Back from the desert

Pictures to come. I'm still sorting out my emotions and recovering from culture and weather shock. I am all mixed up.

Til then -

Busy week

Last week was a busy one for blogging and researching for an upcoming slew of new reviews at Citysearch Boston, where I've recently started freelancing (only because Christine, my editorial soulmate, is the editor there). I was also busy researching a piece for a new food publication (TBA when I get my first clip - I don't want to jinx anything).

This week, however, I am going to need to hunker down and focus on work for Go2 Media, as my dear colleague Jessie is on vacation, gallivanting around Guatemala, and I'm handling about 50 percent of her job (which includes the not-unpleasant work of updating our style, music and celeb news feeds) on top of my own (which includes the equally not-unpleasant work of Twittering about food and making sure the mobile hipsters of LA, NYC, Austin and the like don't miss their Pete Rock and Horrorpops shows).

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a guest update from Madame Jessie (as she is called when writing silly horoscopes for our site). She is currently rocking the beaches of Antigua. This letter is one of the reasons why I am lucky to have her as my coworker.



Hola muchachas! Guatemala is amazing and you should all drop what you are doing and fly down this minute.

On Sunday we went to Chichicastenango (which is really fun to say) and there was this ridiculous market and we bought all sorts of handicraft crap from the indigenous peoples. The little kids are at once adorable and sad because they try to sell you things like little flutes, and they are really good at making the pouty faces and saying things like "señorita señorita para que puedo comer." Ugh.

Yesterday we went to a volcano and climbed it in really inappropriate shoes and clothing and toasted marshmallows and bread near the lava. Shit is HOT, if you were wondering. The little niños tried to sell us walking sticks, saying "¡es necesario!" but we thought they were full of it. Turns out, walkng sticks would have been helpful. I just didn´t like how they suggested that it was necessary to buy a stick to hit the dogs with. There are stray dogs EVERYwhere. They are really skinny and it´s sad. They seem happy enough though, and they must be doing ok if they could, like, run up the side of the volcano-- which wasn´t exactly an easy hike. We fed them a lot of volcano toast.

Today we might rent bikes. Or we might take salsa lessons. Or we might go to the massive market and buy tons of wacky fruit. Or something.

Tomorrow we are busting out of our sweet hotel here in Antigua (we are like BFFEs with the recepcionista, she´s totes adorbs) and heading to the beach. Woot woot. I gotta work on getting rid of this rad tank top tan.

Hope all is going well for you ladies!

Un beso,
Jessie

Envy-and-awe-inducing photo of Antigua by Michael R. Swigart via Creative Commons license.

Bostonist: Tupelo and Sip Cafe now open

Two new spots opened this week. I wrote about both for Bostonist.

Tupelo is a new Southern comfort food restaurant in Inman Square. The reporting process for this was very Web 2.0: the week before it opened, I put a note about it on our go2 Twitter account, @go2foodnews (which you can follow by clicking on the link to the right - hint hint). In the tweet, I referenced their Twitter account (@tupelo01239), which had a lot of good information up already about the restaurant-in-progress.

Then, @Tupelo02139 hit me back, thanking me for the coverage with an @ reply that referenced our feed. Impressed by the speed of their reaction, I direct-messaged Tupelo for more information, and found out that the voice behind Tupelo's Twitter feed is Jen Deaderick, the wife of Tupelo's opening chef -- who happens to be Rembs Layman, the chef who created the delicious menus I've been eating for years at Matt Murphy's and Pomodoro, where my friend Aaron has been bartending on and off for a long time. She passed along Layman's email, and he passed along the new menu (now viewable on Facebook), which looks, well, exactly the way a menu would look if the chef of those two restaurants decided to open a Southern spot. It's still rich, textured, crumbly, comforting, marinated, slow-cooked, and seafood-savvy, with fried oysters and green tomatoes in place of Pomodoro's delicate Italian calamari and Matt Murphy's hearty Irish fish & chips.

Now thoroughly excited (albeit with a twinge of wistful regret, as the menu's not terribly veggie-friendly), I wrote up a post on Bostonist about the new place, which then made its way to Twitter via our RSS feed, which was then re-tweeted by Deaderick, who then thanked me for the coverage via Twitter direct message.

Moral of the story? We're getting great traffic from this, and so is Tupelo. And traffic, my friends, means we both stay in business. It's a win-win without any ethical compromises -- the only thing that's been exchanged is friendly words and timely information. So, for those writers among you who are still crowing, "Why should I use Twitter? What's it good for? I am cantankerous and contrary and feel that mocking this relatively innocuous bit of technology is far more important than researching real and useful information for my readers!" I say to you: this kind of thing is what makes Twitter useful.

