New Orleans coffee

If you are from New Orleans, you may not have heard of Dunkin' Donuts, a chain that has virtually conquered Boston.

DD has been around for decades, but its creep has increased as the years go by.  When I lived in Connecticut, and earlier in Rhode Island, I watched it fill available corner lots and storefronts with alarming  determination.  There are still local shops that will brew you a cuppa joe, but I suspect by century's end DD will dominate the field even more than it does now, if corporate HQ has their way.

Common chicory in flower

The Crescent City coffee scene seems more varied.  Community Coffee and PJ's are easy enough to find and there are a few Starbucks, but the little guys still have clout in their neighborhood niches.  I've been to Cafe du Monde once as a tourist, but I haven't been back.  I'm no coffee connoisseur and I'm content with pretty much anything that's hot.  This may be why I haven't noticed the chicory that is supposed to be the hallmark ingredient of New Orleans coffee that separates it from all other blends.

Chicory coffee may be a myth used to lure tourists, another legend like voodoo that helps cement New Orleans' reputation as a unique place on the globe.  I know it's an ingredient in the Cafe du Monde blend and I've seen it listed on the sides of cans in the supermarket.  I just don't know how common it is.  My unsophisticated palate may never know the difference.  The issue bears further investigation.

With all its experiments over the years, I don't recall Dunkin' Donuts test marketing a cajun blend of coffee featuring chicory.  Of course, Boston did recently acquire two Popeye's Chicken outlets so it may just be a matter of time before DD starts selling this combination of two natural diuretics in a brew.

The Last Hurrah

The Last Hurrah is the name of a movie starring Spencer Tracy (not pictured above) detailing the life of Boston's notorious Mayor Curley.  It is also the name of the bar located in the Omni Parker House Hotel.  Yes, that Parker House.  The one where Parker House rolls were invented.  Boston cream pie was also invented there.  Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes dined there regularly.  It's quite the hangout.

We stopped for drinks at the Last Hurrah last night.  It was nice but if you are stopping for cocktails in downtown Boston, may I recommend the Marliave.  While it is difficult to find, once you know the way, you'll kick yourself for not figuring it out.  It is easy to reach the Granary Burial Ground (essentially across the street) and also from Bromfield Street (which could be its address, but it isn't).  The cocktails are at Marliave, like the decor, is old school.  The Molasses Flood is a favorite and I recommend it for anyone.  The Warren Harding, is a gentleman's drink that shouldn't be wasted on anyone under the age of 35.

We were at Marliave last Thursday and oysters were for sale a dollar apiece.  I had six Wellfleets and they were delicious.  They were a perfect match for my Warren Harding.

The drink menu for anyone interested.  I also like the W.C. Fields.

The secret to clear skin

I was wandering around the Polish Triangle today, that area bounded by Columbia Road at its base and Dot Ave and Boston Streets at its sides.  These two last two converge at Andrew Square, hence the "triangle" in Polish Triangle. 

Walking the sidewalks, I noticed all the women I passed, no matter thier ages, had skin close to perfection.  The older ladies had some crow's feet, a few worry lines and frown lines and laugh lines, but overall their complexions glowed like freshly churned milk.  As for the younger ladies, I wish I knew the Polish equivalent to the phrase, "Ooo-la-la."  All the passing people were speaking a language heavy on the consanants in unfamiliar combinations.  I overheard a lot of sz, cz, tz, scz, sctz, ctsz, tczsk, etc.  Accent marks were flying through the air left and right.  That's were the 'Polish' comes from in Polish Triangle.

I stepped into the Baltic Deli at 632 Dot Ave, a block from the T station.  It's more than a deli, its a grocery store too, the way all the Polish delis are in the Triangle and Andrew Market is really a liquor store.  I bought some pickled beets and noticed that the cashier had a complexion like a waxing moon.  The cash register is right next to the sausage counter and the juxtaposition of this vision of clean pores and polished marble beauty posed next to kielbasa links, mysliwska, jalowcowa, and kaszanka didn't compute.  I looked around and I learned an ancient Polish beauty secret.

