Saying Goodbye To A Treasured Spot
Over the past year, and even before that, I’ve been writing about restaurants closing. We might have forgotten now, but in the last years of the 2010s, restaurants were shutting down at a growing rate.
Many people in the industry felt that the landscape had become over saturated. Restaurants were having trouble finding staff. Chefs were opening multiple locations, only to find that they’d spread themselves too thin. Competition was making it hard to make monthly rents.
Everyone secretly thought that a contraction was due, and it’s clear that COVID-19 provided that contraction. As I’ve said before, 110,000 independent restaurants have closed in the past year, and more than 2 million restaurant people are still without jobs.
I’ve written about numerous names that have been lost or put on hiatus, but the meaning didn’t truly hit home until last week.
People in Boston and elsewhere reacted with distress to learn that Island Creek Oyster Bar, its sister establishment, Eastern Standard, and The Hawthorne, a craft cocktail bar downstairs from Island Creek, had closed.
I loved all three of them, and I was just as upset as my friends. For one thing, I never for a second suspected they wouldn’t survive the pandemic. They were successful, highly regarded and served terrific food and drink.
In retrospect, now I realize the signs were there. Massachusetts, like many places, has at times prohibited or limited indoor dining and drinking. All three sit near Fenway Park, and down the street from Boston University.
We all know what’s happened to baseball and in-person learning, not to mention the shift to work from home. And, to top it off, the three places were in a tangle with their landlord, who apparently sees a more prosperous use for the properties in a hot area of Boston development.
But, it’s one thing to view a closing intellectually, and quite another emotionally.
The importance of our locals
Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve found my “local,” as the British would say. The restaurant or bar where I most feel comfortable.
Of course, in Ann Arbor, it’s Zingerman’s Roadhouse, trailed by Knight’s Steakhouse on Dexter Avenue, and Nick’s House of Pancakes. These are all places where I know the owner and the staff, and can settle into a seat or a booth feeling right at home.
In Chicago, my local was Smoque BBQ. In Phoenix, it was The Henry. I have several favorites in New Orleans, including, but not limited to High Hat Cafe, Gabrielle, Saba, MoPho La Petite Grocery, and the branch of French Truck Coffee on Dryades.
My relationship with these Boston places began before I moved there. I found the Hawthorne when I flew over to watch the Detroit Tigers take on the Boston Red Sox in their annual series, something I discovered many other Detroit fans liked to do.
My friend Joseph Lichterman and I were looking for a spot to wait out a massive crowd that had descended on the T stop nearest Fenway, and went into Island Creek seeing refuge. It didn’t have room, but directed us to the basement.
There, we found a charming, chic craft cocktail bar where our casual baseball attire wasn’t out of place. Our server couldn’t have been more accommodating, asking what we felt like drinking, and making recommendations that perfectly fit our moods.
When I arrived in January 2016 for my year-long stint at the NPR show Here & Now, I asked co-host Jeremy Hobson for some restaurant suggestions. “You have to go to my sister’s place,” he said, quickly typing a text into his phone.
Jeremy’s sister, Nicki Hobson, was chef de cuisine at Island Creek, and I was excited to dine somewhere with a woman in charge of the kitchen.
On that first visit, we got the kind of treatment that you might get from a friend of the chef: a nicely located table, attentive service, good food, and little extras that came to the table.
But every time I went after that, the treatment was the same, whether I was by myself sitting at the bar to dine, or with a group of friends.
Maybe there was a note next to my name in the records; all I know is that I was treated like family.
All around me, people were having business dinners, and friends were meeting, and couples were on dates, and there were celebrations. It had the buzz of a successful place.
In the midst of mourning my mother, it was comforting to drop into that party.
Why we like them
Although Boston abounds with great restaurants, I wound up going regularly, and ate my way through the menu, which included oysters from Island Creek’s own beds, oyster sliders, great chowder, a terrific lobster roll, and fresh fish entrees.
Even the baking was good. You don’t think of a seafood restaurant for bread service and biscuits, but they were excellent, as were the desserts, which I usually took home, too stuffed to finish, but not wanting to skip.
The last week I was in Boston, in fact, I sat at the bar and treated myself to an expensive glass of champagne, figuring I was saying “a bientot.” Little did I know that it was adieu.
The reaction so many of us had last week was visceral. For me, Island Creek’s closing meant a piece of my mental Boston was gone.
That has happened to me constantly through the years: a number of the places I frequented when I was a graduate student at Columbia University have closed, like Ollie’s Noodles, Dock’s Oyster Bar, and Glaser’s bakery.
Chicago has lost my beloved Takashi as well as the entire Treasure Island grocery store chain. Ann Arbor abounds with empty restaurant locations.
But, because I lived in Boston so recently, it didn’t occur to me that a place I liked as recently as five years ago would just vanish.
I’ll never walk into Icobar again and see that sea of faces, people sitting at the bar, at high top tables, along the banquette in the back, or smile at the server setting down a round tray of oysters.
I won’t be able to settle back and just enjoy the hum, or go downstairs to The Hawthorne after and chat with the owner, Jackson Cannon, or a member of his bar team. (Jackson hopefully will pop up elsewhere, just not in those surroundings.)
Island Creek has a surviving location out in the Boston suburbs. I’ve been there, and the sprawling atmosphere was nothing like Kenmore Square. I actually turned around and walked out.