But please, if you're still on the fence, I encourage you to stay there -- because food journalism is becoming very competitive in this town, and if I can maintain an edge using this tool while you go on about its inherent narcissism and pointlessness and degrading effect on the English language, etc. etc., I can more easily scoop you.

--

Speaking of which, I am fairly sure I scooped the Globe this week (although Thrillist scooped me first, sigh) when I wrote about Sip Cafe, which just opened in the old Z Square space in Post Office Square. This location has been my go-to summer lunch spot since my days as an intern at the Boston Business Journal. It has a nice little patio and is located directly inside the beautiful grassy oasis that is Post Office Square, where Financial District work-bots can pick up a cushion to sit on the ground without mussing their suits and skirts, as they listen to live jazz or flamenco under the shady trees and trellis-covered walkways.

I was surprised when Milk Street Cafe vacated the space and again when Z Square took off earlier this year. But I'm happy to see that Jared Mancini, the new owner of Sip Cafe, has snapped up the space and brought his sustainable/local take on the coffeeshop concept to the Financial District. Service is still a little shaky -- we went as a group on opening day and agreed we'd give it another month or two before we returned for anything like a real meal. But the drinks are on point (Mancini slung coffee on Newbury for a while before opening this place) and the location, as I said, cannot be beat. I may return next week, now that the weather in Boston is approaching the 80-degree mark!

Photo of stove via Tupelo; photo of Sip Cafe by Kerry Skemp.

Wine Riot FTW

This event was amazing. Big props to Tyler Balliet, Morgan First, Maggie Dayton and Lauren Michaud of The Second Glass for putting this together. My Bostonist recap is now up and available for viewing. More photos of the event by the talented Christine Fernsebner Eslao here.

And while I'm giving props to my friends again

I should note that my dear friend and colleague, Jenna Scherer, has started a new blog cataloguing all of her theatre writing for the Boston Herald and the Weekly Dig. It's called The Second Husk.

Cynicism, laughter, the second husk into which the shucked man crawls...

-- Djana Barnes, Nightwood

Jenna sees 3-4 plays per week, so there are always new updates. And amazingly, she still finds new and sarcastically creative things to say about them all, even when she's busting out her third article in a weekend on a Sunday morning when everyone else is walking their dogs or drinking mimosas. She is a trooper. And she's currently looking for a fulltime gig, so if you're in need of a staggeringly brilliant arts writer (she doesn't just write about theatre -- it's just what she does best and most frequently), you should contact her at jenna [dot] scherer [at] gmail.com.

Weirdly accurate cartoon rendering of Jenna Scherer courtesy of artist Jenna Scherer.

Bostonist: Guide to the Wine Riot

As I mentioned in a recent post, my friends Tyler and Morgan from The Second Glass are working on a little party called the Wine Riot. It's coming up next weekend.



If the event sells out, as they're hoping it might, there will be 2,500 drinkers attending, with one tasting session on Friday and two on Saturday, and lots of wine classes, vendors and food. It will require about 150 volunteers just to keep things running. I will be one of them. As such, I offered to write a kind of insider's guide to the Riot for Bostonist, as I've found myself explaining it frequently to interested parties anyhow and think the complexity of the schedule and the structure of the event does require some clarification. It's now up on Bostonist. Feel free to comment with questions!

Given what I know about that rock

Last night we saw John Vanderslice and John Darnielle (a.k.a. The Mountain Goats) at the Somerville Theatre. I would have been happy to see either one play solo at this venue -- hell, I'd see almost anyone at this venue -- but to have them both together, playing acoustic, was pretty cool.

Vanderslice started us off with a set of passionately rendered acoustic versions of his heavily-produced, moody paeans to lost lovers and lost rabbits, then Darnielle took the stage. After he had played the songs he wanted to play and began taking requests from the audience, it became apparent that many of the audience members were superfans determined to hear the most obscure items from his sizable catalogue. Luckily they made some excellent requests, from the angry and hilarious divorce epic "No Children" ("I hope you die! I hope we both die!") to the encore performance of "This Year", whose chorus, "I am gonna make it / through this year / if it kills me" clearly resonated with our recession-battered audience.

