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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Winter Mélange of Beets and Mushrooms

Chocolate truffles.  Cheesy croque-monsieurs.  Buttery mashed potatoes.  Macaroni and cheese (for two meals in one day).  Okay, so my holiday diet hasn't been what you might call stellar.  But didn't I read somewhere that laughing burns calories?  Boy do I hope that's true, because it might help even things out.  This holiday was big―as in, Brady-Bunch-style big, Times-Square-style big, opening-ceremonies-of-the-Olympics-style big―and very boisterous.  Five days, four generations, three rowdy brothers, two barking dogs, and one green pine tree dressed up in its finest.

Of course there was cooking, two days of it: butternut squash soup, cornish hens in a balsamic glaze, broccolini with garlic and lemon, prime rib au jus, and those aforementioned mashed potatoes, which turned into a very amusing group effort and resulted in one bent potato masher.  But I don't want to talk about any of that; I'd rather tell you about something earthy and wholesome, like this dish, which is the kind of simple fare I go for when everything else seems too rich.

Jimmy's Bar and Oven: Pizza from the Oven, and More

Let's talk about pizza for a bit—that indispensable element at slumber parties, college cram sessions, and weekday office lunches.  Thin-crust, deep-dish, wood-fired, extra cheese; you name it, you can find it.  One might find a hundred different pizzas on one city block, but all of us keep a mental note of our favorite topping combinations (mine is sausage with black olives and mushrooms) to fall back on, ready to roll off the tongue when the swarthy, stubble-cheeked pizza guy frowns at us for taking too long to order.

Though Boston might not have the pizza definitude of, say, New York, or Chicago, we know what we like, and we have some dang fine pies to our name.  Which brings me to Jimmy's Bar and Oven on Beacon Street, where the 'oven' in the restaurant's name is a Wood Stone model, churning out pizzas from a fire that burns close to a thousand degrees Farenheit.  The benefit of that heat appears in the crust: a high baking temperature produces a crispier crust and more even cooking.  Jimmy's crust is substantial enough to hold all the toppings, but not so thick that it overshadows the toppings.  And, it's crispy all the way through—a rarity, even among some of the best pizza makers.
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