Athan's Bakery: Colorful Cakes for your Springtime Table

Just inside the door of Athan's European Bakery in Washington Square is a brilliant carnivale of color.  Sunlight fractures through dozens of pastel cellophane bags, filled with springtime goodies.  A freezer case full of gelato reminds me of a painter's palate, from its bright, glistening purple blackcurrant and the deep mauve of raspberry, to rich browns and beiges with undertones of cocoa or nuts.  From the shelves beckon little chocolate pyramids and hearts and bars wrapped in fine gold foil.  The urge to run around touching everything, to plunge my hands into the bins of cookies like a kid in a toy store, hits me hard.
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Osaka Japanese Sushi and Steakhouse: Hibachi-Style Grill, at its Finest

It's eight-thirty on a Saturday evening, and the baseline of noise is high in Osaka Japanese Sushi and Steakhouse. Cheers erupt from the corner as one surprisingly sober diner catches a bite of grilled chicken in his mouth, slung across the grill by a chortling chef; from the next table comes a gasp of delight as four-foot high flames swoosh off of the grill.

Meanwhile, across the dining room, a chef armed with a squirt bottle squeezes a thin arc of sake into the mouth of one grinning diner. Diners at the table take up the fist-pounding count of "One! Two! Three!" until, somewhere around "Eighteen!" the drinker begs off, wiping a wet dribble of sake from the corner of his mouth.
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Corrib Pub: Simple Food, Among Friends

In some ways, the Corrib Pub is the most old-fashioned place I've been to in a long while, a throwback to the type of bar where—please excuse me for this—everybody knows your name.  

Here is a place where simple drinks are simply poured.  You won't find a frou-frou specialty drink menu; there's no pomegranate syrup or chocolate shavings.  What you will find, however, is an incredibly fresh and effervescent Guinness, or Harp, or Bass from the tap, perfect black & tans, and solid mixed drinks.

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Golden Temple: Dinner for the Lunar New Year

For many observing last week's Lunar New Year, the perfect way to ring in the year of the water dragon is with an enticing feast of Chinese food.  And Golden Temple feels like an inviting place to celebrate.

This is sort of a restaurant-cum-nightclub, one half resembling cruise-ship style opulence—perfect for the sixty-and-up crowd—and the other half a bar under a high ceiling that, architecturally at least, makes me think of dining inside a beehive.  The crowd is a mix of teenyboppers and middle-aged folks lingering over their happy hour drinks, ordering everything from margaritas to sake to precisely-mixed drinks with names like the Raspberry Retropolitan and the Suffering Bastard.

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Dok Bua: Thai food, from the exemplary to the fickle

I'll admit it: I'm confused.

Dok Bua Thai Kitchen, nestled in on Harvard Street, has the feel of a roadside Thai joint—plain wooden tables and chairs, with the kitchen enclosed in a wooden hut.  It’s one of those much-lauded local favorites, proclaimed a "hidden jewel" with great value, and the 2011 Best of Boston winner for best Thai restaurant.  

If you're familiar with good Thai food, you'll know that it balances four core flavors: salty, sour, sweet, and spicy. This balancing act is key to the complexity in such famous Thai dishes as, say, a bowl of Tom Yum soup, or Som Tum, that remarkable papaya salad, crunchy and soft and sweet and spicy all at once.

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butternut squash ravioli with brown butter sage sauce

I know that everyone pounces upon butternut squash when they first arrive, in September or so, great bins of them in the markets reminding me of giant bins of apricot-colored legos.  But for me, this is the time for real butternut squash-ing.  January is the time when I want my oven on, sometimes for the whole day, filling the kitchen with precious heat and with the weighty aromas of a dinner that will warm my bones.

Jerusalem Pita: Where Eggplant Steals the Show

As a rule, I’m not given to superlatives—with the written word, it’s too easy to fall into a hole I can’t climb out of.  But folks, the truth is that I’ve found the best eggplant dish in Brookline.  

It’s at Jerusalem Pita, just off of Coolidge Corner, selected at random from a menu endearingly full of spelling errors.  The Eggplant Rolls are somewhat doleful-looking bits of cold eggplant, perhaps inviting a bit of ‘order remorse’ when you see them on the plate, weeping olive oil and spooned over with a green relish of raw garlic, parsley, dill (the dill most of all, that marvelous, underappreciated herb).  But take one bite of this little appetizer and you’ll rhapsodize for hours about these long-marinated, ultra-tender morsels, about their perfect blend of garlic and seasonings, about the keen, zesty taste of the dill and parsley.

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