Even though the food was the same, there was no warm welcome. There was no buzz — maybe there would be at a busier time, but I wasn’t about to schlep out to Burlington on a regular basis in Boston traffic to find out.
I’m trying to be sanguine about the whole thing. The business journalist in me says that this is just the way commerce works. You find a winning formula, you make people happy, but something can always get in the way.
If you are robust enough, you survive it; if you have to cut pieces of your organization to prop up the others, you do.
Last week, Michael Gulotta, who owns MoPho and Maypop, told me he still dreams of reopening the latter, although it has been closed now for almost a year.
Its future rests on whether MoPho receives a PPP loan, and if he feels confident enough in returning tourist and business travel, which comprised Maypop’s primary customer base.
“It’s soul crushing,” he says of seeing his dream restaurant sit idle. “To be able to offer that level of service, you have to have a team that’s invested. It takes a lot of effort from everyone to have those things in place.”
An extension of our homes
Restaurants have to make financial sense, of course, but the ones that become favorites are more than just well-run businesses.
They’re an extension of our homes. When I first slid into a leather-covered booth at the Henry, I felt like I was on the sofa in my living room.
A chat with a favorite server at Zingerman’s Roadhouse is like having a friend stop by. The food that arrives at the table is a link to all the memories we have of things we’ve eaten there before, and the wonderful times we had doing so, whether by ourselves or with a group of people.
For me, Island Creek was an education in oysters, as well as the comfort of the New England dishes my father liked when I was a girl, although Nicki prepared them on a far higher plane.
It was an experience that included the valet parking attendants (you could leave your car there during Red Sox games and they’d have it waiting out front when the game ended), and the pretty bathrooms that were just upstairs from the dining room.
In short, if I was going to design a restaurant, it would be a lot like Island Creek.
Now, when I am able to go back to Boston, that corner will house something else, and it will be yet another spot that I’ll look at and see my past, as I do whenever I walk through the Public Garden and think of my parents taking me there at age six.
I hope Nicki will return, at another restaurant or in her own place, and I’ll be sure to support it when she does.
Losing Island Creek and its siblings only reinforces to me how important it is to save the places that make up our present. So, give your locals your business while you can.
Helping The Folks In Texas
I am a proud honorary Texan. My father had family members there, my mother’s best friend lived there, and I’ve been going to Texas since I was a girl. I’ve been a frequent guests on Texas Standard, the fine public radio program.
So, the ice storm and blackout last week has been front of mind. Many people have asked how they can help Texas, and I wanted to suggest two food-related places that might merit your support.
One is World Central Kitchen, the philanthropy launched by Chef Jose Andres (above). His organization leaps to help people in need whenever a crisis takes place, and they were right there in Texas last week, serving food and providing supplies of water, which was in short supply.
Another is Food Bank RGV, which is the food bank serving the Rio Grande Valley. The Valley, as people in Texas call it, is the bottom most tip of Texas, and a part of the state that I know best.
I first visited the Valley in college, and have been all across the area, from Brownsville down to Mexico. It is one of the worst-off parts of Texas, but the people are warm and are trying their best to recover from the storm that caught so many off guard.
Knowing Texas like I do, I think it will get back on its feet fairly fast. And while there most likely will be much finger pointing, there also will be plenty of learning about the impact of climate change, and hopefully better preparation next time.
Traveling to Italy With Stanley Tucci
Confession: I had a little meltdown last week. I hit what everyone is calling the Covid Wall. I was frustrated with snow and cold and I wanted to just go somewhere.
After I had my little cry, I flipped through the programs on my Tivo and remembered that I had recorded the new CNN series, Searching for Italy, which is hosted by the actor Stanley Tucci.
It’s the first food series that CNN has commissioned since Anthony Bourdain’s death almost three years ago. (Yes, it’s been that long.) I’m never sure about celebrity hosted food shows, but Stanley has credibility in the kitchen, as I wrote for Forbes.
He was one of my mother’s favorite actors, so I bought her The Tucci Cookbook when it came out in 2012. For a celebrity cookbook, it’s nicely written and the recipes are good for someone who wants to get started with Italian dishes.
More recently, he’s been known for his Negroni recipe on Instagram that went viral.
The television program is well done, although the commercials are bothersome. You might be best off recording the show and fast-forwarding through them.
Tucci kicked things off by visiting Naples and the Amalfi Coast, and of course, you want to dive through the screen and eat the pizza and spaghetti with zucchini that’s demonstrated on the show.
He is a skilled narrator, and speaks Italian mixed in with English. The show is a little like Somebody Feed Phil, minus the corny jokes, in that he highlights historic places and talks with chefs and writers.
I was pleased that he visited a Roma community in Naples, and gave us a different view of people who are often maligned.
Of course, you aren’t getting a lecture on Italian history and Tucci isn’t a Le Cordon Bleu trained chef. Purists in travel and food may turn up their noses.
But you will get gorgeous scenery. You could easily watch the show with the sound off, although you would then miss the pleasure of his trained voice.
I also recently discovered the YouTube series called The Positano Diaries, and it seems like a natural companion if you’d like to dive deeper into what it’s like to live and cook in Italy, lockdown life included.
Tucci’s show is airing on weekends, with a new episode on Sundays and a repeat of the previous week on Saturday nights. Maybe it will help you avoid your own Covid wall, or ease the stress of hitting one.
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