Your Chowder hounds have sniffed down the best culinary events in town. Check back every Thursday for your weekly prix-fixe of foodie festivals, cooking classes, wine tastings, and more.

Sept. 1-30
Imilchil Feast at Tangierino
In Morocco, the September harvest inspires young people to couple up. You can do the same at Charlestown’s Tangierino, but try to wait until the second course. All month, the restaurant is offering a four-course prix fixe dinner menu with dishes like wild salmon tagine, seven-vegetable couscous, and Moroccan desserts.

Sept. 1-30, dinner hours
Filet Mignon & Lobster for Two
Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar
Cheap date, huge payback. For $99 total, now through September 30, you and a guest can savor two six-ounce filets, two Australian lobster tails, two chopped wedge salads, Fleming’s potatoes, sugar snap peas, and two chocolate mousse desserts.

Sept. 5-30, 5-11 p.m.
Liberty Hotel Anniversary Celebration
Clink
Today marks the date that The Liberty Hotel first opened. To thank you for supporting the hotel, CLINK will be offering a special menu of $9 cocktails and $5 bar snacks like bacon and parmesan palmiers throughout the month of September.

Sept. 7, 5 p.m.
Eat Local Dinner
Tomasso Trattoria, Southborough
Enjoy a five-course dinner of locally and sustainably raised foods and organic/biodynamic wines. The meal will feature only locally sourced ingredients and will include a word from guest speakers Ilene Bezahler, publisher of Edible Boston Magazine, and Kim Marden of Captain Marden’s Seafoods.

Sept. 8, 5:30 p.m. (debate); Sept. 9, 7-9 p.m. (party)
Great Whisk(e)y Debate
Bedford Village Inn, Bedford, NH (debate)
Barley House, Concord, NH
The BedFord Village Inn will tackle the old whiskey debate with the help of whiskey professor Bernie Lubbers and scotch malt expert Simon Brooking. Guests will decide which whisk(e)y is best—bourbon or scotch, after tasting two small batch bourbons and two single malt scotch whiskies. A victory party will also be held the following evening from 7-9 p.m. at the Barley House.

Want more restaurant news? Sign up for our Table Talk newsletter.

The latest recipe collections from cooking-technique juggernaut America’s Test Kitchen—headed by Boston’s own Christopher Kimball—arrived in the mail with a thud this week. Heavy as my sad attempts at Christmas fruit bread but far more digestible, The Cook’s Country Cookbook and The America’s Test Kitchen Family Baking Book come packed with a collective 1,200 recipes guaranteed to keep spatula fiends busy for years.

Which may be alarming for those still working their way through any of the 50-odd books listed on the America’s Test Kitchen website: America’s Best Lost Recipes, Behind the Scenes with America’s Test Kitchen, Best of America’s Test Kitchen 2008, plus books devoted to casseroles, side dishes, American classics, Italian classics, restaurant favorites, and so on. For those who prefer taking a micro, rather than macro, approach, there’s How to Cook Chicken Breasts and How to Cook Simple Fruit Desserts. Read the rest of this entry »

I stopped by Craigie on Main—the future (bigger, fancier) Central Square home of Craigie Street Bistrot in the former La Groceria space—on my way to work this morning. Or, rather, I stopped by the work site that will become Craigie on Main in about seven weeks. Tony Maws was there, going over plans, and he gave me a quick tour.

If you’ve eaten at Craigie, you know how tiny that space is, and how subterranean. If you’ve ever seen the kitchen (my closet is bigger), you’ll understand why people talk about it in terms of lemons and lemonade. Nevertheless, I’ve always enjoyed Craigie’s coziness, and felt a twinge of nostalgic regret when I first heard about the move.

But having seen the new place, I’m counting down the weeks.

Read the rest of this entry »

We here at Chowder love great food of all kinds, from romantic dinners at L’Espalier to ribs at Redbones. And one of our favorite places to eat is at the fair.

