For our ninth anniversary, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I had our restaurant and the sea.
The restaurant is SRV, Boston's only Venetian-style bacaro. We always order their nine-course tasting menu, the Arsenale, and it is always intelligent, surprising, and delicious, the kind of food you can think about but also just enjoy. The polpette remain the Platonic ideal of bar snacks, meltingly browned marbles of pork and beef in the Platonic ideal of red sauce; they were followed this year by the smoked ricotta frittelle in a dressing of red pepper marmalade and honey, which had the fun of visually doubling the meatballs and tasting entirely like their own creamy, fluffy, internally molten thing. Neither of us actually likes red pepper all that much, so we were continuingly impressed by the slim savory slips of stuffed pepper and then impressed even further when we realized they were stuffed with that bane of summer gardens, zucchini. SRV's preparation of baccalà is one of their standouts and we're glad they know it: foam-white tufts of salt cod on crostini as abyssal black as the squid ink you can taste, deeply, when you bite in. The heirloom tomato salad made the most of the last of the season with meaty red and sweet yellow slices in a bright tangle of bottarga-dressed frisée. The monkfish arrived in heart-like fillets plated over borlotti beans and fennel with creamy dollops of eggplant and briefly silenced all conversation except for an agreement that more restaurants should cook with fennel. The delicate rich bites of duck breast in a drizzle of dark sweet cherries over crisp slices of kohlrabi and a chewy bed of sprouted rye did the same for an agreement on kohlrabi. When the pasta arrived, Rush remembered that SRV does not just make it from scratch, they mill their own flour in-house, and it must account for something about the luxurious silky moreish-ness of the strozzapreti which came with the plangently garlicky and artistically clever combination of green pesto and purple basil, the rigatoni in a near-stew of sausage and summer squash and cherry tomatoes which could have gone to fancy minestrone and did not even have to avoid it. We appreciated the ornate silverware of this stage. Dreadfully, I cannot remember the details of the dessert they brought us to round off the Arsenale—some kind of panna cotta? I was charmed by the pickled gooseberries—but in my defense I was distracted by the blueberry crostata with kelp gelato. Rush had the mascarpone mousse with cherry granita and it looked lovely from where I was sitting, but it was not seaweed. They had also correctly predicted that I would want to order the Flotsam and Jetsam, an icily dark cocktail made with bergamot, gin, and squid ink; they themselves went for a kind of vegan milk punch called the Pua's Punch, with coconut milk and Marsala, and later the very, very smooth Innocents Abroad. My second round was the Bella Notte, where the counterintuitive tomato proved essential to keeping the mezcal from smacking the drinker in the face. Unfortunately, when the restaurant decided to present us with complimentary meringues with a candle for our anniversary, they turned out to be made with coffee, but it was still a nice thought. We wrote grateful and enthusiastic notes all over the bill. We hope for many more anniversary celebrations from them. They were jam-packed on a Tuesday night.
The sea was Castle Island, where the tide had come up to the stones of the seawall and rippled, dark and heavy, under the white and sodium streetlight and the grounded stars of the far curve of the harbor and the plane that roared overhead out of Logan, looking rather like a special effect at such a steep angle through the low clouds. The moon is not quite full yet, but it was golden against the dusk-blue on the way to the restaurant and ivory-colored over the water; the air smelled richly and cleanly of salt. We walked far enough to get a better look at the mural on the side of the boathouse and made plans to return with Fox, who we agree will like the fort and the causeway and the cranes of the Conley Terminal, lit up like installations after dark. We saw two kids on scooters, who we strongly suspected must have snuck out to be zooming around Telegraph Hill at a quarter to midnight; more power to them. We drove home and watched Steven Universe: The Movie (2019), which we both really enjoyed—I loved the Max Fleischer, Chuck Jones throwback springiness of Spinel and appreciated Rush pointing out the movie's dialogue with a bunch of '80's animated films I had missed as a child—and then I came home to collapse, since this evening is the dress rehearsal for the Igs and tomorrow is the show and I kind of need to be sleeping when I'm not onstage. The weather held.
My mother had reminded me that the ninth anniversary is Bronze, so in the absence of any ability to give my lover Rachel Weisz, I gave them a ceramic salamander all in black glaze with a bronze stripe down its back.
