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By J.Ho, September 17, 2007 11:45 am

Update on the quick review of Blue Smoke Bistro — I haven’t been back there, but I drove by Blue Smoke in the parking lot recently and noticed they now have writing on the doors noting which is an exit and which is the entrance. This would have been nice from the start, but hey, everyone and everything can always get better. Is it a coincidence that I moaned about the confusing entrance and then they fixed it pretty quick? Probably.

The place still sucks. And I heard they still charge $5 for PBR draft. So, I guess if I’m ranting about paying $5 per draft for PBR, what business do I have living in Hamilton? Trust me, the rich bastards that live around me are 100 times cheaper than I could ever be. As for the money made off beer by that bar, they can’t possibly spend more than $60 (actually $30 I found out) for a keg of PBR. They can pour around 95 or so pints out of a keg. Think about that profit margin. I know, I know, what about the high rent they must be paying? Well, plenty of places in Boston have much higher rent and still don’t charge $5 per draft of PBR. The kicker is that they probably won’t sell a lot of PBR in that place. Which means the keg will get old and taste like ass. Not much different from fresh PBR, but hey. Cha-ching! The rich get richer. Yankees suck.

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By J.Ho, August 28, 2007 11:03 pm

If you asked me last week about this place, my opinion would be quite different. By Sunday evening my mind was changed. By late Sunday evening, my opinion was going south again. I’ve leveled out a little and decided to give this place some time.

My quaint little town of Hamilton needs two things … more bars and less buttholes. Blue Smoke is a new bar/restaurant down the street from where I live. New bar, same old buttholes. The good thing is that it’s close. From my back yard I can probably drive a golf ball through their back door. I can walk there. And it’s close enough to the Black Cow and the Weathervane if I tire of the place.

The Blue Smoke sign has been up at the Hamilton Crossing center for months. They finally opened. I was researching this place and discovered Blue Smoke is somewhat related to Cala’s Restaurant in Manchester. I’ve never been there, but at least their website is cooler. A little heavy on the Flash vector graphics. But at least they put some thought into it. Blue Smoke’s lame web site mentions something about Alchemy in Gloucester. I’ve never heard of Alchemy until recently. I don’t cruise to Gloucester that often, but when I do I hang at Madfish Grille (overpriced mediocre food, but cute girls and great bands), Old Timer’s, Crow’s Nest, or Jazzy Joe’s. My friend was part owner of the Harbor House in Gloucester, but I have yet actually go there.

Anyway, my first impression of Blue Smoke was complete, yet controllable, rage! Blue Smoke opened on Tuesday, August 21st, 2007. I heard they had some sort of “soft opening” party the previous Saturday. How I wasn’t on the guest list is beyond me. So I try going there on there opening night. I assumed it would be busy.

I walk through the front door. There was a small excuse for a foyer then another door. That second door was locked. I’m like what the hell? I figured they were swamped and weren’t letting any new guests in the place. I can understand that, so I go away. I come back the next night. Same thing. I figured the opening must be drawing a huge crowd. Probably all stinky rich local drunk buttholes. No harm no foul. I go back again. Same thing. Now I’m starting to get pissed off. If they are so freakin’ busy that they can’t let any more people in, the least they could do is have someone stand there to greet and kindly turn you away.

So I try again … this time on Sunday night. God damned door is locked again. People are in there though. I can here the glasses clinking. And the snobby voices. Oh my God, I was fuming. I’m about to get in my car and crash through the front window when I notice some people walking out of a side door that looked like it led into the kitchen. I go over there, rip open the door and to my surprise, I was trying to get in the emergency exit the whole time! Now don’t I feel like the freakin’ asshole!!! To my credit, the door I was trying to go in actually looked like what would be the main entrance. The real main entrance looks like the side door to the kitchen.

