Cafe Luna – babies, dogs, and service, oh my!

A charming little place, very conveniently located to the apartment where I’m staying in Central Square. I Yelped them to the tune of a few good reviews, I liked the menu, so we went. Cafe Luna is pretty reasonably priced, with a good selection for brunch.  They seemed pretty disorganized, though, opening at 10:00 despite being relatively unprepared.  So we moved our own table.  And another table.  And sat really, really close to another couple with a wandering dog, teathered the bottom of the cast iron.  There was also a lovely 6-top with two gurgling, screaming children.  I’m terrified of children, so I was tempted to hit up the house Bloody Marys or one of the inventively-flavored Mimosas.  Then again, I’M the terrifying one without caffeine, so I fortified with two lattes.  A far cry from the coffee/milk-flavored water I had yesterday at the Asgard (I still can’t say that name without going all Sconnie (‘Aaaaassgard’) and snickering).

I’m on a benedict kick lately, so I decided to try it with lobster today.  It was better than the Crab Cakes Benedict I tried yesterday – more lemony, more savory, better, fluffier English muffin underneath.  I ate all of it and had to restrain myself from scraping my fork along the bottom of the plate for more yolk/hollandaise sauce.  I’m a classy gal

I also managed to steal a bite of my companion’s steak burrito – also good, though I can’t give it the same love I had for the Lobster Eggs Benedict.  My verdict: food – B+, service – C (might have been an off day), company – (my own)  A++.

Another thing I forgot to mention (and pretty much the thing that MADE my day yesterday) – Toscanini’s.  About four doors down from Cafe Luna, Toscanini’s claims the best ice cream in the world.  I still need to compare, BUT their salty caramel gelato (it had to have been gelato – ice cream doesn’t taste like that) was amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing.  Oh God.  Must go back and try all flavors.  After exercising vigorously.

As you’ve probably ascertained – I love to eat.  Next stop, I think, Lobster Pool Restaurant.  That is, after the TechStars go out on Friday for an eating competition.  Tell me: where’s all the “ALL YOU CAN EAT” in Boston?

A day off

I don’t think I could’ve had a better day off, excluding the horrible coffee experience I had at the Asgard for breakfast (yes, lattes actually contain espresso, not watered-down coffee.  You can’t do this to someone who barely has her eyes open!).  Before you write them off entirely, my breakfast of Crab Cakes Benedict was really quite good – almost as good as the Crab Cakes Benedict I got in Atlanta at Highland Bakery.  Crispy crab cakes, smothered in hollandaise sauce.  English muffins to sop up the egg yolks. And not bacon, but FAT BACK.  Yum.  But get your coffee elsewhere.

I meandered along Mass. Ave. toward Harvard Square for my next appointment for the day at Sasha Salon.  Ladies, flock here.  They’re a bit pricey, but when it comes down to the important stuff, like pampering you and helping you to relax, these people are good.  My deep cleansing facial left me a little red in the chin, but I was totally sure of the fact that my facialist had ERADICATED all the skin problems I was having.  As if that wasn’t enough, I had a massage – a full body, deep tissue massage.  None of that “let me feel your aura” shit – this woman used her hands, arms, and even elbows to work some horrible knots out of my shoulders.  Aaaah.  (I will name names if anyone’s interested)

I love Boston.  Anyone have any Boston eats / Boston sights suggestions for me?  I’m digging this city, one Saturday at a time.  Tomorrow is back to work on langoLAB – if anyone’s interested in being a beta tester (which we sorely need), hit me up at jennifer at langolab dot com.

