Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot eating & cooking in Northwest England)
25
In my next life, I am going to have staff.
Key qualities - someone who can do techie stuff, arrange and supervise plumbers. And find restaurants.
I was watching the UK’s Celebrity Masterchef a few weeks back. One such celeb was Rod Stewart’s wife. She mentions that they have a private chef who prepares three course meals for them every day.
And on Professional Masterchef, one contestant notes that he works as a private chef, cooking for the man of the house. And another chef cooked for “madame and the children”.
this is hilarious. I’d love an assistant who would do this for me, I spend dozens of hours searching for stuff and making a master word document when I go somewhere I’ve never been before. I could save days of my life if someone would do this for me.
I am unsure if hidden boston is pay for play, but he does sometimes go places where the food quality seems questionable. I have sometimes found decent things through that site though, especially old school joints like Monte’s in Lynn. And he hipped me to that weird banh mi joint that’s at Marina Bay in Quincy, that was pretty good.
I’ve also found for some cities that Reddit can be a decent place to look for threads. The Boston one is pretty weak, but when I went to Houston I got really good info from there and I’m researching a trip to Philly and it seems like there’s a lot of good stuff. The trick is reading enough so that you can suss out the folks who are worth listening to. Another good reason to have someone else to do this for you!
If you ever go to LA, the Food Talk Central board for that city is really active. And someday I’ll go to Chicago, and you know I’ll be checking out the LTH forum for that one (LTH Forum), I think someone here hipped me to that. I’m convinced that there might be other things like this for some cities, but they can be hard as hell to find if they don’t get indexed by Google.