So I head over and grab a seat at the bar. Whoever designed the bar has never worked behind a bar. Neither have I , but I’ve sat at enough of them to know when one is dysfunctional. Put it this way. The bar was so wide and the booze racks sitting at the knees of the bartender made it so that they couldn’t even reach out to me to give my food or drinks. The decor looked a little cheap too. From the time and money I heard they sunk into this place, you would think it wouldn’t look like PT’s Pub in Vegas.

I check out their selection of draft beers. Weak selection, but oh well. I did see Anchor Steam. I was like, SCORE! Anchor Steam is tough to find in the northeast I love Anchor Steam, especially with a good meal. It’s not the kind of party beer that you drink 30 at a time, but it’s still good. I read a great article about Anchor Brewing’s CEO, Fritz Maytag. Yeah, of the Maytag washing machine family. Inc. Magazine did a write up on Maytag lauding him as one of the most fascinating entrepreneurs. Check it out here.

The bartender asked me what I would like to drink and I told her it was nice to see Anchor Steam on-tap. But then I said, “I’ll take a PBR!!!” Now, normally you don’t see Pabst Blue Ribbon beer in a swanky north-shore bistro. I was in heaven. Not that I’m the biggest fan of PBR, but it’s dirt cheap beer that will get you wasted and doesn’t taste like piss. I order a PBR and browsed the menu.

Great looking menu. Lots of good stuff. Basically continental fare. Expensive though. It took me at least twenty minutes and three PBRs to finally decide on what to order. Now I went against my own personal culinary constitution and ordered roasted chicken. Roasted chicken in a restaurant usually sucks. It’s impossible to make it fresh which means it’s usually reheated. And chicken with skin and bones still attached is the cheapest meat in the world. But the roasted chicken was the cheapest thing on the menu at $18 (other than a burger.) Not that I was trying to be cheap, but I wasn’t in the mood for a $30 dinner.

It took what seemed like forever for the food to come. When it did, I was surprised that it was actually pretty good, for chicken. It was a bit dry though, probably from being reheated. Mashed potatoes were lumpy, but that kind of lumpy when you think they did it on purpose to be all rustic and stuff. Not bad, but come on … lumps? String beans on the side were great though.

So I’m nice and chubbed up and I ask for my bill. Well, apparently PBR draft beers in Hamilton cost $5 each. Are they out of their freakin’ minds? $5 … for PBR!?!?!? WHAT?!?!? I was pretty close to telling them where to shove the bill, but I kept my mouth shut since I didn’t have any bail money on me. People, PBR draft beers shouldn’t cost more than a buck-50. Maybe $2 for a bottle. The Lucky Dog in Beverly sells PBR draft pitchers for $6. I know, I know, the Blue Smoke Bistro isn’t a dive like the Lucky Dog. Well, it wasn’t much better when you really think about it. Seriously, after paying $5 for a PBR draft, I felt like that one girl did when Kobe Bryant got done with her.

If they wanted to be snooty and rape people on beer prices, why why offer Pabst Blue Ribbon on draft? I don’t get it. It’s a total frat house beer. It has no place in Hamilton. Seriously. Maybe some filthy rich butthole type from the Myopia Club are supposed to walk in there, see PBR on draft and reminisce about his rambunctious days as a youthful chap, sneaking cans of PBR into the dorm at Oxford with his glorious pals Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bartholomew and young Skeeter! Oh what grand old times I had with those chaps he’d say to himself as he whisks off his tweed coat and Sherlock Holmes hat. Clowns.

I should have known better though. How could I have actually believed for one second that I would be drinking an adequately priced PBR draft in Hamilton of all places? Stupid! Trust me, everyone in this town is a millionaire except for me. Maybe my brother isn’t one either, but at least he has a racial handicap to blame it on. Later! Yankees suck!

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By J.Ho, August 14, 2007 10:15 pm

Restaurant Week is an event which showcases a number of Boston restaurants offering special dining promotions of three-course lunches and dinners for fixed prices of $20.07 and $33.07 respectively. The idea is for people to visit the city and try restaurants they normally wouldn’t visit. It’s a great idea. On paper.