Many more, my blue-haired love.
rushthatspeaks and I had our restaurant and the sea.The restaurant is SRV, Boston's only Venetian-style bacaro. We always order their nine-course tasting menu, the Arsenale, and it is always intelligent, surprising, and delicious, the kind of food you can think about but also just enjoy. The polpette remain the Platonic ideal of bar snacks, meltingly browned marbles of pork and beef in the Platonic ideal of red sauce; they were followed this year by the smoked ricotta frittelle in a dressing of red pepper marmalade and honey, which had the fun of visually doubling the meatballs and tasting entirely like their own creamy, fluffy, internally molten thing. Neither of us actually likes red pepper all that much, so we were continuingly impressed by the slim savory slips of stuffed pepper and then impressed even further when we realized they were stuffed with that bane of summer gardens, zucchini. SRV's preparation of baccalà is one of their standouts and we're glad they know it: foam-white tufts of salt cod on crostini as abyssal black as the squid ink you can taste, deeply, when you bite in. The heirloom tomato salad made the most of the last of the season with meaty red and sweet yellow slices in a bright tangle of bottarga-dressed frisée. The monkfish arrived in heart-like fillets plated over borlotti beans and fennel with creamy dollops of eggplant and briefly silenced all conversation except for an agreement that more restaurants should cook with fennel. The delicate rich bites of duck breast in a drizzle of dark sweet cherries over crisp slices of kohlrabi and a chewy bed of sprouted rye did the same for an agreement on kohlrabi. When the pasta arrived, Rush remembered that SRV does not just make it from scratch, they mill their own flour in-house, and it must account for something about the luxurious silky moreish-ness of the strozzapreti which came with the plangently garlicky and artistically clever combination of green pesto and purple basil, the rigatoni in a near-stew of sausage and summer squash and cherry tomatoes which could have gone to fancy minestrone and did not even have to avoid it. We appreciated the ornate silverware of this stage. Dreadfully, I cannot remember the details of the dessert they brought us to round off the Arsenale—some kind of panna cotta? I was charmed by the pickled gooseberries—but in my defense I was distracted by the blueberry crostata with kelp gelato. Rush had the mascarpone mousse with cherry granita and it looked lovely from where I was sitting, but it was not seaweed. They had also correctly predicted that I would want to order the Flotsam and Jetsam, an icily dark cocktail made with bergamot, gin, and squid ink; they themselves went for a kind of vegan milk punch called the Pua's Punch, with coconut milk and Marsala, and later the very, very smooth Innocents Abroad. My second round was the Bella Notte, where the counterintuitive tomato proved essential to keeping the mezcal from smacking the drinker in the face. Unfortunately, when the restaurant decided to present us with complimentary meringues with a candle for our anniversary, they turned out to be made with coffee, but it was still a nice thought. We wrote grateful and enthusiastic notes all over the bill. We hope for many more anniversary celebrations from them. They were jam-packed on a Tuesday night.
The sea was Castle Island, where the tide had come up to the stones of the seawall and rippled, dark and heavy, under the white and sodium streetlight and the grounded stars of the far curve of the harbor and the plane that roared overhead out of Logan, looking rather like a special effect at such a steep angle through the low clouds. The moon is not quite full yet, but it was golden against the dusk-blue on the way to the restaurant and ivory-colored over the water; the air smelled richly and cleanly of salt. We walked far enough to get a better look at the mural on the side of the boathouse and made plans to return with Fox, who we agree will like the fort and the causeway and the cranes of the Conley Terminal, lit up like installations after dark. We saw two kids on scooters, who we strongly suspected must have snuck out to be zooming around Telegraph Hill at a quarter to midnight; more power to them. We drove home and watched Steven Universe: The Movie (2019), which we both really enjoyed—I loved the Max Fleischer, Chuck Jones throwback springiness of Spinel and appreciated Rush pointing out the movie's dialogue with a bunch of '80's animated films I had missed as a child—and then I came home to collapse, since this evening is the dress rehearsal for the Igs and tomorrow is the show and I kind of need to be sleeping when I'm not onstage. The weather held.
My mother had reminded me that the ninth anniversary is Bronze, so in the absence of any ability to give my lover Rachel Weisz, I gave them a ceramic salamander all in black glaze with a bronze stripe down its back.
Many more, my blue-haired love.
