, it’s right near the Coolidge Corner theater, and a bowl of steaming, flavorful ramen is the perfect thing after a movie… if you can get a table, that is.

When I first moved in to Coolidge Corner a year and a half ago, Ganko had only recently opened, and it had a more underground appeal. The wait times weren’t as long, and you could usually get a seat at the bar counter in a pinch. But awesome ramen doesn’t stay a secret in Boston for long. Now wait times at Ganko average thirty to forty five minutes or longer. Their tiny space doesn’t help matters, and so the past few times Yue and I have tried to go, the prospect of a long agonizing wait for our food didn’t really outweigh the prospect of delicious ramen at the end. But recently the stars aligned, and we were able to get a table after only twenty five minutes (most of which were spent perusing the stacks of the nearby Brookline Booksmith).

Though Ganko offers several kinds of ramen, Yue and I both ordered the shio, meaning salt. The sea salt flavored broth is augmented with thin slices of pork, sweet corn, a five minute egg, scallions and nori. This is certainly not the sad ramen you made in the dorm kitchen when you were an undergrad. The flavors blend in the broth, and the noodles are just the right firmness to fill you up and leave you sated. Now, I may be a simple man of simple pleasures, but I think there are fewer things more satisfying than drinking down the last bit of delicious ramen broth from a deep bowl. (Okay, I lied, there are plenty of things more satisfying, but it’s definitely up there on the list)

There are plenty of things a ramen place can do to throw off the balance of their food. The noodles can be too firm, or too soft, or taste too much like the miserable discount ramen you ate in college. They can add too much water to the broth, or too much salt for “flavor”. I’m looking at a specific ramen place in Boston for each one of those things, in case you were wondering. Ganko does none of these things, and as such, it deserves its crown as Table For Two’s Favorite Ramen.

Now if only they would expand a bit so I don’t have to wait so long…