So I go into Boston the weekend before last dying to tryout a new place for dinner. I pick up a friend in the late afternoon and we took a stroll up Charles Street, walk across that bridge that connects Cambridge & the West End, and back again. It seemed like the entire time we were walking we volleyed back and forth: Chinese or Italian? Steak or seafood? Sushi or Indian? French or Ethiopian? Creole or Greek? What do you want? I don’t know. What do you want? Whatever you want. Seriously, what do you want? I don’t care. Well just pick something! You pick something. Come on. Why can’t you pick something? Cause it doesn’t really matter to me. Same here. Well, where do you NOT want to go. I don’t know. I hate it when you can’t make a decision. Well it sucks when you’re harshing on me for not picking something when you can’t pick something either. FUCK!

We’ve all been there …

The indecisive banter continues … what neighborhood we should dine in rather than the food type? Alston or Fenway? South End or Kendall Square? Financial District or Harvard Square? She says, Back Bay! I say, I hate the Back Bay, nothing but a bunch of banker/lawyer clowns talking about their weekends with Muffy on The Island. I say Theater District. She says there’s nothing but bums over there. I’m like, it’s not as bum infested as pretty much all of downtown San Francisco. We both chuckle. What happened next seems like a simultaneous stroke of genius on both our parts. A complete rarity. It was staring us right in the face and neither of us knew it. All of a sudden we look at each other and say, synchronously, “North End!!” Hells yeah! Probably one of the few things we agreed on all day.

We cruise over to the North End and discover half of the North End streets were closed down for the Saint Agrippina di Mineo Feast. It looked cool. They had a bunch of street vendors serving food, selling jewelry and offering carnival style games. There was a stage where some old fat Italian guy was belting out Volare. He had a pretty good voice. The feast was pretty small considering how much of the neighborhood was blocked off. I was like, they screwed up traffic for this? The upside was that we could walk around in the streets and not worry about being plowed by a cement truck.

The North End is by far my favorite area of Boston. It’s known as Boston’s Little Italy, but has had numerous ethnic groups occupying its borders since it’s inception as Boston’s first official settlement and oldest residential community. Plenty of big U.S. cities have some sort of “Little Italy” area or district. In Manhattan there’s Mullberry Street. In San Francisco there’s North Beach. Mullberry street was a nice experience. But in San Francisco’s North Beach isn’t all that. You wouldn’t even know it was a Little Italy if it weren’t for a few tattered Italian flags hanging from the light poles. Italian restaurants down there suck. Pinocchio’s, Molinari’s, Tosca, Vesuvio, Cafe Zeotrope and Caffé Greco are great, fun places, but everything else is for the birds. Don’t waste your time in The Steps of Rome. I guess it’s a cool place for faux Italian’s to hang out and watch soccer, but most of the guys in there are Persians sporting brightly colored European soccer shirts and wearing sunglasses at night.

Anyway, I love the North End. It has a true Italian vibe going. I know, I spent two consecutive summers in Italy. As you walk down the street you pass by dozens of tiny Italian restaurants and pastry/coffee shops. You smell garlic one second. Espresso the next. Over and over. I love it! We’ve dined at Florentine Cafe more times than I can count. The Daily Catch is, well a catch! Il Panino Express, great sandwiches. Lucca, amazing!

We decided to try something new. Wandering around aimlessly, we wanted to find a nice place where we could dine at the bar and watch the Red Sox game. And preferably someplace with large open windows. The weather was amazing. We walk past a place called Bacco. It looked nice, menu was reasonably priced, had a bar, a TV, wide open windows facing the sun, smokin’ hot hostess … Perfect!