You can eat all the fatty, smoked pork packed into natural casings that you want and still look like you bathed in milk this morning.  All you have to do is balance your diet with ample helpings of 'winter vegetables.'  Cabbage, beets, parsnips and potatoes counteract the corroding effects of city air close by the interstate and along a major thoroughfare.  Pickled carrots and squash reverse the capillary-clogging effects of a diet rich in fatty meats and perogi.  If the refrigerator section of Baltic Deli is any indication, beer shouldn't be thought of as an accompaniment to a meal; it is really one fifth the menu.  I like that thinking and I think I can adopt that regimen.

Walk around the Polish Triangle...  It is like walking through a training ground for both the Mr. and Miss Universe pageants.  It's only because Dorchesterites are so naturally shy that Massachusetts hasn't won the Miss America crown every year.  Maybe it's time.  I met a young lady at Baltic Deli this afternoon who could be a contender.


    
The real gourmet Polish sausage, pickled and fresh, is found between Andrew Square and Columbia Road, between the southen border of South Boston and the northern boundary of Dorchester in the Polish Triangle.  Take the Red Line to Andrew Square and head south, either along Dorchester Avenue or Boston Street.  Both are lovely boulevards chockablock with visual diversions and little shops.

Boston's Gyro King

Grove Hall: that nebulous intersection that is one part Roxbury, one part Dorchester, one part suburban shopping center and one part inner city. Boston's Gyro King has planted his throne on the corner of Blue Hill Avenue and Grove Hall's Mecca. You can't miss the palace. It's gate is crowned with a blaring yellow sign with green letters flanked by two three-dimensional, plastic cones of gyro meat. At dusk, the sign glows; a beacon for the hungry.

The shop's grand opening was this past September 9th and the Gyro King is attracting some repeat business. I was there last night to test the menu, ordering the signature dish, naturally. If you're are going to call yourself the Gyro King, you'd better to be able to put your shawarma where my mouth is.

While I was waiting, a woman and her child came in and she was on her phone taking an order to deliver for takeout. The man behind the counter waved and the woman cut her conversation short. "I forgot," she said to the counterman, "You don't take debit cards do you?" He nodded NO. She said she would be right back and in fact she did return after five minutes as I was leaving.

In the meantime, however, a rather husky gent came into the shop and he read the overhead menu that wraps around two walls. "What's the chicken cheese steak?" he asked, pointing at the picture of a long sandwich. The man behind the counter said, "It's a sandwich with chicken, cheese and steak." The husky man looked at the picture a moment more. "Yeah," he said, "I'll have one of them, the chicken cheese steak. Make it the one for $5.99." The almost-six dollar model comes with french fries and a soft drink.

My order was done before I got to see the chicken cheese steak get prepared, which is probably just as well. My take home: two gyros for ten bucks, tax included. Were they good? Yes. They were as solid as bricks with pressed lamb and spices, some lettuce, tomato and onion and yogurt sauce wrapped in a light, grilled pita. Thus far, two people have made four snacky meals out of them. There is about a quarter of one left that I'll probably have as a midnight repast or for breakfast.

Fat raven

I saw the fattest crow on Aukland Street. It could barely fly. My bicycle was zipping down the street's center whisper-quiet and I must have startled it. It was snacking on a dropped pizza crust (from Venice Pizza?) between two parked cars as I passed. The crow sure startled me. I slammed on the brakes at the commotion to my right.

The crow let out a squawk and flapped its wings frantically, trying to get aloft for an escape. It flapped and flapped to no avail until, finally, it got some space between its feet and the asphalt. It hovered a moment and then slowly drifted upward, flapping mightily all the while, to the gutter over the porch at #72.

Exhausted, but feeling it was a safe distance from me, it panted and wheezed, catching its breath. It had a pot belly and bags under its eyes. I swear it sported jowls and love handles under its feathers. Not attempting to fly again, it walked along the porch roof and stepped onto an overhanging maple branch. Then it walked from branch to branch, huffing and puffing like an asthmatic until it was out of sight.

