Thursday and then Friday Yesterday Willy was sick so I was moved into the driver position. First I drove to Harvard Square and delivered 80 cups of Tiramisu to Cambridge 1, my favorite very thin crust pizzeria and the one with the most romantic view of a burial ground. Then over to JFK Street to deliver ice cream to Wagamama. Everyone was listening to Latin music and when I asked if the music was Mexican the sous chef gave me a suspicious look but I was just curious about the country of origin should I run into Marco Wurman. Then I delivered pints to Formaggio South End. After another short drive I circled Quincy Market until I found a possible parking space. We make ice cream for all the Wagamama restaurants. Then I picked up my Dad and took him with me to deliver ice cream and ride through the cold city in a warm car. He had not enjoyed lunch and was very hungry for something good. The sudden temperatures had frozen the Charles to an even pewter color. We had to bring a lot of ice cream to Il Casale in Belmont Center. Dante Magheris owns Ristorante Dante in the Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge as well as Il Casale and recently opened Cucina Campagna in Lexington Center near our brother’s second Rancatore’s ice cream store. Dante himself was in the kitchen, casually dressed in a grey hooded sweatshirt and jlight jacket. I asked when Il Casale opened and he said if we were hungry we could eat at the bar. I thanked him and explained that my Dad was very hungry. Il Casale is famous for home-made pasta. A tall, handsome waiter suggested the tagliatelle Bolognese for my Dad, and the tomato and basil pasta for me. Then he suggested a wonderful wine which we split. My father sat happily on the banquette and looked immensely pleased with his situation. “It may be rainy and cold somewhere,” he said, “ but this is wonderful.” He talked about his mother’s cooking. She was able to cook American dishes as well as Italian food because she had worked outside the house. His father was also a good cook. The conversation wandered back to New York City when my father would make made-to-measure outfits for headwaiters at famous restaurants. They were difficult and demanding customers but the relationship facilitated getting tables. He explained how the headwaiters could make a great deal of additional income by selling jobs to waiters. If my father stayed overnight at a hotel he would eat breakfast in the kitchen with the cooks. We finished an early dinner by 430PM as the staff was eating family meal. I thanked Dante and the waiter, “Sometimes a meal is much more than just a meal.” Friday Friday was the opening of Whole Foods newest market, which might be described as being in in Bostons South End, but that can also prompt a discussion of neighborhood boundaries and names. Back in August, 2012, Chris Marshall wrote an article about the now-vanished New York Streets neighborhood. bostonglobe/ideas/2012/08/18/boston-vanished-new-york-streets/EVxSqBnv9ups9yO5Q6MhTP/story.html For some this store in in the South End and for others it is near Chinatown. Location theory in Boston is an ongoing debate. Until the opening of this new Whole Foods the biggest market in whatever neighborhood we are in was Mings Market. Mings is a personal favorite, part of the spillover of Chinatown across the Mass. Pike. Mings is full of immigrants who do not study at the Media Lab. One friend described Mings as being like a zoo with lots of live animals and fish, except you can kill them and take them home to eat. On one early Sunday morning I ran into Gordon Hamersley who was shopping for something that was by mainstream standards both unusual and inexpensive. Mings employees often seemed to be eating. Another friend thought that for workers the best thing about Mings was the opportunity to eat things difficult to obtain in America. That day I was fruitlessly searching the aisles looking for something when I decided to try my night school Chinese. I approached two women workers and said hello in Mandarin, a phrase that I still feel confident about occasionally saying correctly. Their eyes widened and they raced away. I continued to wander until I found a customer from MIT who agreed to translate for me. Together we eventually found banana ketchup. We never made an ice cream with that ingredient. Many people in this neighborhood seem intent on achieving food security by growing amazing quantities of amazing things in the beautiful community garden that runs along East Berkeley Street.. Whole Foods is part of a development built where The Boston Herald American and Boston Herald were published. George Kimball and Eliot Norton are gone from the precinct, replaced by magazines with cover stories about Whole Foods icon, Moby. We sell ice cream at many Whole Foods and visit any Whole Foods we come near. Like many multiple unit businesses they vary more than people would guess. And if you regularly shop at Whole Foods or sell ice cream to the company you acquire acquaintances who pop up in different locations, like high school classmates or people from a demonstration where many arrests were made. We sold pints to the Whole Foods in Portland, Maine. On my first delivery there I found a worker who I had seen daily at the small store on Prospect St. in Cambridge. At the 14th Street store in lower Manhattan I found a woman who had also worked in Cambridge and eaten a lot of ice cream at our store in Central Square. The woman who runs the Whole Kids Foundation first worked at Amys Ice Cream in Austin, Texas. The foundation works with primary schools to encourage gardening and good eating. While we were talking about Texas and the giant Whole Foods mothership at Sixth and Lamar we were interrupted by other familiar faces. The new development that includes the Whole Foods is known as the Ink Block and is part of a slow transformation of this Boston district that accelerated with the removal of the elevated Orange Line. The Pine Street Inn remains with its Italianate tower built for what was then the Fire Dept. headquarters. It is a replica not of Florences Palazzao Vecchio but of the Torre del Mangia in Siena. Which literally means The Tower of the Eater and refers to the bell ringer, who like the workers at Mings Market ate a lot. Today
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 19:28:33 +0000
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