We grab a seat at the bar and I say, mango martini for me and a cosmo for my lady friend. The service was a bit slow considering on how dead it was and how many people they had behind the bar. We sipped our drinks, watched the game, made fun of people walking past the windows, under our breath. The menu looked good. Wine list was fair. I asked what the daily fresh seafood was that came with their Frutti di Mare. He said that they weren’t serving the full menu due to Restaurant Week. I really didn’t understand what Restaurant Week was all about. He handed me a sheet of paper with the special Restaurant Week menu. I was all like, why the hell did he give us the full menus, let us look at them for 15 minutes, then wait to tell us we can’t order off it and then finally hand us a significantly smaller menu. Stupid.

That’s when I learned about the “pre fixe” menu baloney. We’d get an appetizer, main course and dessert for $33. They had only a few selections for main courses and none were the Frutti di Mare I was all ready for. Turns out this fixed price menu only saved us about four bucks. Basically a free dessert. This wasn’t much of a value to me since I rarely eat dessert, and when I do, never in the same restaurant I had dinner. I like going for a walk and finding another place to sit and have some coffee and a cannoli. Irritated, we decide to stay and order anyway since probably every other restaurant has the same deal.

I can only think that some guy was saying … “I got an idea! Let’s get drum up interest in local restaurants by limiting all the menus!” “BRILLIANT!!”, the Guinness guy replies. One argument was that if you have fixed prices, people can go to some of the more expensive participating restaurants and try out their food at a bargain basement price. This argument is weak. Read on …

I order the Caprese salad with vine ripened tomatoes, fresh mozzarella and basil as my appetizer. I selected the Veal Florentine with seared spinach, pignoli, fontina cheese, pan seared gnocchi, and a vermouth glaze as my entrée. My friend ordered Prosciutto di Parma with warm grilled pears, gorgonzola and balsamic vinegar for her app. Chicken Marsala with wild Mushrooms and polenta for her main course. As for the wine, Bramosia Chianti for her; Buckeley Shiraz for me.

It took about twenty minutes for the appetizers to arrive. As customary we split the apps. Everything was fine with the apps except for there was no basil on my Caprese salad. It was on a bed of field greens. No basil in sight. The workers seemed pretty busy, so I over looked it. I don’t understand why they were so busy though. The place was dead. I think there was an upstairs part, but no noise was coming from up there. And they kept bringing out trays and trays of clean glasses to stock behind the bar. I’m all like, this place is dead, who the hell is dirtying all these glasses?

So the food comes. Now, I’m very picky, yet very tolerant when it comes to dining out, if that makes any sense. The veal was tough and fatty. Obviously not a good cut of meat. Gnocchi was cold. As was the spinach and the vermouth glaze. My first instinct was to send it back, but I was so freaking hungry I couldn’t wait for them to fix it. My friend asked for a bite of my dinner. I gave her a slice off the one side that was warmer than the other. If she knew it was cold, she wouldn’t have let me sit there and not ask for them to fix it. Honestly, I just wanted to get out of there. I had a bite of her chicken marsala. Pretty good. We wolf down the complementary tiramisu and bailed out. What sucked more was that my tiramisu was partially frozen on one half and almost room temperature on the other.

It’s my conclusion that the restaurants weren’t trying that hard to push out quality meals in the Restaurant Week pricing format. I can’t imagine that the real expensive places would give you $100 food for $33. Then again, I only sampled one place. The net-net of it all … Bacco sucks. However, the wine was great.

We leave Bacco and there was some sort of random marching band across the street. Pretty cool.

We’re walking back towards Hanover Street and we walk by a restaurant called Trattoria il Panino e Giardino. It smelled so awesome walking by. They had a great little outdoor garden dining area. That’s going to be my next dining experience in the North End I assure you. We’re walking up Hanover street looking for a quiet bar to watch the rest of the Sox game. We pass Mike’s Pastry. This place has some of the best pastries, cannolis, cookies and Italian bread you will ever find. It’s nearly impossible for you to walk anywhere in the North End and not see people carrying white & blue Mike’s Pastry boxes tied up with twine. I love it!