The chicken smell

Claudia Fishburn has a rare medical condition. It isn't life threatening and people who aren't afflicted with pollosinusitis find it comical, but we all have our cross to bear and Ms Fishburn bears hers with a resigned air. You see, everything Claudia Fishburn smells, smells like chicken soup.

When a suitor brings her roses, they smell like chicken soup to her. When she stops by the perfume counter in a department store, all the testers smell like chicken soup. She went to the Wonder Spice restaurant in Jamaica Plain a few weeks ago and ordered the mango fried rice. It smelled and tasted like chicken soup. She's not a gourmet and her kitchen is stocked mostly with canned goods and lean cuisine. No matter what she cooks, it smells like chicken soup. Even her bathroom smells like chicken soup to her, which may be just as well.

She lives on Sumner Street in Dorchester, close to where this street branches off East Cottage. She moved here because it's right behind the KFC in Edward Everett Square. As she says, "I smell chicken all the time so it doesn't bother me. Other people might not like living behind a chicken restaurant, but I don't notice the exhaust off the fry-o-lators. I figured I'd take this apartment and free up one next to the public garden for someone who would appreciate that smell more."

No hanging fruit

Dorchester isn't fruit-flavored. You can purchase pomegranates, perhaps, in season at the Field's Corner Farmers' Market, and you can pinch bitter apples at the Super-Value Supermarket across the parking lot all year long, and you can squeeze leechees and duran along Dot Ave's Umami Mile, but you can't pluck a chokecherry or a crabapple along any roadside in Dorchester. There aren't even any road apples now that the streetcars have gone underground.

Dorchester isn't sweet. It is tangy and earthy and vitamin-rich, strung with celery threads and fingerling roots that bind everything together in a tight mesh. It is corn and carrots and boiled potatoes. Dorchester is starchy and bulky, with a hint of flavor that satiates a belly with bulk. The spice is in the seasoning and the main ingredient starts with a capitol 'D.'

You can eat stringy meat in Dorchester, meat so neatly cut into morsels that its fibers are studied at MIT to figure out how it can work so well in a stewpot and be chewed by toothless babies with the right seasoning and preparation like pablum or whole milk solids. Molecular evidence leads to a choking hazard conclusion but Dorcester toddlers wrestle their day care brethren to the ground without breaking a sweat or achieving an aerobic heart rate. The science of life is tenoned in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Dorchester babies, like their parents, bite and they bite hard.

Sanitary laws and the Department of Public Health have their place in greater Boston but the people who dine in Dorchester have tough constitutions and robust immune systems more than hearty enough to shrug off the slings and poison-tipped arrows unwashed lettuce leaves and crusted forks can offer. Touch the flexed bicep of a Dorchesterite and you will feel hard puddingstone under your dainty fingertips. Fog, sleet, gloom, despair and ennui may roll inland off the shores of Dorchester Bay. Dorchesterites eat. They bite, they chew, they mull and masticate, and they take their nourishment from they get. There are no fruits or berries. This is a neighborhood that ruminates.

Dot theology

An anonymous seminarian (by his request) who is serving a missionary tenure at an equally anonymous Dorchester evangelical church, has developed an interesting Biblical theory concerning the location of the Garden of Eden. He and I lunched at Shanti, the Indian restaurant at the intersection of Savin Hill Avenue and Dot Ave. Its address is 1111 Dot Ave for those interested in numerology. Apologies that the link is to the Boston Globe's review of the dining room. The Shanti web site seems to be down at the moment, hopefully only temporarily. It is really best experienced in person anyway.

This earnest, young man explained that after diligent research and sleepless weeks spent triangulating references in original Hebrew and Aramaic texts, he had located the spot where the site of Original Sin occurred. He posits that the famous apple tree where Eve succumbed to temptation and then coaxed Adam to the do the same was originally located where the Civil War monument stands in front of Dorchester's First Parish Church. His plate of eggplant curry had just been placed in front of him when he said, "Look at the situation. It's a perfect site."

