Jessica "la flâneuse extraordinaire" A.'s Profile

Olecito is a tiny hole-in-the-wall that exists pretty much solely for takeout.

Everything I've ordered from there has been very good.  I really love their food selection.  I'm not as much of a fan of the authentic Mexican sodas mixed with Boylan's soda from a fountain as some, but I am keen on the menu itself.  The sandwiches and other suggested combinations are imaginative and quite good.  On the other hand, if you're in the mood for a plain quesadilla or a plain burrito, then they can totally do that, and quite well.

Beauty's is a bit anomalous in a world dominated by *other* kinds of delivery pizza.

The pizza is never too greasy.  The pizza has a delicious crust, but rarely too thick.  The toppings are quite good.  The pizza is baked to be close to perfection.  The whole wheat crust is to die for.  Back when I ate white flour, the other crusts weren't half bad, either.

I will concede to other reviewers that they make mistakes from time to time.  And yes, I've picked off the odd topping that made my pizza for some unknown, unknowable reason.  But, on the other hand, they're very responsive, and, in general, their view of customer service is phenomenal

The on-line ordering system is really just the icing.  For someone like me, who's partially deaf, it's definitely worth every second.  For others, it's simply a convenient way to click your way to dinner, and moreover, it's a dinner that's going to be a lot closer to what you wanted to order than telephoning the pizza place around the corner, where your order may be taken indifferently ... if indeed, your order is taken at all.

I've been here three separate times now, and I have to say, I don't get the appeal.

During the three times I've been there, I've gone through the following:
My eggs have been burnt, cooked another way than I asked, or half-raw.
Juice and drinks have come after we've called for the bill.
No matter what I say about what I want on the side, none of it appears after being asked.  What I get on the side varies from somewhat wrong (toast, but different kind of bread) to really wrong (potatoes when I asked for toast.)
The service is beyond surly, it's also sloppy.

I don't know what the deal is here.  It *is* very cheap, of course.  Every time I've gone, the breakfast counter has been filled.  So clearly it's got its clientele, and people must like it, or *I*'d be able to sit at the breakfast counter and see what it's like when I'm not relying on a waitress.  But I have little motivation to find out at this point.

McLean Hospital is a sort of an unspoken thing in Boston.  A lot of people go out here -- more than will admit, certainly -- and the staff is aware that they may be treating people who are prominent in the outside community.  (More on that in a moment.)

I like the place for several reasons.

1.  It's a teaching hospital.  It has a lot of programmes that are designed to teach residents how to be good doctors when they go out and hang out their shingle.  To some, that's a downside -- they don't want to be the focus of an educational experience.  To me, it's an upside -- I'm helping someone else learn how to treat patients with respect and dignity, letting them see that people that appear to have their act together can be falling apart and letting them do lots of relatively cutting-edge stuff in a way to try to help me.  It's also the *only* place I have found in greater Boston where the people I see are psychiatrists (M.D.s) *and* psychotherapists (Ph.D.s) -- if you have complex medical issues *and* complex psychological issues, the more prevalent model of a consultant psychiatrist seeing you every six weeks while you go through psychotherapy is a big, big, big problem.  Not an issue here.  It also means that doctors haven't completely settled yet, which I *love*.  I really don't like the model in the outside community where doctors read your file and have diagnosed you before you come in the door, and "all my other patients do well on this, so".  Experience is a great thing, don't get me wrong, but willingness to listen to an individual patient is particularly prevalent with the residents, who aren't completely settled as "this is the kind of patient I see".

2.  It's a research hospital.  This means that if there are things that need to be done to really figure out what's going on with you -- more common than some think -- they have the facilities and inclination to do it.  This could be anything from blood work to an EEG to a full battery of learning tests -- if you need it, they have staff that do it and do it a *lot*.  This means that if you need special testing done, the chances of being sent to some place in the remote department of one of the big Boston hospitals with a folder and waiting forever for your records is not happening, either.  This is also a huge plus.