After wandering around for ten minutes we end up at the Waterfront Cafe on Commercial Street near the Coast Guard station. Awesome little Italian pub with an excellent selection of beers. Flat screen TVs everywhere! We finished watching the game. The Red Sox won, 4-3!

I took a picture of the vending machine in the bathroom. With a pretty girl in the bar, awesome beer on tap, Sox on TV, gorgeous weather, and this stuff in the vending machine … what more do you need? Yankees suck!

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By Anna, June 20, 2007 1:38 pm

How did it end up in East Boston? – by Anna

From London to Boston’s North End, Italian-born Chef Pietro Delviscovo has serenaded some of the most demanding of palates. Situated now in East Boston, Chef Delviscovo’s Italian cuisine includes his signature hand-crafted pasta, savory seafood, grilled meats, and homemade desserts. Saffron, the ancient aromatic spice much sought in dishes worldwide (and hence the restaurant’s name Zafferano), adds delightful zing to several of Pietro’ s dishes and brings an unusual but not un-authentic flavor of Italy to the dinner table.

The ambiance of Zafferano is elegantly understated. Crisp linen tablecloths, impeccable table-ware, cool tiled floors, and peach-colored walls make for a welcome and quiet reprieve from the 747′s lowering their landing gear towards Logan Airport just meters above. Which brings us to the question as to why a first class chef ended up in this particular East Boston neighborhood in the first place.

Well let’s just say that certain politicians have been selling East Boston as the next big sure-bet wonder Mecca, ‘conveniently located just a few metro stops from Boston’, for some time now. But with a $1.3 billion dollar state deficit at hand, many of the urban revitalization projects meant to lure young professionals and first-time home buyers into the area have not kept pace with the hopes of entrepreneurs who took an early plunge into the neighborhood. Faltering sub-prime loans don’t do much to foster restaurant patronage either. Translation: I would venture to guess that Zafferano is rarely full on any given night. And frankly, the corner on which Zafferano finds itself feels a little like a highway rest stop half-way between where you came from and where you want t o be. This is a shame because Zafferano is a gem of a restaurant deserving of a more inviting (and lucrative) location.

But there we were on a Thursday night — four of ten patrons in a restaurant that has a seating capacity of forty-nine. The good news is that the restaurant has great feng shui and so it does not feel uncomfortable even with so few guests present. Nonetheless, I would highly recommend going to Zafferano with people you like and can rely on for lively conversation given that the alternative, an atrabilious silence interrupted only by the occasional clank of silverware, might prove deadly.

Now how to describe delicious… Let’s start by mopping up (with fresh-made bread) the perfect duet of oil/balsamic dressing that still lingered on my plate from what was a delectable grilled calamari and shrimp antipasto served on baby romaine greens ($12). Just to note, the calamari is served sans tentacles but in bulbous pieces atop the greens. I usually prefer my eight-armed cephalopod mollusk camouflaged to not look like the ugly creature it is but any aesthetic reservations were soon put to rest by the tender succulence of the meat, sliced effortlessly with fork and knife. Meanwhile, hubby had the minestrone soup — a reminder that market-fresh ingredients, fine preparation, and a sprinkle of love sure do make for good soup and loud slurpy sounds emanating next to me.

For the main course I found myself in the typical Libra-esque conundrum of being torn between too many choices (entrées range from $15 – $32). Figuring that the badge of a good Italian restaurant is its carbs (something I think some of my Italian friends would vigorously dispute), I went with the seafood risotto while my girlfriend tried the fresh-made pasta and marinara sauce. To say the least, neither of us was disappointed and we were particularly impressed by her al dente-perfect, hand-twisted rotini drizzled with a fresh and zesty marinara. My husband opted for the fan of Angus Sirloin steak with asparagus tips, and my girlfriend’s husband went with the wild mushroom risotto. These later mentioned dishes were purportedly excellent as well though our eating mates never offered us a bite and so I must confess that this particular part of the review is based entirely on reasoned conjecture that a regressive primal instinct to hoard selfishly that which is really, really high-quality was at play.