Now that summer is unofficially over, the New England fair season gets started in earnest. (The Big E starts on September 12, and the Topsfield Fair kicks off October 3.) This weekend, I went to the Hopkinton State Fair in Contoocook, New Hampshire for a day of petting goats, watching oxen pulls, and eating things I’d never dare eat under normal circumstances.

After the jump, we review the fair foods you must try, and the ones you’d do well to avoid.

Read the rest of this entry »

Your Chowder hounds have sniffed down the best culinary events in town. Check back every Thursday for your weekly prix-fixe of foodie festivals, cooking classes, wine tastings, and more.

Aug. 29-31
Restaurant Week extended at Stix
Stix is offering Restaurant Week lunch prices for dinner, now through Sunday. For only $20.08, feast on a summer mesclun salad or gazpacho with a choice of “flash fried” salmon, chicken breast under a brick with cheddar mashed potatoes, or a flat iron steak with potato confit, braised greens, and chimichurri.

Aug. 29-Sept. 6
Aura Extends Restaurant Week for Two More Weeks
Aura is offering their prix fixe lunch and dinner menus through Sept. 6 for $20.08 (lunch) and $33.08 (dinner). The dinner menu includes three courses, with a first-course choice of an heirloom tomato salad, steak and peaches, or watermelon gazpacho; a second-course of grilled Kajiki, Australian lamb loin, or all-natural sirloin, and for dessert, an organic coffee parfait or braised cherry tart. Includes Saturdays!

For a list of other places that have extended RW, click here. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe it’s just a lingering patriotic buzz brought on by too much late-night Olympic and DNC coverage, but I’ve been prone to small stirrings of civic pride in visiting my new neighborhood mini-grocery—and a top-notch addition to the overall city food scene, by the way: City Feed and Supply, on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain.

With its cheery red, white, and blue trim and bounty of homegrown goods, this bigger, brighter sibling to the cult-favorite original (near the Stonybrook T) is fast establishing itself as a beacon for the hungry, the eco-conscious, the huddled vegans yearning to eat dairy-free. Read the rest of this entry »

When is it too soon to review a restaurant?

Understanding how unexpected kinks and snafus can muck up even the most well-planned restaurant opening, when should responsible media claim the soapbox and pronounce judgment?

There used to be a consensus: give a place two or three months, visit it a few times, and then write your review. But that was before the rise of food blogs and chat boards. Now, there’s such a rush to be first on the scene that I won’t be surprised to discover a Blackberry-toting neighbor liveblogging the next big opening party.

All of these questions came into focus yesterday as I contemplated an undercooked piece of pork at the new, reopened Marliave.

Read the rest of this entry »

When Chowder attends a tasting dinner, the liquid accompanying the food is typically a form of alcohol. We’ve done wine tastings, beer tastings, even tequila tastings, but last week we attended a coffee tasting dinner at Sauciety.

The event was held by Starbucks to herald the arrival of Clover, a new high-tech coffee machine, along with several small-batch varieties of coffee specially purchased for the device. We happily sipped on a cup of El Salvador Pacamara as a barista demonstrated how the Willy Wonka-esque machine works.

“This is highly caffeinated,” she explained. Since an evening cup of regular-strength coffee keeps us up well past our bedtime, we made our peace with the prospect of a restless night ahead.
Read the rest of this entry »

Clearly, there are certain comestibles for which Bostonians have a higher-than-average tolerance. There’s the obvious (lobster). The gimmicky (cupcakes). The artery-clogging (everything deep-fried).

As of this week, I’d like to add a whole category to that list: dessert. Read the rest of this entry »

Your Chowder hounds have sniffed down the best culinary events in town. Check back every Thursday for your weekly prix-fixe of foodie festivals, cooking classes, wine tastings, and more.

Aug. 23, 3-6 p.m.
Free Beer Mess!
The Wine Gallery
Sounds like our freshman year. We weren’t quite sure how to handle it. Hence, the mess. But now that we’re older and wiser, The Wine Gallery trusts us with more than 50 free beers to sample from multiple New England brewers. You have three hours to get your beak wet.

Read the rest of this entry »