Restaurant Review: Strip-T’s in Watertown
The casual lunch counter and bar at Strip-T’s.
Desserts were mostly plain, sweet, and uninteresting, like the proficient oversize homemade cookies ($1.50 each), brownies ($3), and an unpleasant mushroom-infused custard with butterscotch and chocolate ($8), an experiment in umami that failed. But I was crazy about one: the fried brioche doughnut, which changes seasonally. When I had it, it was iced with white-rhubarb-flavored meringue and filled with a beautifully colored pea-and-mint pastry cream ($8).
The main drawback of dining here is a big one—the noise. The painted beadboard, red laminate tables with cast-iron bases, linoleum floors, and bare walls with tasteful photographs are all hard, reflective surfaces that, in combination with the music, make it a challenge to hear your companions, let alone your server.
Then again, Maslow and his staff are performing to such a high level that it’s hard to know whether to wish them grander or more central quarters. There’s something both quirky and magical about finding them where they are. Go now, so you can say you helped put them on the map.
Other Menu Highlights
Chicken wings with Moxie sauce, $9
Seared pork-and-provolone sausage, $18
Wicked small caesar, $4
Strip-T’s, 93 School St., Watertown, 617-923-4330, stripts.com.
Critic Corby Kummer—an editor at The Atlantic and author of The Pleasures of Slow Food—has been reviewing Greater Boston’s top restaurants in our pages since 1997.
