The first legal drink I ever ordered was a margarita, because I was in college and my friends took me out to the now-defunct Iguana Cantina on Moody Street. It was fun in the ritual sense, but as a mixological experience it was kind of a bust; I concluded I did not like tequila. Further research suggested I did not like tequila no matter its price point or its fellow-ingredients. It was a great and pleasant surprise when I discovered that I really do like mezcal, but I chalked that up to the smoke.
It should surprise no one that I have found a surefire method of making me like tequila, and that method is: put seaweed in it.
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spatch and I celebrated our fourth anniversary last night at Waypoint. It is our first repeat anniversary restaurant and it did just as well by us this time: the aesthetic remains a drowned undersea shimmer, the dining room full of plankton-green neon and tiles like wet slate and the jellyfish shine of glass bells, and the food remains spectacular. The bread plate no longer contains the salt-black sourdough made with squid ink that I loved so last year, but there was ink swirled in the white bean dip and sugar kelp in the smoked butter and the breads made with kelp and colatura di alici tasted both sweetly and pungently of the sea. The salt cod fritters with smoked lemon and chestnut aioli reminded Rob of childhood summers on the Isles of Shoals, where the cod were called dunfish and he watched them sun-dry. The small, tender, plentiful snails were not wiped out by their crunchy garlic butter any more than the succulent (a much-misused word, but I don't in this case have a better one) lobster tail by its bed of Szechuan pepper-fried black rice. I ordered a cocktail called the Submarine because it was made with torched nori tequila and aquavit; it was breezy and briny but not parching. Rob got the Forest Gold with maple sap and whisky, appropriately woody and very smooth. Between the urchin, the bottarga, the pecorino, and the smoked egg yolk which split and glazed into the pasta when cut with a fork, we were expecting the uni bucatini to be an umamibomb, but if so it was a surprisingly delicate example of the species, chewy, sea-sweet, full of unexpectedly melting flavors. Rob's milk punch was as transparent as its ice cube and tasted like the best aspects of a piña colada and tom kha gai. I got the Professor because it's hard to ruin absinthe, cognac, and orgeat, and this drink didn't. For dessert, Rob had the cinnamon-sugar donuts with coffee ganache and I thought I was ordering an apple crostata with fried ice cream, but it turned out to be rye ice cream, which was even nicer. Our last drinks were absinthe, which I will never stop associating with the cloudy green of a breaking wave. We walked back into Harvard Square and browsed the basement of the Harvard Book Store, having spent the late afternoon and early evening on the harborwalk instead of a museum, watching a searchlight swivel through the blowing rain, right-of-way lights of planes lifting off out of Logan, the oarlock creak of moored boats and pilings in the rocking wash of the tide. LED streetlight is sharper on wet brick and cobbles than the mercury vapor of noir, but it lies on the moving surface of water in the right pleated bands. We followed the Fort Point Channel back to Cabot Yard and discovered the street art we had seen last month belongs to a public park called Underground Ink Block, which may be hipsterishly named but has wonderful murals of licensed but not tame graffiti. What could we do after that much smell and sound of the sea but want to eat it?
Today it angers me not just that the news is apocalyptically bad, but that the news is so deliberately apocalyptically bad. Decisions made knowingly from nothing but cruelty and greed. It is not new, it is not new from this administration, it is not new from the world, but the magnitude of the cruelty and the greed and the carelessness feels like it's growing. I don't feel disillusioned, just furious. I want to protect people I love and people I don't even know and I can barely pay the rent. I don't want to take up believing in hell, but I have to be careful about the ill I wish on the architects of these decisions in this life which is the only one I believe in. I do not wish it to be generalized. I want to be here to celebrate after they're gone. But I do want them gone.
I am not sure if my latest Patreon review got lost in its timestamp; I watched F. W. Murnau's Phantom (1922) the night before last and whatever I was expecting from its title and provenance, proto-noir was not it. I may be feeling more than ordinarily self-conscious about my film writing because I have just started reading James Agee and he is as good as his reputation. Seriously, he is a delight. I can trust him to see the same movies I do, even if we feel differently about them. He was appreciating Harold Lloyd in the years when I thought nobody was. And I am deeply sorry that his Studs Lonigan trilogy starring James Cagney and Mickey Rooney was never made.