Of course, were Zafferano to move to a swankier location than its present East Boston one, their rent would also skyrocket. Everything else would go up with it and the affordable range of wines (between $15 -$45) would not be quite as affordable as they are now. All totaled, we spent around $110 per couple. This included pre-dinner drinks for two, a bottle of wine, three appetizers, four entrées, and a round of port for dessert. Also included was a bit of conversation with the owner (a.k.a Pietro) and his lovely wife, Giuseppina, who like to visit with guests to make sure they have enjoyed the meal. Apropos dessert, Pietro makes these as well but as tempting as a liqueur-infused sponge cake topped with a silky cream glaze sounded, we were all just too pleasantly full to go the last round.

Zafferano is a first-class, must-go-to restaurant which I hope will retain its authentic flavor no matter what location they may one day find themselves. Zafferano is located at 999 Saratoga St., East Boston, MA 02128. Tel.: 617.785.0987. Website: Zafferano Restaurant. Hours of operation are Mon.–Wed., 11:30 a.m. – 9 p.m.; Thur.-Sat., 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Reservations optional.

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By J.Ho, February 14, 2007 1:38 pm

Now I really can’t explain to you how huge of a carnivore I am. Meat! Roasted, fried, grilled, sautéed … I’ll enjoy it any way I can. But when we’re talkin’ smoked meat, my mouth starts to water! It is so hard to find good smoked meats. Either in a market or a restaurant. It’s probably harder to find good smoked meats in a restaurant since they have to keep a small inventory moving quickly and smoking meats properly takes a lot of time, a lot of patience and a lot of care.

I have been to very few, true southern smoked BBQ joints that were actually any good. Outside the south anyway. My brother has taken me to Redbones in Somerville, Massachusetts a few times. It’s ok. They smoke their meat way too fast which makes the meat tough and tasteless. But what can we expect from a BBQ joint in Slumaville? Some of the best BBQ places I’ve ever been too were random stops along Interstate 40 during my three recent cross-country moves.

I lived in Newport Beach, California for about a year and a half before I moved to the Boston area. As much as I like dining out, I rarely went out to restaurants. I’m not kidding when I say at least three to four times a week a friend or four would come over to my apartment and we’d grill up steaks, chicken, seafood, or whatever out on my patio. Plenty of food, plenty of beer. I probably cooked more in that time frame than any other in my life. I knew a few good restaurants, but dining out just wasn’t a big deal.

I moved away in the fall of 2005, but I had to come back to party up with some friends for New Years a few months later. My most awesome friend, Rose, takes me to a new BBQ place that opened up about a par 3 from where I used to live. I was all like, “BBQ in Orange County? This is gonna suck!” Oh my god. This place is amazing!!

It’s called The Beach Pit. If you’re not looking for it, you’ll never find it. It’s tucked behind a small strip mall off 17th Street and Tustin Avenue in Costa Mesa, CA. From the front it looks like a small house with a old-style tin roof. In the front yard there is a small playground and some outside dining tables. Inside, is a small dining room and I think there was a larger dining room in the back, however I never made it back that far. It was relatively new when I went the first time and the walls were painted bright white. They were letting people sign the walls with magic markers. My signature is there if you look close enough.

Rose and I sat down and immediately started slugging down some beers. The menu is simple … smoked meats smothered in BBQ sauce with only a few sides to choose from. We dug into some pulled pork, baby back ribs and smoked sausage. Blueberry cornbread and sweet potato fries on the side. UNBELIEVABLE. The meat was moist, tender and delicious. That cornbread is amazing. I need to reverse engineer it and post the recipe here. It can’t be all that hard.

