Favorite places...

It’s rare to find a restaurant experience that is memorable or special enough where you want to keep coming back. Sure, we have our usual hangouts where the food is consistently good, the service is pleasant, the martinis are made perfectly etc. But the type of place I’m talking about is different. They are at the edges of the dining bell curve. They are the outliers. They are rare to find and difficult to replicate.

We all have these places. Usually it’s a place that is not terribly fancy and typically it’s a little shack or hole in the wall. Quite often they are places that are independently owned and operated. They are the grass roots of the restaurant industry without a trace of overbearing investors or corporate managers. The owners souls and personalities are felt everywhere. You can usually find them managing the front of the house or hidden in the kitchen. The food of course is excellent – usually classified as the ultimate in comfort food, with judicious amounts of garlic, butter and cream. Old school music like Earth Wind and Fire or Johnny Cash is blaring in the background for the benefit of the wait staff and kitchen crew to keep the adrenaline pumping. The place is sometimes BYOB or has a cheap but amazing list of wines. The wait staff is generally quirky. There is always an essential element of the dining experience that is missing, be it no dessert, no reservations, cash only, faulty air conditioning or kitschy tablecloths only the owner could love.
My own personal list includes places like Au Pied de Chochon in Montreal, Mamma Mia (a little shack in Pacific Beach CA), Django in Philly or Eeendracht and Proeff in Rotterdam. These are the places where I get my jollies (Yes, I am a full fledge nerd). Now, don't get me wrong, I love innovation and fussiness. I love going to the trendy places, the Michelin star rated restaurants, and even Las Vegas where I have a shopping mall of celebrity chefs ready to serve me at the whims of my bank account. The Ferran Adria's and Wylie Dufresne of the world have my vote because I get a thrill from trying pine nut foam with bruleed radicchio and a pesto ice cream. But at the end of the day, the places I crave are the Sweet Basils of the world.

Sweet Basil is a tiny Italian restaurant in Needham MA. I loved the place so much I begged the owner Dave for a job and spent several years working for him. Sweet Basil consisted of (before they expanded) a 6 burner stove, 10 tables and 20 or so chairs. Frequently, we would run out of chairs and have to run over to the Needham House of Pizza and the local ice cream store to borrow additional chairs to accommodate the 150 or so covers we would squeeze in on a weekend night. I spent most of my time in the front of the house as the hostess, answering the phone that NEVER stopped ringing, managing the 50 or so nightly takeout orders, opening BYO bottles of wine for those waiting for tables, dodging elbows, bootys and hot food while playing a crafty game of chess to house the hundreds of people that showed up at our door. I'm bragging, but the sheer volume relative to the staff and restaurant capacity was astounding. Someone should write a Harvard Business School case study on Sweet Basil's throughput. Hostessing, witnessing or cooking at this place was not an easy task. You must understand the complex emotional state I would feel on any given Friday or Saturday night when faced with the task of figuring out how to accommodate 4 - 2 tops, 3 4-tops, and 1 6-top (all of which have shuffled into the restaurant inquiring about a table within minutes of each other) in a reasonable time frame. And yes, you can't forget the 30 or so other people that have already been patiently waiting for their table. Two to three hour waits were not (and are still not) unusual. And trust me; it’s usually worth the wait.

The air at Sweet Basil is filled with olive oil and garlic, and occasionally billows of smoke from a dash of red pepper flakes thrown into a smoking hot pan of seafood fra diavlo (the kitchen is about 3 feet from the dining area). Without fail, at the end of every shift each strand of my hair and every pore of my skin reeked of garlic. Anyone that spent 2 minutes in the place would walk out smelling like a garlic salad. My late and beloved 1990 Toyota Camry was the pure essence of eau de garlic. My work clothes were beyond reproach. It was almost pointless to wash them as the smell of basil, parmesan, garlic and balsamic were impervious to any amount of industrial strength detergent. The pulsating beat of Stevie Wonder and Jamiroqui bounced back and forth on the aluminum decorative wall pieces which added to the decibel piercing noise the packed restaurant would have by 8pm every night. Considering my frenetic personality, I loved every minute of it. The customers loved it too despite the endless waits, drafty doors and the cash only policy.

I left the restaurant industry a while ago and now I must go to Sweet Basil as a customer and wait on line like the rest of the commoners. I gripe about the cramped location, loud music and the seemingly endless waits. But it’s really about the food right? My last time at the restaurant was perfect and imperfect in every way. My friends and I got ragingly tipsy while drinking cardamom scented martinis at the Indian restaurant down the street as we waited the 90 or so minutes for our table to be ready. After the 4 of us sat down to a table meant for 2 we devoured several plates of crusty bread, homemade garlicky pesto, sweet mussels, and extra crispy calamari. Our BYO bottles of Shiraz kept us warm (we sat next to the drafty door) while we ate Braised Lamb Osso Bucco, Linguine Bolognese and Rosemary Chicken out of chipped but colorful mismatched bowls. The lamb is the best braised meat I have ever tasted. A massive, meaty shank served over the creamiest polenta ever, roasted carrots, eggplant, zucchini, portabellas and lamb sauce. The meat is rich and tender and the braising sauce is thick and wonderfully gelatinous. The Bolognese dish rocks my world because the sauce has a touch of port wine and balsamic. The Rosemary Chicken is the ultimate in comfort food - a massive bowl of ziti tossed in a garlic parmesan cream sauce with roasted asparagus and sautéed chicken. The sauce is what makes this normally ubiquitous dish special as it has an almost smoky liquid peanut butter like quality. I have never been able to replicate it in my own kitchen.
Of course you still want to linger and have coffee and desert despite ingesting 3,000 calories in 60 minutes but sorry, Sweet Basil doesn’t serve it and that check that was politely but urgently placed on the table is the high sign to leave because they really needed the table 30 minutes ago, so you reach for your wallet and hope you brought enough cash so you don’t have to run to the ATM machine because they don’t take credit cards. You walk out (garlic scented of course) with a sense of contentment and that all is right in the world for a few minutes. That’s the type of place I’m talking about – quirky and unique but memorable and leaves you craving for more.