I mentioned that most scholars put the site a few thousand miles and an ocean away to the east but he was undeterred in his conviction. He said, "If I stand on the corner of Quincy and Bowdoin Streets and look uphill, I can see that apple tree. I can smell apples. I can see a python curling around the granite of the monument around that Union soldier's leg." I suggested he may be hallucinating but he dismissed this as narrow-minded pettifoggery on my part. It's true I hadn't spent a lot of time researching the topic prior to our interview.

He said, "How can you stand at the summit of Meeting House Hill, in that triangular park in front of the First Parish Church, and not look around and see the makings of Paradise as far as your eye wanders?" I didn't argue the point but I did point out that we could take a dining room poll and easily find more than one person who did disagree with his assessment. He relished his eggplant and encouraged me to enjoy more of my lentils. The food, as usual, was very good, perfectly seasoned with a balance of salt and spice.

Is Dorchester Edenic? In some ways, yes. It is the birthplace of many sins. Is it a sullied paradise? Like so many other places, the answer is: of course. Is this guy a crackpot or a visionary scholar? I don't know. If he lands a segment on the History Channel some people may believe the theory he is peddling. For the people who live in the neighborhood, they'll probably keep peddling their bicycles and taking the bus to get to work. It's a nice idea and it is certainly applicable, whether it will hold water, is another matter altogether. Dorchesterites overall don't like being the center of attention or a world-shaking movement. They are busy enough getting on with their lives. This is a place where utility trumps conjecture.

Burger King smells better

Burger King, that hamburger empire with outlets on Dot Ave and Columbia Road is branching out of the food business and into the scent business. We don't mean the aromas that waft out of the fry-o-lators into the surrounding neighborhood. We mean the scent of seduction "with a hint of flame-broiled meat" as only Burger King can do it. Flame broiling is what separates BK's burgers from McDonald's, as much as customers being able to have it their way. Now you can have it your way after a shave and not be a slave to the corporate tastes of Drakar, Canoe, Stetson or Old Spice.

Burger King has introduced its own cologne, or 'body spray' as the marketing wonks at Axe like to call it.

I was in line to order a loaded Angus Burger at the Dot Ave BK, standing behind a couple of toughs. You know the kind, construction workers wearing grimy, Carhartt overalls with baseball caps that haven't seen a washing machine since they were made. and bandannas in their back pockets caked with half-frozen snot and grit scraped from V-8 engines' headers. They had beards speckled with crumbs from yesterday's lunchtime subs and teeth as stained and crooked as the tombstones in the Old Burying Ground on the Common. These guys didn't place an order for food. They asked for the new Burger King cologne they has heard about from their buddies, the cologne that drives carnivorous women wild.

The cashier thought they were crazy so she summoned the assistant manager, a pudgy fellow who has obviously enjoyed his share of complimentary Whopper Jr.'s in lieu of a decent wage. He took control of the situation and told these customers that the cologne was only available for sale via the website firemeetsdesire.com. The shorter of the two protested, "But I don't have a computer." The taller one pulled him aside and said, "You can use mine. I'll get a bottle for each of us."

After enjoying my scrumptious Angus Burger, I went home to confirm the facts. It is true, a meat scented cologne is for sale under Burger King's aegis, concocted to their exclusive, trademarked formula. After all, who could do it better than these experts in the field of flame-broiling beef for the masses.

I called Esmelda Perez, who is planning to open her "Smell Good Shop" on Upham's Corner. She told me over the phone, "Oh, I'm all over this one. I've already ordered a case and written the product line into my business plan. This will go over big in Dorchester. I smell dollars."

What's a roti?

There is a roti shop in Upham's Corner so I could easily answer the question myself by walking through the front door, but that would detract from the air of mystery about this food. My first thought is that it is some kind of croquet, a ball of dough wrapped around a ball of other ingredients and then deep fried. I don't have any reason to think this. I just do.

I've seen roti shops in Mattapan and other neighborhoods but I was never hungry when passing through so my ingnorance remains unsullied by experience. I like not knowing what this mystery food may be. It makes the future more tantalizing.