I’m super pissed this place opened when I left town. I wish I could have gone there a few times a week while I lived down the street. I’ve been back to visit Newport a few times and I always posse up with Rose and head on down to the Beach Pit. I’m not sure who I miss more, her or the BBQ. My parents live in Las Vegas and I told them to check out the Beach Pit while they are in the area. They visit OC quite a bit. I think they made a few vacation weekends just to go back and chow on some great BBQ.

The Beach Pit is an excellent compliment to all the great styles of food you can get in Southern California and coastal Orange County in particular. Great food, prices and atmosphere. Add that with my great friends, outstanding weather and ice cold beer … nothing else in the world beats it.

I’ve included a few BBQ blog links for you: BBQ Forum, BBQ Junkie, The BBQ Blog, WhiteTrashBBQ, Commercial Appeal BBQ and The BBQ Report.

When you leave the Beach Pit, go east on 17th Street and turn right on Irvine Ave. Drive down Irvine Ave and bang a left on Cliff Drive. Make an immediate right onto Kings Road. Just around the bend on the right is a small park overlooking the Newport Harbor and Balboa Peninsula. If you are lucky to be there at the right time of day, you’ll see this view …

Isn’t it obvious why I miss this place so much? Yankees Suck!

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By J.Ho, February 1, 2007 5:29 pm

So I was waiting for my date at Matt Murphy’s Pub in Brookline … standing at the bar … I had to stand, there weren’t any barstools. Even if there were barstools, there wouldn’t have been any room for them. I didn’t see any beer taps so I assumed they served bottled beer. I asked the bartender what bottled beers they carried. In a comically over-done Irish accent he tells me they don’t have bottled beers and tossed me the menu with draft beers on the back. Hey, I know Irish folks. I’m part Irish. This guy’s Irish accent was way over the top. I mean, yeah, he could possibly actually be from Ireland, but he was trying real hard to make sure I heard his outrageous, yet slightly smug accent. I wanted to say, “Tanks, laddie … just git me a fookin bear and stay away from me lucky charms! Jaysus!” … but all I said was that I’d like a Newcastle.

Anyhoo … as I began to sip my suds I thumbed through the pile of newspaper at the end of the bar. I picked up a page and started to read an article about cooking with a broiler by Mark Bittman. I own a cookbook by Mark Bittman titled How to Cook Everything. It’s one of the best cookbooks I own and I highly recommend everyone in the world to buy it. The article was a excellent read. Low and behold, I was reading the the cover of the Dining & Wine section of the New York Times. Now I’ve pretty much given up hope that the New York Times would ever be a paper worth reading. I mean this is a place that actually pays Paul Krugman to write editorials. Sheesh! Over the past several years I have been convinced that the New York Times is a place with boundless hypocrisy … severely lacking in journalistic integrity, ethics, accuracy, quality and style. I let my hard-nosed attitude towards the paper neglect the Dining & Wine section. I wish I hadn’t. I’m glad I’m back. I went ahead and added the NYT Dining & Wine section to the links on the right and I’ll be perusing through it as often as I am able. Hell, I even linked to the Boston Globe’s food section as well. I’ve largely ignored the Boston Globe since they are owned by the New York Times. Two peas in a pod as they say in Tibet. What makes me sick is the fact that via the Boston Globe, the New York Times also owns a piece of the Boston Red Sox and NESN.

Just as I finished reading the article, my date shows up. Let’s call her Dimples. She orders a Guinness. Nice! The smug extra-Irish bartender says something completely inaudible … He sounded more like the Swedish Chef from the Muppets than the extra-Irish barmaid he was shooting for. Dimples and I look at each other trying to figure out what he was saying. It turns out they didn’t serve Guinness. If you wanna act extra-Irish in a town like Boston, it doesn’t help by not having Guinness on tap. She orders whatever the house substitute was. On to the food … Dimples ordered the fried Atlantic cod & chips. I had the Beef stew. My stew was pretty good. Beef was tender and the vegetables were fresh. The fish & chips were much better. That’s what I’ll get next time I go.

