Cafes/Restaurants in Boston

I've been staying in Boston for a week. Below is the list of restaurants and cafes that I found good.

Scoozi (235 Newbury Street)

A budget but stylish Italian restaurant on Newbury Street, the main shopping street of Boston. Shrimp scampi spaghetti is well-done. Background music of good taste is a plus. A take-out is available, too.

The Blue Room (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge)

A very nice restaurant serving contemporary cuisine located off the beaten track in Kendall (MIT's campus area). Grilled tuna with star anises, stir-fried shiitake mushrooms, and sticky-rice in coconut-curry sauce is very creative and highly recommended.

Desi Dhaba (401 Massachusetts Avenue)

A budget Indian restaurant located near Central Square in Cambridge (in between MIT and Harvard campuses). Their curry lunch buffet (less than 10 dollars) was value for money.


Trident Booksellers and Cafe (338 Newbury Street)

A bookstore-cum-cafe that offers wireless broadband connection for free, serving all-day breakfast (egg dishes and pancakes etc.). Asian chicken salad was excellent. It's located near Hynes/ICA green line metro station as well as a bus stop on Massachusets Avenue from which you can go to MIT and Harvard.

Tealuxe (108 Newbury Street)

A cosy cafe properly serving a wide variety of tea.

Tremont 647 (647 Tremont Street)

A great restaurant in South End, the up-and-coming district of Boston, serving contemporary cuisine. Steamed Tibetan Lamb Momos for a starter and Pan Roasted Local Wild Cod for the main were beautifully done.

The Upper Crust Pizzeria (20 Charles Street)

A good budget pizzeria in Beacon Hill area. On the common table under an abstract tin sculpture hanging from the ceiling, you can finish your quick dinner with a tasty slice of pizza for the budget way below 10 dollars.



---
And I realize none of these cafes/restaurants have a counterpart in Stockholm...

Hotel Review: Hotel Commonwealth in Boston

www.hotelcommonwealth.com

I stayed in room 515 (with a king-sized bed) for 3 nights from 7 November 2008.

The Good:
1. Location. Just within a minute from Kenmore subway station on the Green Line.
2. Friendly staff.
3. Pleasant antique furniture. The pale turquoise color is pretty.
4. Very comfy bed. I got very good sleep.
5. Tasty room service breakfast.
6. Very tasty puddings in the lobby for breakfast.
7. Wireless internet in bed rooms for free of charge

The Bad:
1. Elevators. You need to insert the room key card before pushing the floor button. (Except when you go down to the lobby floor.) Otherwise, the elevator won't take you to the floor of your room. And you need to insert the card several times until it works.
2. Sockets (for electricity and for internet) on the desk. It's hidden behind a wooden panel that looks like a drawer. As the distance between the sockets and the wooden panel is very short, the panel cannot be closed if you use a socket converter.
3. No coffee maker, let alone a kettle. Unless you use room service or take away from a coffee shop nearby, therefore, you can't drink coffee or tea in your room.
4. Although wireless internet is available, the room directory instructs you to use an ethernet cable hidden inside the desk drawer for access to the internet. And this cable doesn't work.

The Ugly
1. Shower. The shower head is fixed on the wall. The ugliest thing is its water pressure, which goes up with water temperature. When the warmth of water becomes just right, water pressure is so strong that my skin hurts. I couldn't rinse my body.

Verdict:
If you don't take shower, this hotel is recommended.

Chez Henri @ Logan International Airport

Dine Boston Cafe, a restaurant just in front of the security check gate in the Logan International Airport (Terminal E) seasonally features some meals by a chef of a Boston's local restaurant, a very admirable initiative given that nobody wants to end their trip to Boston with uninspiring meals at the airport. This season's featured restaurant is Chez Henri, serving French meals with Cuban twists. Fresh oysters slightly topped with chili and vinegar sauce for a starter, and beef steak with tomato and basil sauce accompanied with crunchy and spicy French fries for the main, beautifully puts an end to my four-day stay in Boston.

Boston

I find Boston similar to London in many ways: dimly-lit interior spaces, uncomfortable metro trains, smelly booze pubs, the difficulty to eat salad in restaurants, etc. The cityscape of Boston is better than that of London: Boston has at least got this pleasant, red-brick covered street-scapes.

