Swordfish souvlaki from Greek Street. Fish was perfectly cooked, sitting on a bed of really good salad with herbs, capers, shaved fennel, pickled red onions, green and black olives and a nice lemony vinaigrette. Fries were excellent. Pita was fresh and warm. Taramasalata was the best I have had in this country. Lovely lunch! The new skating rink outside was well-populated.
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What an incredible post! Quite likely the best ever on HO-Boston. You’re da’ woman!
(The others on the thread by you, and others, are damn good too.)
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I’m working in Boston until Tues and hope to get back.
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We have a simple rule to live by in our household. When @GretchenS says “go!!”, we ask “how soon?”. We’re glad we went. It’s a terrific, mind-opening show.
We also took in the astonishing juxtaposition of Jackson Pollock’s 1943 mural with Katharina Grosse’s two-sided hanging – you don’t think a large Pollock can be dwarfed, but it is here. And we reeled from Hyman Bloom’s macabre carcasses and cadavers. To keep the discussion food-centric, some of the paintings are of squashes, although by the time you get to them you’ve started to see body parts everywhere.
On to real food: Following, again, in the large footsteps – not to suggest she has big feet – of the great GS, we went to Time Out. We split a Craigie Burger (“OG”) and fries, both very good, but neither the best we’ve ever had, and a porter. We also got a chicken-parm and a Sunday tagliatelle bolognese to go from Schlow’s, but sampled both before we left. The c-parm was nicely crisp on the edges, and the sauce had a slight bite. Very good. The Sunday pasta was excellent with the haunting afternote of nutmeg that you look for but rarely find. Neither was as good once we got home.
I found the noise level high – both the piped-in music and the 30-somethings that seemed to fill the place – but I’m an old curmudgeon.
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Such is the dark power of @GretchenS that she bent me to her will this afternoon and time-traveled me back to this morning and made me visit Time Out Market again. As part of her evil plan, she got me there at 10:30 having had my phone tell me the market opens at 7:30.
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The market may open that early, but not every door to it does. You go to the most obvious ones and, after a bit of the push-pull routine, you see a sign directing you elsewhere because it’s winter. It was, apparently, not winter last Sunday evening when all doors opened. Anyway, I got in and found, essentially, only coffee, donuts and bagels available. I said to myself, what the heck, and got myself a $9 cup of rather mediocre pourover from George Howell. Team, I’ve taken this for you. The coffee was thin and weak, although not actively unpleasant.
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Every other food place opens at 11. Luckily the pourover had taken 8 minutes to pour, so I had only 22 minutes to kill. There were these yellow, high-backed armchairs in the lobby that were practically imploring me “Fooddabbler, sit in our laps and we’ll caress you while you think.” Who could resist? Especially since, as a startled young woman once said to me several decades ago when I told her what I did, “You mean they pay you to think?”. That is, indeed, my primary job.
So, I did my job till it was time to eat.
- I hugely over-ordered. Not a thinker when it comes to that.
a) Spicy chicken soup and dumplings from Ms. Clucks (aka O Ya) and karaage chicken and waffle fries. The chicken was a little too battered for me, but everything else was very good.
b) The spicy chicken noodle soup and dumplings from the same stall was a real knockout, but you must like your broth taste like the very essence of chicken. This may have been the best chicken-soup-that-tastes-like-chicken I’ve ever had. If you prefer a more neutral broth, this brew’s not for you.
c) Duck corn dogs from Tasting Counter. This is duck sausage in a corn casing, fried and served on a skewer like a lollipop. I found it a bit dry – expecting a more juicy burst of duck in the center. Also got a side of rather intense shishito peppers. On the Uber home, that was the main smell. I tipped my transporter well.
d) Since I’m a pawn in GS’s evil chess game, I was bent by her will to get a brace of nori tacos. Oddly, I was fullish, so asked them what my to-go options were: they were nice enough to say they could pack everything separately. They did, and my reconstruction at home was very satisfying. The torched hamachi was very, very good, and the spicy tuna better. If I may quibble – and if I’m not a dabbler, I’m a quibbler – the nori dominates the aftertaste, rather than the fish.