As for the rest of the pub, it was an overall good experience. They typically have live music, but I have no idea where they could fit a band. This place was pretty small. No music last night since there was some sort of a trivia league. We weren’t playing but I helped out the table next to us on a few questions. Doesn’t everyone know that Billy the Kid also went by the names Henry Antrim and William Harrison Bonney in his younger years? As for Dimples, she was wonderful company. Namaste! Yankees suck!

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By J.Ho, May 24, 2006 2:34 pm

I lived off 29th Ave & Clement Street in San Francisco for three or so years. On the stretch of Clement between 26th & 22nd Aves reside some of San Francisco’s best neighborhood restaurants. Ernesto’s was one of my favorites. Everything I ever ate there was outstanding. Baked stuffed clams and sautéed calamari are excellent appetizers. The seafood pasta is a delicious dish: linguine with shrimp, scallops, garlic and green onions served with a butter-lemon sauce. Veal Saltimbocca, grilled veal chops, pizza, grilled swordfish, fettuccine alfredo … I can go on and on. If you’re lucky, the smoked chicken risotto and/or the filet mignon marsala may be on the list of daily specials.

The know-all, be-all of dishes at Ernesto’s is the Chicken Ernesto. Lightly sautéed chicken breasts smothered with a lemon-butter-wine mushroom sauce served with either the daily vegetable or a side of pasta. I live near Boston now, but I never stop thinking about Ernesto’s and all the great restaurants on Clement Street.

I tried for four years to reverse engineer this recipe since they would never tell me how to make it. I even considered getting a part-time job as a bus boy just so I could learn how it was done. I dropped that idea pretty quick. Eventually I got the recipe close enough to brag about it. As it turns out, it’s a lot like making veal or chicken piccata, just without the capers.

½ cup all purpose flour
2 teaspoons salt
½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
4 boneless chicken breasts, about ¾ pound, pounded to a thickness of ½-inch
1½ tablespoons light olive oil
2 packages of white mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed and diced
5 tablespoons butter
1 cup dry white wine
½ cup chicken stock
1 garlic clove, chopped
1 lemon, juiced, or more to taste, (about 2 tablespoons)
1 tablespoon chopped flat leaf Italian parsley leaves

To pound the chicken thin, place one chicken breast in a large Zip-Lock bag, underskin/membrane side up and pound with the smooth side of a meat mallet. Don’t pound too hard because you can easily ruin the meat by breaking it all up.

In a shallow bowl or plate combine the flour, 1½ teaspoons of the salt and pepper and stir to combine thoroughly. Quickly dredge the pounded chicken in the seasoned flour mixture, shaking to remove any excess flour. That’s something I do differently. Ernesto’s doesn’t dredge the chicken in flour first. I like the taste and texture of a bit of crusted flour on sautéed chicken.

Heat the oil in a large sauté pan over medium-high heat until very hot but not smoking. Add 1½ tablespoons of the butter and, working quickly and in batches if necessary, cook the chicken until light golden brown on both sides, about 1 minute per side. Transfer to a warm plate and set aside. increase the heat to high and sprinkle about two tablespoons of the seasoned flour into the oil and whisk rapidly till it’s dissolved. Add the wine and bring to a boil. De-glaze the pan with the wine by scraping to remove any browned bits from the bottom of the pan.

When the wine has reduced by half, add the mushrooms, chicken stock, chopped garlic and lemon juice and cook for about five minutes, or until the sauce has thickened slightly. Whisk in the remaining ½ teaspoon of salt, remaining 3½ tablespoons of butter and the chopped parsley. When the butter has melted, return the chicken to the pan and cook until heated through and the sauce has thickened, about 1 minute. Serve immediately. Yankees suck!