Cheap eats
Charlie’s Kitchen, Quincy DHall, Cambridge Snow
Listen up, young Padawans: if you want free food, you gotta have game. And by game, I mean some really clever A-game up your Juicy Couture sleeve. There are a couple of ways, but I’ll reveal one way to get meals for next to nothing (and it doesn’t even involve standing on a street corner).
Check out Restaurant.com, where you can buy gift certificates to places for less than face value, plus usually a bunch of minimum purchase strings attached. Still, it saves you a good amount.
That’s how I ended up at this Harvard Square institution known as Charlie’s Kitchen – known for their burgers and ungodly combinations of seafood slathered in oozing cheese. Anyway, here are some pics, plus a few extra on my camera for good measure.
By the way, I am GOING TO ICELAND next week! I am looking forward to eating hakarl, their national dish of rotten shark. And puffin.
Oh dedicated readers of my blog, I promise you pictures of the aurora borealis (hopefully), geothermal springs, and whatever culinary adventures I go on. I hope I will not become extremely depressed from the 2 hours of sunlight a day.
And the reportedly ammonia aftertaste of rotten shark.
Be-tee-dubs, I edited the Iceland chapter of Let’s Go: Europe 2009, so it will be hilarious finally pronouncing those crazy Icelandic names to Icelandic people and having them laugh at me. Cross cultural exchanges!
Charlie's Kitchen, sort of like a divier version of your traditional neighborhood diner. They play too-loud indie rock music and the condiments come in a cardboard six pack container on each table, which looks, at first and second glance, a lot like they left a pile of trash and forgot to clean it up. Would be an attractive option if inebriated, or want to skip the pseudo-good-for-you-ness of B.Good and just want an unapologetically greasy plate of food.
Charlie's Kitchen: I thought I had ordered a platter of cheesy lobster goodness, but it turned out to be a more mild lobster salad stuffed with shredded iceberg into hot dog rolls, served up with decent fries. Not too much flavor to be found here, but hey, it's free lobster...?
Charlie's Kitchen: A Guinness-soaked double cheeseburger for my devoutly sober, Catholic friend. "It gives it an interesting taste," he said. I couldn't really detect much of a difference, and definitely no beer flavor, although I only had a tiny bite and made off with a bunch of his french fries.
Charlie's Kitchen: A salmon salad, fish a bit overcooked, mostly to assuage my guilt about sharing a lobster roll with my friend. Look, green things!
I love Crema Cafe's quiche... a light-as-air leek quiche, with creamy bits of goat cheese embedded.
An unfortunate thing that I witnessed being eaten. That's onion dip on wonderbread.
Snoow!
Walking out of Mather House.
A Culinary Day in Flushing, Some Political Protestors, and my Hairdresser
There’s always something intensely comforting about Flushing, Queens to me – how I have been going there regularly for a decade, and how so many things never change. I always get my hair cut by the same man at a salon called “San Mei” (3 Beauties) and the price of a haircut ($8) has never gone up.
The food here is great and ridiculously cheap. As long as you get past the fact you’re eating with a plastic fork, or standing on the street with political protestors next to you, or how there’s no service to speak of, it’s an amazing deal.
Click on the photo of an explanation of what I ate.
