Yow, how could I forget Mug ‘n Muffin? I had a western omelette every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for an entire semester.
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Love that you can go there for an “immersive analog experience”
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hey c’mon, it was better than Young and Yee on Church Street!
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Yes.
With a long version of " Quaalude" that, along with the “Birds of Fire” Tour Mahavishnu Orchestra show at the Orpheum and seeing The Mothers of Invention on Mothers day, just about changed my life.
Actually i just gave my ticket stub for that Mahavishnu show to a freind I went to the show with, because it was 50 years ago in April.
The show was $8.50
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Yes the “fanciness” vs the food was very confusing
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Yep, that’s what it was called. Then it became a Chili’s and then when the Chili’s left the son of the original Swiss Alps owner reopened it as Hoffa’s Swiss Alps. I don’t think that lasted long.
One other place I ate a lot as a mailman was at Lee’s Beehive on Dunster, next to City Sports. (Both where the Greek place is now). It was the last bastion of real cheap lunch in the Square–even in the 90’s you could get a tuna or ham sandwich in there (that i think came with chips and a pickle) for like $3.25. If you felt like springing for a burger it was a bit more, maybe 4 bucks.
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that Young and Yee on Church Street…got take out from them once, I think, between 1973 and 1977. It did not come close to resembling food, much less Chinese Food. Never again. Yengching…one of my art history tutors took our seminar there. The seminar was on Chinese Bronzes. The food was good back then or at least decent for what passed for Chinese here then. A group I was temporarily part of in 1973 was taken to Joyce Chen. I don’t remember the food.
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There was a place very much like Lee’s Beehive on Church St, too. Great cheap lunch and great fries. I can’t remember the name.
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yeah, I used to eat there too but I haven’t been able to dredge up the name! it’s driving me crazy.
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on one of the routes I covered, the regular mail guy told me that they would give him free lunch every day because he delivered the mail there. When he was going to be out for months following surgery and I covered the route, he said if I wanted to do the same to just let them know that I’d be doing the route daily.
I never did, because the food there was so bad that I didn’t even want it for free!
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I think Lee’s was on Church Street. Lee’s Sandwich Shop, however.
Was Lee’s Beehive owned by the same people?
More nostalgia:
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oh right, Lee’s Sandwich Shop! It was next to Bob Slate when that was on Church. They had a long counter with stools at it in a really narrow set up.
You have to imagine it was the same Lee, both of those spots had the exact same sort of menu filled with cheap, diner style food.
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I have to say that it is truly stunning to me that someone bought the Harvard Square theater building for 6.5 million dollars in 2012 when AMC shut it down and that to date there STILL has not been anything in there since they shuttered.
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I’m told by people who know more about money than I do that keeping a building shuttered, with minimal maintenance, is still profitable as long as property values go up (as they do in Cambridge). It’s a bit like holding stock – it doesn’t do anything for you when you hold it, but it does a lot for you when you sell it. Plus, apparently, there are tax benefits to holding property that you claim you cannot use.
But, I know nothing about this personally.
As an aside: Enjoying this thread.
And, let me cautiously say that I found several dishes at Yenching palatable (although overly oily – and I like oil).
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yeah, no doubt. that building is worth way more than 6.5 million today, and all you had to do was hold it and pay the taxes. i get it, it’s just weird in the meantime to watch a space like that stay vacant for a decade.
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And obviously purchased by an entity who doesn’t give a rat’s butt about the neighborhood’s character.
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I went to the Lee’s on Church Street a few times when I was working at the nearby Harvard Graduate School of Education. It was very popular with grad students and others. Many went just to get the fries for take out. I don’t know how they made those crinkle fries taste so great! So sad not to have those hole-in-the-wall restaurants anymore.
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Anyone remember the original Harvest, before they remodeled? U-shaped bar In front, some tables sequestered on the far side, including a very long table for larger groups. The number of famous chefs who worked in that kitchen is staggering. The Design Research building it’s in has an interesting history.
I got introduced to Harvest by a Danish postdoc in the US on a Carlsberg fellowship. The Danish kroner was so strong he was earning more than the head of the lab, which helps explain why he was a regular.
The food was damn good. House-made sorbets were pretty exotic back then.
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The American Repertory Theatre (in the Loeb Drama Center on Brattle) kept me coming back to Harvard Square over the years. Apparently the ART is planning a move to a new facility in Allston. Not sure of the timeframe, but the loss of ART will surely impact the character of Harvard Square.
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I was aware of the Design Research building and its distinguished place in industrial design history (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Research_(store)), but hadn’t consciously thought that Harvest was nestled in that complex.
I’ve my own Harvest story. In 1991 I developed an interest in something called hypertext, a fictional-sounding idea at the time of linking passages of text to each other. In 1992/3 a little technology emerged in the physics community of how such an idea might be practically implemented. It’s creators grandiosely called it the World Wide Web. I studied it. A close friend of many years standing, aware of my proclivities, told me that her journalist/editor husband was to be in town from London, and wanted to learn more about this stuff. I took him to lunch at Harvest. He ordered lavishly while he pumped me for information. But we came from different worlds. All I could talk about were the technicalities of HTML. All he was interested in was whether this could be used to make money. Naively, I said I didn’t see how.
The rest of the lunch passed uneventfully, although expensively. At the end, though, he footed the bill, and added “Rupert’s paying.”
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