Leftovers: Testing the enduring appeal of some of Boston’s old-school dining favorites
Photos by Mitch Weiss
Ever been out to dinner and asked yourself, “Damn, is this the hottest
restaurant in town right now?” The signs are obvious. Weekend
prime-time reservations are like gold. The bar is four-deep with
walk-ins waiting an hour-plus for a table. There’s excitement in the
air, in your glass, on the plate. You spot a local celebrity or two.
You can’t wait to tell your friends how amazing it is. You’re at an “It
Place” all right.
Of course, seasoned observers know It Places
don’t stay that way for long. Most have their moment in the sun and
quickly fade. The crowd that makes it their obsessive business to
patronize only the freshest of the fresh has a short attention span —
after a few months, it grows bored and moves on, anointing another
darling du jour. Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chips wrapper.
Boston’s
restaurant landscape is pocked with craters from meteoric stars that
flared briefly before crashing to earth — like Excelsior, a former Back
Bay hotspot that abruptly shut down last month. The current economic
freefall is partly to blame: many high-end restaurants are struggling
to survive the drastic shrinkage in business entertaining.
So
how is it that certain former It Places — restaurants whose bright,
shining moments passed years before Excelsior’s — manage to survive
despite the imploding economy? Trend-conscious locals may dismiss them
with a “pfah, that place started sliding 10 years ago” or “oh, I guess
we loved it as kids when our grandparents took us there.” But they’re
still packing in the customers. One theory is that today’s patrons of
faded It Places are naïfs who’ve been sold a bill of goods: clueless
tourists following their hotel-room dining guides or business travelers
steered by graft-collecting concierges.
But what if the
conventional wisdom is wrong? Could these superannuated superstars
still have something worthwhile to offer? How fun would it be to
convince your food-snob friend that a restaurant she derides as a passé
tourist trap is in fact a hidden gem? I decided to test this contrarian
idea by revisiting a few restaurants that are still popular, despite
not having been “hot” since at least the arrival of PlayStation 2.
>>Continue Reading: LEFTOVERS: Boston's Old-School Dining Faves>>