3.  It's a treatment hospital that's used to all levels of treatment.  Two particularly bad medication interactions landed me in the hospital in two separate years.  Now, any time spent as a psychiatric in-patient sucks, completely.  But if you're already being treated there in their outpatient clinic, the person who's going to decide if you should be there or go home is the same person you've been levelling with every week, rather than a bureaucrat desperate to free up some beds or a Dr. Mengele type who suggests you just haven't gotten enough art therapy yet to go home.  Or whatever.  But, and they empathise this, unless you are a clear and present danger to yourself or others, you always have the ability to sign a 72-hour psychiatric release in which they either have to present evidence that you are not yet stable enough to be released into the community (e.g. you came in completely out of touch with reality and haven't stabilised on medication yet -- and the judges do not grant this lightly) or you can go home.  Now, to be fair, bank holidays and weekends don't count because they have three business days.  But three business days probably isn't going to be the worst thing for anyone.

What I said above about their awareness of people's prominence in the outside community came up when I asked for my laptop.  (Yes, when you're staying in the hospital, you're allowed to have your mobile and your laptop, no problem, as long as you use them during the appropriate times.  If you've ever stayed in a hospital for a medical reason, you get very used to having to wait for nurses to finish shift change and such to get things done, and it's no different.)  But my laptop had to be vetoed.  I asked why.  Because it had a camera in it.  They are very serious about ensuring that no patient shows up in photos taken in the hospital.  I can really understand and respect that, particularly for people who are in the hospital for a long period of time -- no one wants to have distant family members find out they were in a psychiatric hospital via YouTube.

On the whole, from an informal canvass of my friends who have been both outpatients and inpatients at various area psychiatric facilities, for everything from unmanaged acute mania to suicidal ideation to routine psychotherapy, my experience at McLean seems to have been the best on the whole by everyone's estimation.  And therefore, even though no one particularly *enjoys* psychiatric hospitals or being a patient at one, I think I should give it its due.

I ordered from Montien's take-away yesterday through GrubHub.

Either GrubHub didn't get through to Montien or Montien slipped, but the food took an hour and a half to make a 3-mile trip at 8 p.m.  Still, since I can't blame one or the other, I'm not going to blame either.

The sushi menu was extensive, and they had a sizeable selection of Chinese, Japanese and Thai food, which is a plus in its own way -- none are likely to be stunning, but between 3 East Asian cuisines, you're probably going to find at least one that pleases everyone in the group you're ordering for.

Presentation was strange, even for take-away sushi.  Some of the things I asked for as nigiri were simply presented without rice, but then some things I asked for as nigiri were nigiri, so I'm not sure what's up with that.

I ordered Japanese -- nigiri sake, nigiri ebi, and nigiri hamachi as an appetizer, chicken teriyaki as a dinner and finished with tamago.  Others in my household ordered Thai and Cantonese.

Their rice was definitely much stickier than I associate with sushi rice -- it's more in tune with Thai rice I've had before.  The sushi was definitely not something I'd go back for.  The teriyaki chicken was okay, but nothing to write home about either.  The tamago was extremely good.

The rest of us agreed that it wasn't great, but it wasn't terrible.  While it's convenient to place a large-ish order from one restaurant, for the price, it'd've made just as much sense to just order from three different restaurants and get a much better result.

I am in mourning.  They have announced that they will be closing in March "sometime", as they tried desperately -- and failed -- to find a buyer for the stores.

I keep praying for a miracle, like the one that saved Out-of-Town News.  I wait with bated breath.

Otherwise, I don't know where I'll go to get a tenth of the things I like, want and use in my daily life.

This is one of the most interesting food shops I've been into in Cambridge.  For one thing, most spice shops aren't paired up with an ice cream maker.

For another thing, it's nothing but wall-to-wall spices.  It's like walking into a souk stall at a bazaar.

Their spice selection is quite good but doesn't cover everything I'm looking for.  It does, however, cover most of what I'm looking for.  (And I mix my own herbal tisanes, so I can't fault them for not carrying a certain kind of leaf.)