Marlborough Street, Back Bay

But I see stupid demonstrators blocking city traffic here as well. The presumably picturesque Copley Square was spoiled by politically-charged Americans shouting their ideology. (Boston Public Library was an escape from all this.)

Cambridge, a neighbouring town where Harvard and MIT are located, is a weird place. From central Boston, take the red subway line and the first station is Kendall/MIT. The area is Tokyo-ish: super-modern high-rise residential buildings without any hint of tradition. But it seems to be the place where you can find some hidden gems (like The Blue Room, Toscanini's, List Visual Arts Center---see below). Stata Center looks rather ugly, though.


Stata Center at 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge

The second station Central is in the area with many immigrants: the atmosphere is a bit like London's Brixton. I smell of ganja. Then the third station is Harvard, where I feel rather uncomfortable and sometimes even depressing. Perhaps because I'm never comfortable with the mainstream or what the majority believe is true.

In the end, I didn't try hard to explore the city because I didn't feel like doing so (I didn't visit downtown Boston). Given that Boston is called the Athens of America, maybe I'm fundamentally disinterested in what constitutes America.

Toscanini's

Having a dinner until late last night and checking out by 9:30am, I'm hungry but don't fancy the hotel's mediocre breakfast. I walk around outside the hotel, finding this nice neighbourhood cafe at 899 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.

Freshly squeezed organge juice and warm bread puddings with maple syrup and soft cream cheer me up. The window-side comfy sofa seat receives the morning sunlight, with fat b-lined chillout music as background. Waitresses and a hippy-looking cafe owner are nice and pleasant. Around 10:15am, there is a long queue of people presumably living nearby. They also serve a variety of coffee, brunch menu, and "the best ice cream in America" according to the New York Times (so reads the sign on the cafe window). If I were a PhD student in Boston, I would definitely come here for a weekend brunch.

List Visual Arts Center at MIT

A free-to-enter gallery of contemporary video installations in the middle of MIT campus is a pleasant surprise if you think MIT is all about technology geekiness. Each of white-cube style exhibition spaces features one video installation with a comfy leather bench in front of the screen.

I find one interesting installation (entitled "Hor-champs" by Stan Douglas, 1992). In a rather spacious cubic space, a double-sided video screen is hung diagonally at the center. One side shows a free jazz band's performance in a standard TV style: the camera mostly focuses the main saxophone player with backing trombone, bassist, and drummer just occasionally shown. The other side of the screen shows the video shots usually discarded: the bassist and drummer while the saxophone player plays the main melody or the saxophone and the trombone just standing while the drummer or the bassist is playing solo. It captures my interest because this is how I often listen to music: the vocal or the main guitar is just background for me; my ears focus on the bass line or the drumming rhythms. So I like this installation.

Boston Public Library's courtyard

The Blue Room

After an 8 hour trans-Atlantic flight, with a 2-day academic conference awaiting me next morning, I definitely need to have a great dinner with an excellent atmosphere. The Blue Room (1 Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA 02139), a restaurant in a rather Tokyo-ish area of Kendall (where MIT campus is located), almost perfectly satisfies my picky expectation. Wood-grilled whole branzino fish, served with pomegranate syrup, crushed olives, herby leaves, and bits of pink grapefruit, is super. A whole baked fish often exhibits a steep decline in the degree of extra pleasure from eating more: the second half of fish meat quickly starts tasting boring even if the first half was gorgeous. The Blue Room's chef knows how to avoid this: serving grilled fish with what tastes continuously stimulating with texture in stark contrast: pink grapefruit.

A dessert (cream cheese flan) is rather mediocre, but the service is extremely beautiful here. A waiter taking my order tells me that baking fish can take at most 35 minutes. When the fish is almost ready, he comes to my table again, saying, "In two minutes." A waitress serving the fish asks me if I have an experience of eating a whole fish (when I reply by saing, "I'm Japanese," she says, "I don't want to make any presumption."). The decor and atmosphere is stylish without being pretentious.

A truely excellent restaurant (and its website is cool).