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This is excellent intel, I have been wondering about it. Were the wontons nice?
And I had no idea I had time-travel powers – good to know!
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For reals? Do you dabble in other currencies? Surely that’s not US dollar pricing?
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Absolutely for real. I figured (a), hey, it’s only money, (b) you can’t take it with you, ( c ) you only live once, etc., and took the plunge (except it was pourover not French press).
The New Yorker cartoon of just a few years ago of a panhandler saying “Brother can you spare me five bucks for a cup of coffee” will have to be updated to ten bucks.
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That depends on what you want from a wonton – wanton or not?
These were polite, thin skinned, with juicy fillings, not unruly in any way.
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On re-tasting tonight the food that made it home, I realize that those shishitos are totally friggin’ wrong. Yes, they’re “applewood smoked” and charred on the outside, but they’re completely raw on the inside. You bite into one, and you get char, smoke and then – what-the-hey? – totally raw pepper underneath. This was not apparent when they were warm earlier. It’s amazing what heat can hide.
Ugh
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Not to ugh you out further (OK, maybe to), here are three of their peppers frontside and backside:
As you see they’re very unevenly charred. My guess is that they were using too-high heat, explaining why the insides were uniformly undercooked, or even uncooked on several.
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There have been comments scattered here and there on this thread on the pricing at TOM. I agree that it’s on the high side, but by present standards it isn’t, in my opinion, sky-high. Let me deconstruct the things I last ate (all prices are base, before tax and tip):
- Two nori sushi tacos for $19 ($18, base price, plus $1 for the spicy tuna). Since I brought home the components, and reconstructed the tacos, I was able to assess how much there was of everything. I think there was enough rice, fish, and garnish to get three conventional pieces of sushi from each taco. That would work out to about $3/piece. Not out of bounds for fish of pretty high quality. (The $1 supplement for “spicy” does seem high, given that it’s over 10% of the cost of that taco.)
- The spicy chicken+dumpling+noodle soup plus chicken+waffle at Ms Clucks came to $29. That’s very reasonable, given that there were three reasonably-sized lunches there.
- The duck corn dogs plus the infamous shishitos seem* to have come to around $20. This may have been the weakest value.
All in all, given that this is a forum where we’re all fortunate enough (the posters at least) to (a) eat out well, and (b) eat out at all, I don’t think these are out-of-this-world prices.
Having said that, after sampling a few more things, I think I’ll not eat here again unless out of necessity:
*I put an asterisk above, because my CC e-receipts all only say Time Out so it’s hard to reconstruct the pre-tip&tax cost. I absolutely deplore every trend that this represents – the acceptance only of CCs, the inability to get printed receipts, the difficulty in tipping as you want, not in preset amounts, the obvious mass-corporatization that this venture represents.
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We found the bar drinks incredibly large. During my last visit, I ordered a hard cider served in a tall tumbler glass. In the time it took 4 of us to order and eat our food that cider still has a lot of life left.
Is it still around? I like cider.
To take a time out from Time Out, I’ve two large-drink stories:
- A colleague of mine who’d spent time in the UK and had developed a taste for the stuff ordered port at a bar one night where we’d met after a few-year gap. I ordered some beer they had on tap. When our drinks arrived mine was full to the brim of my glass – and so was his. He, I might add, was equal to the task.
- One Christmas Eve night, returning to a hotel on Long Island after a 7-fishes feast with her family, my wife and I went to the bar – as though we had not had enough to drink – and ordered cointreau. The very young doorman-barkeeper basically filled two large glasses for us. We tipped him well, carried them to our room, and filled a water bottle with the stuff. That was 25 years ago, and I’ve not had cointreau since. (I can still taste it.)
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Was in December. Check the bar menu. They had a few different ciders on tap.
What makes you think I’m not degenerate enough to drink left-over December cider in January?
But, I’ll check the ciders-on-tap next time. Thanks.
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What was I thinking?!
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Ohhh, that’s been on my radar for a while! Thanks for the pic.
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