Cambridge and Boston: more travel photos

Today is my last full day in Boston/Cambridge, and tomorrow evening I’ll be back in Chicago.

The other day my friends Andrew and Naomi took me to Oliveiros’s a Brazilian steakhouse in Somerville. If you haven’t been to one, they all work the same way. There’s a big salad bar with stuff you largely want to avoid so you can eat more meat, and then the servers bring skewers of freshly-cooked meats to your table, and you indicate which ones you want. It’s mostly beef (sirloin, flank steak, etc.), but also lamb and sausages. They slice a long, thin piece from the skewer and you grab it with your tongs. This can go on forever, or until you’re sated.  If you like meat, it’s a great experience, assuming you pick the right steakhouse—like this one.

Below: a famous pre-drink cocktail, the Brazililian caipirinha. It’s delicious, and here’s Wikipedia’s take:

Caipirinha (Portuguese pronunciation: [kajpiˈɾĩɲɐ]) is a Brazilian cocktail made with cachaça, sugar, lime, and ice.  The drink is prepared by mixing the fruit and the sugar together, then adding the liquor. Known and consumed nationally and internationally, caipirinha is one of the most famous components of Brazilian cuisine, being the most popular national recipe worldwide and often considered the best drink in the country^[3] and one of the best cocktails/drinks in the world, having reached third place in 2024, according to the specialized website TasteAtlas.

Cachaça is distilled sugarcane liquor. It differs from rum by being made from freshly squeezed juice of sugarcane, while rum is made from fermented molasses. Cachaça also is not aged as long as is rum.

Doesn’t this look good? It was.

The buffet (aka “salad bar”). In the second photo, my friend Andrew is trying to rile me up by taking all the platanos, or fried ripe plantains. We both agree that that is the only item you should get at the salad bar (I also got a bit of potato salad).  I can eat many, many fried plantains.

Andrew trying to deprive me of platanos. Look at that evil expression!

Where’s the beef?  Here it is, and skewers of various meats keep coming:

A visit to Dorchester the next day, where my hosts Tim and Betsy used to live. (We all lived together on Beacon Street in Boston for my first two years in graduate school, inhabiting the tiny basement of the man who founded the New Balance Shoe company. I then moved to Cambridge and Tim and Betsy to Dorchester.)

Tim needed a pastry cutter to make real Southern biscuits, and we found a lovely, crowded kitchen store in Dorchester. It also sold cat clocks. I used to have one of these, black and looking like Felix the Cat. The tails wag back and forth with the seconds:

Lunch at the Steel and Rye Restaurant in Milton, right across the small Neponset river from Dorchester (Dorchester is formally part of Boston, while Milton is its own town). I had the Italian sandwich: “coppa, salami, mortadella, provolone, shredded lettuce, chili vinaigrette, ciabatta.” Quite tasty.

The restaurant was right by the Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District, The old factory buildings remain, especially the one where they made the famous Baker’s Chocolate. They’re now apartment or office buildings, but are still lovely. The area as described in Wikipedia:

The Dorchester-Milton Lower Mills Industrial District is a historic district on both sides of the Neponset River in the Dorchester area of Boston and in the town of Milton, Massachusetts. It encompasses an industrial factory complex, most of which was historically associated with the Walter Baker & Company, the first major maker of chocolate products in the United States. The industrial buildings of the district were built between about 1868 and 1947. They were listed as part of the district on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, with a slight enlargement in 2001. The buildings have been adapted for mixed industrial/retail/residential use.

Here’s one pair of buildings from 1905 with a nice metal bridge connecting the parts:

Back in Cambridge, you see this sign towering over Porter Square. I’ve not seen the likes of it before. It’s not far from Harvard.

My big doings yesterday consisted of going to the Japanese restaurant Yume Wo Katare in Porter Square. Although the link says “This is not a ramen shop,” it certainly is. (It’s the equivalent to Magritte’s “This is not a pipe.”) In fact, the only thing they serve is ramen.  You get a very large bowl in a delicious, rich, porky and garlicky broth with bean sprouts and pieces of pork (choose two or five big pieces). Your only other choice is whether you want extra garlic (you don’t need it; the broth is plenty garlicky) or a more spicy broth.  It’s delicious, with plenty of hand-pulled noodles and big pieces of juicy pork.  But the restaurant is also known for something else (see below, noting the “dream workshop” on the window):

The inside. I was heartened by the almost exclusively Japanese clientele, which testified to the quality of the ramen. There are no tables—only benches.

Below: my bowl. It was HUGE (I chose the five pieces of pork). I was able to finish everything except a cup or two of broth, but my stomach was absolutely distended: full of noodles sloshing around in broth. I had to take the bus home though it was only a 20-minute walk, simply because I was too full to walk. Needless to say, I had no dinner.

Each customer gets judge by the staff when they’ve finished, rated on how much food is left. I got a “good job!”, but I think everybody gets that.

My giant portion. This was the first time in my life I did not completely empty a bowl of ramen. But I ate all the solids!

The aspect of this restaurant that has made it especially well known is that customers are asked at some point in their meal to tell everyone in the restaurant their Big Dream. (They ask you if you want to recite one when you enter, and if you do they put a placard saying “Dreamer” at your place. ) Three people recited their dreams during my lunch: one woman wanted to visit all of America’s National Parks (there are 63), and a guy said his dream was to participate in an Ironman Triathlon, which includes a full marathon, a 2.4-mile swim, and a 112-mile bike ride. I can’t remember the other dream.

When they asked me as I entered the restaurant if I wanted to recite a dream, I said I was too old to have dreams, but of course that was not true. I still have them, but I am too shy to recite them.

Later today: a visit to Christina’s Homemade Ice Cream in Cambridge, the best place to get ice cream in America.