An early highlight was Darnielle's performance of Ace of Base's "The Sign", which my Bostonist colleague Christine described as "less a cover than an annotated critical edition, the original text broken up with observations and footnotes and questions." Before he began to play, Darnielle confessed. "I love this song ... I had to stop playing it after a while, because it gets to the point where, 10 years into the relationship, you have to stop having sex four times a day." (As someone who listened to that entire cassette over and over again almost nonstop the year that it came out, I completely understand this emotion. This early and repeated exposure to Ace of Base may explain my generation's current fixation with Swedish rockers, actually.)

But the other memorable moment of the night was when an audience member requested his little-known ditty "Beach House." Peep the lyrics:

BEACH HOUSE

I get letters telling me since I moved away
you've taken to hanging out on that rock about a mile from shore
Given what I know about that rock, mainly that it's populated by seals
I strongly suggest to you that you not hang out there anymore

'Cause the seal is a wily and a vicious creature
and the seal will bite you if you give him half a chance
Yeah the seal has a mind set on violence
and the seal is the sworn enemy of man

Now when I say that the seal is vicious I use the term advisedly
according to Webster's 9th New Collegiate, definition 4b.
Which states that vicious means marked by ferocity
and offers as a synonym...savage

'Cause the seal is a vicious and a wily creature
and the seal has a mind full of evil designs
and the seal will harm you and laugh about it
Yeah the seal is not a creature you want to toy with
Yeah the seal is not a creature you want to toy with

Yeah. Did I also mention that he and Vanderslice are creating a tour EP called "Moon Colony Bloodbath" about astronauts who harvest organs on the moon? No? Well, Christine did. Good thing the official writeup was her responsibility.

If you're wondering where the connection to food is in all this, well, don't worry. There is one. You see, in my favorite cookbook, I Like Food, Food Tastes Good, which contains essays and recipes written by members of indie bands, Darnielle has contributed an essay, and I kept thinking about it as he played. His recipe is for something vaguely Indian (I will dig it up after I unpack all my cookbooks). In the book, he rhapsodizes about the wonders of clarified butter and the joys of eating real food when not on the road. And despite all of his angry songs and his sardonic sense of humor, he is nothing but earnestly sweet in his essay. "When I get home from tour," he says, "I look forward to cooking for my wife more than almost anything."

The moral of the story being this: John Darnielle is a slightly schlubby former psychiatric nurse whose lyrics concern mostly adolescent angst and evil stepfathers and seal-related paranoia. So if John Darnielle can find domestic bliss and become a rock god and learn to cook with ghee, there is hope for all of us.

(Photos courtesy of Christine Fernsebner Eslao for Bostonist)

Bostonist: BOND Helps Answer the Eternal Question: Where to Eat in the Financial District?

Here at Go2 Media, we work hard, but when 11:59pm rolls around, talk turns from APIs and queries and deadlines to LUNCH. Last summer, a group of us organized a monthlong "Lunch Challenge", during which we attempted to try a new restaurant every day. Luckily, the Financial District is lousy with lunch spots, and we discovered a few new favorites, like the Boston Kebab House and Trattoria Andiamo (née Boston Deli Deluxe).

Usually, we gravitate toward places that provide a great value for the money and a variety of choices to satisfy our diverse group of coworkers, from Jack, our meat-loving Puerto Rican project manager, to Richard, our vegan ex-rocker engineer from Scotland. But sometimes, we splurge.

Last week, Jessie (who normally hunkers down over a can of soup re-heated in the kitchen) joined me on a jaunt to BOND, the Langham Hotel's new space. I am a fan of the folks at the Langham - I profiled their wonderful pastry chef, Trena Costello, last summer, and they were kind enough to host one of my students at their Chocolate Bar last year for my 826 food writing workshop. (The photo for the subsequent Globe article about our workshop was taken at the Langham.) So I was excited to visit again -- if only for another taste of Trena's intricate chocolate desserts (and yes, we left with extras in a to-go box).

The meal we shared with Julie Shamrock, the hotel's communications manager, only served to underscore my already positive impression of the place. Our food was tasty, locally-sourced, and reasonably-priced (though as I note for full disclosure it was comped for us). And despite BOND's highfalutin' decor, the staff kept things casual and unpretentious - which to me is the most wonderful and forward-thinking thing about this establishment. I ended up writing about our visit on Bostonist - the full piece is here.

For friends who work in the Financial District - do you know of any other noteworthy deals or lunch spots not mentioned in this piece? I'd love to know about them!

(Photo credit: Robert Rollend, courtesy of the Langham Hotel)