Good Friends, Loose Lips, Tall Ships, and Attitude

Erin and Jon, our good friends from Alabama, St. Louis, and now Alabama again were in town last weekend. They brought do rags for us and a lady bug do rag for Phoebe, which she was ecstatic about.

We first took them to the Barking Crab, a restaurant we'd seen on the TV show Man vs. Food. I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the food sucked at a place we heard about on a program where the point is to conquer the food rather than enjoy it, but it was an overpriced tourist trap featuring eight dollar "bowls" of clam chowder containing exactly two clams, soggy crab cakes, fish and chips where all the breading falls off after the first bite, bland fried shrimp, decent fried scallops and calamari and chips, and sticky communal picnic tables. Neither man nor food won this contest, one got grease induced gut rot and the other got unceremoniously turned into excrement. Liz did yell at some bratty kid with inattentive parents for sticking his grubby little brat hands in the communal silverware bucket. Tres Bostony.

The weekend picked up from there since it almost had to. We looked at some Tall Ships and then hit the North End for some Italian dessert and coffee, then took them to the oldest continually operating pub in North America. It's called the Bell in Hand and it's not all that cool. More of a "so you can say you did" type of thing. Then we went home and were in bed by, oh, let's just say 10:45.

The next day we forced them to walk part of the freedom trail, just so they could say they did. We're very particular about people actually doing the things they say they did. Then we went to a place called Eastern Standard near Fenway where we had awesome oysters, probably the best salad I've ever had (poached egg and lardons over frisee) and a tongue sandwich. A cow's tongue, not my own tongue disguised with a bun and mustard like in cartoons. After that, we saw the Red Sox play the Royals.

The Sox won one to nothing, which makes for a pretty boring game when you don't have a horse or a Twin in the race, Big Poppi notwithstanding. Then we came home and allowed ourselves to stay up until, oh let's say 11:30.

Saturday we decided leaving the house was a horrible idea so we had an all day tasting menu. We started with Liz's famous buttermilk waffles, moved on to watermelon, goat cheese, arugula, and sesame salads, then fried manchego pucks with spicy honey, then scallop and tuna ceviche, and finally venison gorganzola juicy lucy sliders. Liz, who is currently sitting behind me studying vocab for the GRE, says it was ambrosial and metamorphosed our appetence into satiation.

Then we put on do rags and hung out with the neighbors until, oh probably about midnight. We were feeling saucy. Sunday, we ate some lobsters and put them on a plane back to AL. Pretty nice weekend, all things considered.