You know the drill, folks, here’s where we put up the hopeful and the hopeless restaurants for the month of September in this most terrible of years.
This past week brought two brutal blows down upon two longtime places in Mass where I ate many a meal as a child with my family. Carbone’s, a classic red sauce Italian joint in Hopkington is shuttering after 87 years in business. And down in Foxboro, they’ve issued demolition permits for the Lafayette House where the original and oldest part of the structure was put up in 1784. Most of the rest of it was put up piecemeal over the years, but that sure is the end of an era. I remember steaks and white tablecloths in that place.
Very sad to hear that the Pour House has closed and will be sold. Many memories there. I just took my kids for breakfast over the holidays last year and it hadn’t changed at all. I lived in the Back Bay for 10 years, but the neighborhood is quickly becoming unfamiliar.
argh, Tacqueria el Barrio in Boston is shutting down. I really liked this place when I tried it. They even made their own tortillas, which very few places around here do. This year is rough.
Unfortunately I think we haven’t seen the rough part of the year (and early part of 2021) yet for the restaurant industry (and everybody else). So far was the “easy” part
yeah, I pretty much agree. At lunchtime I walked by a strip of Highland last week that has a Chinese place, a falafel place and a Thai place side-by-side and saw only the Thai place was open. The Chinese place is bad and the falafel place is only OK, but that they’re still closed at lunch seems a really bad sign. There must be tons of small places like this that are never coming back and aren’t even getting reported.
Item also caught my eye. I‘m really sorry for anyone who might be losing employment or hours. The reported disregard for COVID safety on the premises saddens and scares me, though.
They succeeded in 2 ways which both promote the wild rich kids party aesthetic they’re shooting for: The first was Salt Bae posting a video to his Instagram showing a tightly packed line of customers waiting to get in – most without masks. The other was a video of a woman twerking for Salt Bae and when her boyfriend who was outside was let in, he started what appeared like a melee before the video ended; this video ended up on World Star Hip Hop and elsewhere. There were plenty of pictures and videos of guests posing for photos with Salt Bae all without masks with guests milling about without masks either. The 3 foot table spacing was word of mouth.
