Craigie on Main

One of the restaurants my cousin suggested that we eat at was Craigie on Main in Cambridge up in Boston. It's near MIT and Harvard and was very excited by the lovely pig on their website. I was also immediately seduced by the word "seasonal". Eat seasonally and you cannot go wrong. I think the last frontier of vegetable for me was peas. I'd sort of eat around them when I had fried rice and it was only this year when I started eating sugar snap peas raw because they were so good because they were so fresh.



So this is the first thing you see when you come in to the restaurant. The kitchen is all out in the open, right smack in front of you when you come in the door. Sorry for the unacceptable iphone documentation! It's a very civilized kitchen and I wished we sat at the bar (overlooking the kitchen)



The menu at this restaurant isn't finalized until 5pm on the day itself, so it changes depending what gets in fresh. I was most impressed by their "EAT LOCAL!" page at the back of the menu, detailing where they've sourced their products from. They also had a really large range on their menu. You could pick the prix fixe (amuse bouche, pick your own appetizer, main and dessert with dessert wine), the surprise tasting menu (6-10 courses, you pick how many you want to eat), the neighborhood special (appetizer, main, chef's special dessert pick), or regular ala carte. What was surprising and delightful was that the food in each of the categories were completely different.




This is joining my signature blackberry fizzy drink as a summer treat. It's fresh blueberries, lavender, lemon juice, club soda and apple cider.




This was a salad with mesclun and endives on a generous slabs of heirloom tomatoes, topped with fried onions. slurp.




The main was a bluefish, a really fishy but tasty fish on a bed of potato, spinach and bacon something with some yummy sauce.




My cousin ordered a side of MARROW, which tastes like meat butter. It is quite delicious.






This was my dessert, an olive oil and chocolate mousse (!) with candied walnuts and what looks like a chocolate rainbow. My cousin had a peanut butter parfait sandwiched between some sort of flat candied wafer topped with banana foam. I wonder if Elvis would've approved. One of my biggest food peeves is foam. I hate foam. It is like eating soap and looks like seafoam which is NOT attractive. Even the word foam isn't attractive. Why would you want to eat it and be "foaming at the mouth"? This foam however, looked more like a mousse, really dense whipped cream. It was pretty substantial, but when you put it in your mouth it disappeared completely. Immediately. And you were left with nothing but a very assertive flavor of banana.

Hands down this is one of the best restaurants I've been to in America, which is a bold statement. I love it when restaurants get their customers to be interested in what they eat and their servers have a real excitement for the food and know what they're talking about. I also loved the enormous and beautiful wall sized map of France at the back, together with a whole bunch of information on farms, local stuff and general goodness. It seems like it would be out of place for a fancy restaurant, but this is not the stuffy type of fancy, just the really good type.