John Harvard’s

John Hahvahd’s, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves.  If you’re going to call something a Roquefort burger, I want it to rise up off of my plate and karate chop me in the mouth with its noxious odor like Chuck Norris.  Instead what I got was an okay burger, with some kind of unidentifiable white sauce somewhere underneath my bacon, lettuce and tomato.  John Harvard’s, I wanted crumbles!  I wanted them cascading off of my bun!  I wanted them as a counterpoint, intermingled with the sweet, caramelized onions that you cooked so well.  But no, I got bland white sauce.  Boo.  My companion’s burger had Ranch sauce and green peppercorns.  This smoothed my feathers a little, as did the fries – crunchy steak fries with a little spicy kick.  And a warm pickle :/

Your beer was somewhat better, John Harvards, and it better have been.  You’re known for your microbrews, so it’s not surprising that your Pale Ale was quite good.  Unfortunately, your English bitter tasted to me like it was swabbed off the deck of a ship heading over to the Americas.  And your Archangel Ale, oh, for which I had such high, high hopes, was unbalanced, with a sharp taste of alcohol and the characteristic hoppy kick almost completely absent.

Your redeeming dish was actually in a cup.  It was your clam chowder – the standard, really, but with sweet, slightly chewy clams and a great cream base.  You got that right.  It seems to me that you still have a long way to go before your food truly stands up to your beer.  Hey, Bostonians, tell me – did I miss trying something truly great at John Harvard’s?

Shack Dining

I am a food snob.  I openly admit it.  I put myself through college waitressing, usually at fine dining establishments (though I did do a stint at a dive called “The Public House” – before you get any ideas, this was STRICTLY a bar), so I know my food.  So naturally, I instinctively think twice before eating seafood at anything remotely resembling a shack (this has served me well in places where there wasn’t an ocean around… ahem, Milwaukee).  Then I arrived to Boston.

My first foray into shack dining happened on Memorial Day this year.  On a whim, I decided I MUST HAVE OYSTERS (*slurp*).  A quick yelping told a friend and me that Summer Shack was one of THE places for seafood here in Boston.  So we went, chuckling to ourselves as we approached a big, nondescript brick building with a huge fisherman’s head guarding the entrance.  Alright, Nemo aside, we went in.  It got kitchy.  And loud.  Picnic tables, a neon sign screaming LOBSTER, red, paper napkins (AKA the fine linen, as my grandpa used to call them), plastic forks, and BUCKETS to toss shells into.  Buckets!  Nice.

We dove right in.  We ordered the Tower of Power (oh yes, they went there): 8 oysters, 8 littleneck clams, 4 shrimp, and 4 crab claws.  Brought to us in something loosely resembling a garbage can lid with ice.  On metal stilts.  The oysters were great – cold, briney, and HUGE.  With horseradish and a mignonette.  Shrimp, par for the course, crab claws – mmm.  We walked out, still a little hungry, but still happy.

After the American Craft Beer Festival, we were hungry again.  So we took the short walk from the Seaport World Trade Center to the Barking Crab, a little boathouse, right on the water.  A… shack.  Two for two.  The place was totally hopping – picnic tables full of people, chattering loudly back and forth, random ’90s rap/rock playing over the loudspeakers (took me WAY back with “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd).  We got seated next to a 6-top of kids headed for the second session of ACBF and perused the menu.  I let the Charleston native I was with make all the decisions – I figured I should probably defer, as he’s been eating crab WAY longer than I have.

Adhering to our new tradition, we started out with oysters, then ordered a 1.25 pound lobster, along with lonely (snow) crab clusters, and some corn on the cob.  The corn on the cob was lacking (a good chunk of my dad’s side of the family comes from/lives in Iowa, so I know GOOD corn on the cob).  I soldiered on.  Fun fact – Barking Crab doesn’t outfit you with anything to crack the shells.  Except. A. Rock.  It was awesome.  I slipped into my primitive self a little bit, splash-proofing my Google t-shirt (schwag!) by putting a paper plate over the  creatures, giving them a good wack before going all four-year-old (pulling meat out, dipping it in drawn butter, and eating with my fingers).  I made a mess.  It was glorious.  By the time we bounced out, we had anihilated (by pounding or eating) every bit of those poor crustaceons.  And it was good.

All in all, I would say that I had a very successful weekend venturing out into Boston proper.  I’m back to the grind tomorrow – coffee with an IP lawyer tomorrow AM, mentor meetings, and a bunch of other fun stuff that comes along with my budding entrepreneurial life, courtesy of TechStars.