It should surprise no one that I have found a surefire method of making me like tequila, and that method is: put seaweed in it.
spatch and I celebrated our fourth anniversary last night at Waypoint. It is our first repeat anniversary restaurant and it did just as well by us this time: the aesthetic remains a drowned undersea shimmer, the dining room full of plankton-green neon and tiles like wet slate and the jellyfish shine of glass bells, and the food remains spectacular. The bread plate no longer contains the salt-black sourdough made with squid ink that I loved so last year, but there was ink swirled in the white bean dip and sugar kelp in the smoked butter and the breads made with kelp and colatura di alici tasted both sweetly and pungently of the sea. The salt cod fritters with smoked lemon and chestnut aioli reminded Rob of childhood summers on the Isles of Shoals, where the cod were called dunfish and he watched them sun-dry. The small, tender, plentiful snails were not wiped out by their crunchy garlic butter any more than the succulent (a much-misused word, but I don't in this case have a better one) lobster tail by its bed of Szechuan pepper-fried black rice. I ordered a cocktail called the Submarine because it was made with torched nori tequila and aquavit; it was breezy and briny but not parching. Rob got the Forest Gold with maple sap and whisky, appropriately woody and very smooth. Between the urchin, the bottarga, the pecorino, and the smoked egg yolk which split and glazed into the pasta when cut with a fork, we were expecting the uni bucatini to be an umamibomb, but if so it was a surprisingly delicate example of the species, chewy, sea-sweet, full of unexpectedly melting flavors. Rob's milk punch was as transparent as its ice cube and tasted like the best aspects of a piña colada and tom kha gai. I got the Professor because it's hard to ruin absinthe, cognac, and orgeat, and this drink didn't. For dessert, Rob had the cinnamon-sugar donuts with coffee ganache and I thought I was ordering an apple crostata with fried ice cream, but it turned out to be rye ice cream, which was even nicer. Our last drinks were absinthe, which I will never stop associating with the cloudy green of a breaking wave. We walked back into Harvard Square and browsed the basement of the Harvard Book Store, having spent the late afternoon and early evening on the harborwalk instead of a museum, watching a searchlight swivel through the blowing rain, right-of-way lights of planes lifting off out of Logan, the oarlock creak of moored boats and pilings in the rocking wash of the tide. LED streetlight is sharper on wet brick and cobbles than the mercury vapor of noir, but it lies on the moving surface of water in the right pleated bands. We followed the Fort Point Channel back to Cabot Yard and discovered the street art we had seen last month belongs to a public park called Underground Ink Block, which may be hipsterishly named but has wonderful murals of licensed but not tame graffiti. What could we do after that much smell and sound of the sea but want to eat it?Today it angers me not just that the news is apocalyptically bad, but that the news is so deliberately apocalyptically bad. Decisions made knowingly from nothing but cruelty and greed. It is not new, it is not new from this administration, it is not new from the world, but the magnitude of the cruelty and the greed and the carelessness feels like it's growing. I don't feel disillusioned, just furious. I want to protect people I love and people I don't even know and I can barely pay the rent. I don't want to take up believing in hell, but I have to be careful about the ill I wish on the architects of these decisions in this life which is the only one I believe in. I do not wish it to be generalized. I want to be here to celebrate after they're gone. But I do want them gone.
I am not sure if my latest Patreon review got lost in its timestamp; I watched F. W. Murnau's Phantom (1922) the night before last and whatever I was expecting from its title and provenance, proto-noir was not it. I may be feeling more than ordinarily self-conscious about my film writing because I have just started reading James Agee and he is as good as his reputation. Seriously, he is a delight. I can trust him to see the same movies I do, even if we feel differently about them. He was appreciating Harold Lloyd in the years when I thought nobody was. And I am deeply sorry that his Studs Lonigan trilogy starring James Cagney and Mickey Rooney was never made.