They also carry Mem Tea at a much cheaper price than the ones offered at Cardullo's, which is the only other place I can find Mem Tea reliably.

The spices are incredibly inexpensive and presented organically -- which is not to say that they're guaranteed to be without additives and the like.  I mean, they come in the form they're meant to.  For instance, anise and allspice come in seed form, ginger comes in root form, mace is dried blades, & c.  This means that you may have to get out a mortar and pestle, but frankly, the extra freshness is worth it.

Besides teas and spices, they carry a wide variety of salts, a number of unusual extracts (not just vanilla -- black cherry!), dried hot-hot-hot peppers (habanero included), and some distillations of things like lavender oil.

Once you've been there, foodie or no, you'll never go back to buying McCormick's spices at Star Market.

Especially when you realise that you're paying less for the spice that you want, getting it fresher, and getting the right one.

When I moved to the area six years ago, I immediately sought out Wainwright Bank and Trust.

See, even before I was a Cantabrigian, I was a Cantabrigian, if you get what I mean.  I had always used local credit unions, was interested in socially progressive investing, things like that.  It's just how I rolled.  So Wainwright Bank was a natural choice for me because of their position on community issues.

Now, years later, I would give it five stars except for one thing.  And this could be big, or it could be nothing.  It has been acquired by Eastern Bank.  I don't know what that means for the autonomy of Wainwright Bank and how much they're going to be able to be socially progressive trailblazers any more.

Historically speaking -- I looked into their history in the 1980s --they were an élitist organisation anyway, and then re-positioned themselves as social go-getters, and I have no problem with that -- lots of places need to find their niche in the market.  However, Eastern Bank is huge, and I'm not sure how well Wainwright company culture will survive.

Back to Wainwright.  The tellers know me by name.  I've given my name occasionally, of course, but they know me by name and I'm there maybe once a month.  Customer service representatives help with *everything*.

At one point, I had my debit card number stolen for a few transactions in Florida.  They caught it even before I did and they took care of it promptly.

At another point, my husband was working a contract for a bank in Australia.  I'd looked up their SWIFT code and went from that, but the central headquarters explained that they had been assigned the SWIFT code from the Fed (or some such, I wasn't really clear on that) and they gave me twenty minutes worth of detailed instructions so that I could be absolutely sure the money would be deposited promptly and correctly.

Everyone is always relatively cheerful, at least by Central Square standards.  The tellers know what they're doing and I've never stumped them.  They're not bright and chipper but they are smart and they're wary -- characteristics I *like* in a bank.  I'd rather have someone be able to point out an irregularity on a cheque and ask me about it than to be brainlessly chipper about the entire thing.

I am pretty damn sure that there is no way anyone ever gets anything over on those tellers, and I *like* that, I like it a *lot*.  A business that's handling my money should be friendly and polite, and they are, but they're also wary and conscientious, and frankly, I value that even more.

I am going to go to the five stars for now, actually.  We'll see if the Eastern Bank acquisition affects what they do and how they do it.

This shop is amazing and always has been.

Picture the produce at a farmer's market, the plants available at a top-notch garden centre, the meats available at a specialty deli, the cheeses available at a top-notch cheesemonger, and special touches like in-store made breads, cheeses, pickles and pasta.

Then take the prices you were envisioning and cut them by 2/3.

That's how good it is.

I had an interesting time today with my first experience of Douzo.

Showing up with two children is never a good sign from the restauranteur's point of view, not that I blame them.  But they were very kind.

My elder daughter is 12 and perfectly capable of using chopsticks.  My younger one, at 9, doesn't quite have it.  They dug around in the back room until they could find an odd plastic harness-type thing that acts as a "chopstick trainer".  I wish *I*'d had one when I was first figuring them out.

I asked to be seated at the sushi bar, as the restaurant was nearly empty, and they were happy to oblige, and my daughters enjoyed watching the process.

I had no problem getting service whenever I needed it and the waitstaff made helpful suggestions on the combos.  The prices were reasonable, as well.

The only mistake I made was getting off at Copley instead of Back Bay.