| nice tapas place |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|11:02 pm] |
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You can drop me randomly pretty much inside the Greater Boston area, and it is very likely I will know exactly where I am. The two big exceptions to this are the South End and Roxbury. Yes, I'll sort of figure it out by noticing the Hancock Tower orientation with respect to the Prudential Center, but that won't mean I know what's around where I am.
I did a bit to fix that tonight by going to a tapas place in the South End called Estragon on a recommendation from Davey's friend Rhys, who lives pretty much in the center of the historic South End area. In a nutshell, I recommend it - it's slightly cheaper than Tapeo, and a bit more down-to-earth, with ingredients that are more plebian than patrician.
I got off the T at South Station (Broadway would have been a better choice, and Andrew wouldn't have been a bad one), made my way to Harrison Street, and walked down to East Brookline, where I in fact met Davey for dinner, though not Rhys. I briefly thought I had the directions wrong, and the place was at East Berkeley, but the layout of the South End reinforced the directions - once I passed a Waltham, Malden, and East Canton streets, I understood that there was in fact going to be an East Brookline. Another example of naming conventions being useful tools.
The place was a converted warehouse space, with a dominating bar along the inside wall that nonetheless felt spacious and roomy in spite of the pipes running along the ceiling. The wait staff were quite competent, both knowledgeable and around at exactly when we needed them, without the ever-cloying "is everything all right?" question every 15 minutes.
Round 1:
Boquerone con marchego y Tomate. Very nice imported white anchovies. My favorite of the night.
Albondigas de Bacalao. These cod fritters were a bit of a disappointment. Nothing particularly wrong with them, but they seemed a bit eh. I guess I'm always hoping for the nice salt cod offerings at Atasca.
Panceta. A perfectly cooked piece of pork belly, with a nice garlic sauce.
Round 2:
Espincas a la Catalana. Apparently, spinich was meant to be sauteed in olive oil, and served with pine nuts and raisins. Who knew?
Pincho Moruno. Lamb skewers with a homemade cumin mustard that didn't burn out my mouth. (Most mustard does, these days.)
Jamon con Melon. On the theory that everything goes better with bacon, this is melon slices wrapped with serrano ham. Very tasty.
We finished off with a cheese plate that was quite nice - I particularly liked the blue cheese, which was the hard crumbly version. I also had some very nice cortado, which I quite liked.
I definitely want to go back and try the paella sometime, but this was a tapas night, and that would have been a meal in itself. |
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...spinich was meant to be sauteed in olive oil...
Noooo ruining nice spinaches with nasty olive oil. That might be worth trying with Sunflower oil perhaps.
Sadly, you basically have no business going into a tapas place. I'm fairly sure they don't put olive oil in either the coffee or the sangria; after that, all bets are off.
Woe. I'd have to settle for the Sangria - could be worse...
Oh, yes. We discovered this this week at home. Necessity being the mother of invention, and the fact that our larder was largely empty but for a recent CSA haul, we had greens sauteed with fresh garlic scapes, served over starch -- it worked with spinach and with mustard greens, and it worked over rice and over spaghetti (the latter treatment included chicken breast in the mix).
The nuts would be an obvious addition (as would be the citrus zest). I'm sure the raisins were a plus, although they wouldn't have occurred to me.
Do you mean Andrew station, as opposed to Ashmont? Ashmont is one stop south of us, and Andrew is one stop south of Broadway. I'm really hoping it wasn't just a braino, because if there's some awesome T/walking shortcut from Dot to the South End, I definitely want to know about it.
Yeah, Andrew Station. I'll change it in the main text. From Andrew, I'd probably take the road that goes past South Bay until it hits Mass. Ave. and take that down to Washington Street. There is probably a nifty back way through twisty little streets all the same, but even if I could do that by feel, I have no idea what their names are.
From here, I'd probably walk Dorchester -> Hancock -> Pleasant -> East Cottage -> Mass. Ave. I'd expect that walk to take about an hour, and then you still have to get to Washington and the South End from there.
*siiigh* That's about what I figured. But it looks like Estragon is fairly walkable from the Red Line even for those of us who get too bored to walk farther than a mile, so it's good to know about.
Re: "Espincas a la Catalana.
A variation on this that we make: spinach sauteed in olive oil and fresh orange zest, then served with pine nuts and golden raisins.
The orange zest adds a great flavor to the whole dish. It's easy to make and one of our favorite side dishes.
There's an Elizabethan recipe for spinach that calls for sauteing it in butter and serving with currants. Pine nuts would be a great addition, but not very English.
I had forgotten to mention the music at the place, which I would characterize as "Spanish eclectic" - a mix of Spanish pop, salsa, tango, and bossa nova music thrown together. The place was roomy enough to do a bit of dancing in, and though I don't know if that's a scheduled feature, it certainly looked like nobody would object to folks getting up and dancing.
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