I've never been to a party when, during a lull in the festivities, someone shouts out, "Let's get some rotis for take out!" Pizza, yes; Chinese food, yes; a run to McDonalds or Burger King, sadly, yes.

I've never been in a group of friends discussing what to eat and someone fake-coughed into their sleeve while exclaiming, "ROTI!!" I haven't met anyone yet who can tell me what a roti is. I must travel in the wrong circles, and yet a roti shop isn't hard to find. They must be selling them to somebody. Again, I must travel in the wrong circles.

Portugese not required

Restaurant Laura is a Cape Verdean eatery that hasn't been covered by Boston's newspaper of record for a few years. Maybe it should be. It came to our attention recently and scouts were sent out to reconnoiter the prospect. Reports came back positive and affirmative that this is a hot spot worth checking out.

Word on the street is that Restaurant Laura offers live music more nights than not and that the food is good, the atmosphere is good and the music is superb. Last Saturday, we dispatched some agents on bivouac to Columbia Road between Upham's Corner and Everett Square, to number 688 Columbia Road, Dorchester, MA 02125 to be specific. They got their maps out and triangulated the location before they embarked on the mission. Unfortunately they had already had thier dinner so they weren't in the mood to eat again. This dispatch has a few holes in its information, but we expect it has enough to entice. What is an adventure without unconfirmed expectations awaiting proof?

Agents 11 and 76 report that Restaurant Laura occupies an expansive, nondesript, brickface storefront on Columbia Road. The location is clearly marked with gold embossed letters over the facade. Our agents didn't enter the premises but they did press thier noses against the plate glass windows. The interior is decorous and spotlessly clean: white table cloths and glasswear without lip prints. The staff seemed attentive and there weren't any frowns on the diners' faces. A woman was playing guitar and singing. The man perched on a stool next to her was playing a drum cradled in his lap. All faces were paying attention to the musicians and rocking to and fo or clapping as appropriate. The plates were piled high with food that looked delicious and everyone was eating with gusto while they listened to the music.

We are encouraged by this report and intend to visit Restaurant Laura very soon. You should too.

Mothers' Rest

Is there any more poetically named park in all of Boston than Mothers' Rest? Located on Washington Street just north of Codman Square, a wrought iron archway frames the park's entrance with these promising words: "Mothers' Rest." How many mothers have parked their strollers a few moments while resting their calves and taking in the refreshing view?

No matter how tall the trees get, the view remains unobstructed. Dorchester Bay stretches out to the far horizon where ships disappear. The Corita gas tank displays its rainbow, the wind turbine on Freeport Street revolves at its regular, relaxed rhythm, the neighborhoods of Neponset Circle, Field's Corner and Savin Hill stretch out in all their tangled, peaceful jumble. Everything is quiet on top of the hill at Mothers' Rest.

There are benches, tables, a jungle gym, monkey bars, a slide, a few swings. There is everything a mother and tyke could want to pause on the trek homeways or store-ways to reinvigorate themselves for the march in either direction. It is one of those little niceties that make Dorchester so livable.

Acorns

Out of a little nut a majestic tree will grow. The oaks along Huntington Avenue beside Harvard Medical School are flush with acorns. They hang heavily on the ends of branches while leaves unfurl thier glossy, green leaves like stoutly inflexible pennants.

Longwood is not the most cheerful neighborhood in which to take a lunch hour stroll. The classrooms and labs have taken over the neighborhood and there aren't many shops and there isn't too much shade to paint a picturesque streetscape. Despite that, there are a few trees, like the 10-year-old oaks already mentioned, and there are benches where diners tuck into pizza slices and sandwiches. This is also ideal weather for girl- and boy-watching depending on your inclination.

I wouldn't recommend Longwood to tourists unless they are the type that groove over medical students, art students and people wearing hospital johnnies. Longwood is modernist ugly but it is lively. It doesn't thrum with an urban vibe, rather it hums with medical administrators ambling about the sidewalks killing time until the return thier cubicles. There are worse sights.