A new pizzeria is born

If you live in Boston you are used to pizzeria flyers tucked into your front door. They all seem to use the same format from the same printer with the same layout, the same fonts and the same clip art. I found one of these today in my front door but the front fold was a little different. It wasn't enough to separate it from the pack that arrives over the course of a month, but I tend to read these from front to back closely because I have little else to do. My mail arrives in the afternoon and I've already spent an hour in the morning reading the Wall Street Journal and ten minutes in the morning reading the Boston Globe, so by day's end I'm ready to use my reading skills again and the mail is about all I have.

The logo on this flyer was a bit different. It wasn't set in white space floating above a picture of a choice pizza pie. It was cemented over a photo of a hamburger bun, some wraps full of indistinguishable filling, two disks that looked like pizzas, and assorted whole vegetables. The shop's address is at 856 Dorchester Avenue.

The shop's name is Avenue Grille & Pizza. I looked over the literature and I wondered, "Do I know this place? It's close by judging from the address." Click...click...click...the pieces fell into place: Avenue Grille... Great Ceasar's ghost!...and Pizzeria?

The Avenue Grille was a sit-down restaurant where locals gathered, that offered sandwiches as well as some dishes that required more preparation served on white china plates with a glass of wine or a cocktail. The Avenue Grille didn't have the best food but it did have a restaurant feel when you sat in its dark wood dining room. I knew it was under new management, but not that they were turning a bistro into a pizza joint. Maybe Dorchester does need more pizza joints. Maybe the hunger for pizza cannot be satisfied with pizzerias every half mile or so. 856 Dot Ave is almost equidistant between Pantry Pizza and Andrew Pizza. Maybe some people don't like to walk.

We hadn't been to the old Avenue Grille for a while. It is on the opposite side of Columbia Road from where we live. It's not a wide road, but it is a boundary where, those of us to the south like to think. separates the men from the boys. Maybe we should have crossed that boundary more often. Maybe we will now that there's a new pizzeria open for business. I'll have to give it a try.