American Craft Beer Festival

Oh, friends.  I am a native of Milwaukee.  And, while I try not to claim Miller or Pabst as my own (the Pabst Mansion being an exception to this rule and one of my favorite places to visit when I’m home), I am still a Milwaukee girl at heart.  I love beer, so when I saw an announcement on my work calendar for the American Craft Beer Festival, I had to check it out.

Allow me to guide you along my journey to beer enlightenment.  I began, as all Wisconsinites do, with Miller products.  Thin and tasteless, yet grossly filling to the point of bloation (is that a word?), this liquid gold was my first.  We would buy it by the 30-pack in college, desperate for that buzz, ending up only with a tummy ache :/

Then, there came Natural Ice.  Even cheaper and even more bland than Miller, I remember taking sips and doing a little tongue gag every time I swallowed.  Sigh.  Natty Ice.  What a classy name for a beer.  After a few more jaunts with my friends with Budweiser (I’m still on a mission to wean Herbie and Mom off of Bud Light), Busch, something appropriately named “the Beast” and Coors, I began to eschew all beers in a can.

Around this time, I started hanging out with a group of Europeans.  And no matter how much they were hurting for booze (and Eastern Europeans are ALWAYS hurting for booze), never did they buy a domestic beer.  Under their tutelage, I ran the gamut from Berlin to Copenhagen to Warsaw (it was a zig-zaggy kinda gauntlet): Heineken, Carlsberg, Tuborg, Pilsner Urquell, Okocim and Zywec (check out a beer review for the last two here).  A huge step up from the domestic swill I was drinking, but still, not exactly what I (didn’t yet know that I) liked.

I don’t remember the exact moment when I became a hop head/IPA/APA JUNKIE.  I vaguely remember drinking a beer that had a really distinct, bitter-ish taste and perfumy nose, and thinking… whoa.  I  love this.  THIS is what I’ve been waiting for.  So I asked what it was.  Ah, now I remember.  I was sitting at a bar near Capital Square in Madison (someone help me out, it’s two doors down from Opus Lounge toward the square) and a co-worker started giving me the run-down about ales, porters, lagers, and pale ales.  It was at this point I understood that what I was loving had a name.  And that name was Pale Ale.

That takes us to present day, June 20th, 2009.  American Craft Beer Festival at the Seaport World Trade Center.  Waiting in line, we saw a host of funny t-shirts (my companion managed to restraint himself from punching some dude wearing a PBR shirt), pretzel necklaces, beer mug hats, and some weird, weird facial hair.  The convention center was like Mecca.  Sacrilicious.

Beer. Everywhere.  Over 75 brewing companies.  Over 300 craft beers.  We were like two little kids in a ridiculously alcohol-ridden candy store.  Forgive me if I can’t give you a play-by-play of exactly where we went – things started getting a little fuzzy at a few points that afternoon – but I can tell you that we limited ourselves almost entirely to IPA/APAs.  To paraphrase my companion, APAs can vary much more widely than, say, darks.  No complaints here.  I don’t feel like I missed out *too* much by limiting myself.

We bypassed Dogfish Head’s 90 Minute Imperial IPA, as we’d both already had it and considered it to be pretty good.  A few that we did try -  in no particular order – New England’s own Harpoon’s Leviathan Imperial IPA (a limited edition, 10% alcohol by volume, aggressive WOLLOPing monster), Otter Creek Imperial IPA (another new series, 11% by volume, somewhat citrusy, malty), Terrapin’s Rye Pale Ale (cute tortoise with a banjo on the label, really interesting flavor that I can’t quite characterize).  But the one we loved most was Odell’s IPA.  It was amazing, a really perfect balance (of what, companion?  You’re better at this than I am).

After we completed our pilgrimage, we stumbled over to the Barking Crab (great recommendation @sbroderick).  More on that next time.  I’m still kinda sleepy.