Learning Strategies

The day before yesterday, it was getting to be too late to cook dinner after I picked up Barbara in Watertown...and we would have had to defrost something anyway, or go grocery shopping on the way home...which would have made it even later... Anyway, this was a good excuse to try the new restaurant called South, which was right on our way on Dorchester Street.

You might think that a restaurant called “South” serves southern cuisine, but you would be wrong. Or you might think that it’s in South Boston, and in that case you would be right. But to make full sense of the name, you have to understand the truly ambitious plans of their parent organization, the Trinity Restaurant Group. Along with South, they are about to open North (in the North End, of course), East (in East Boston), and of course West. I don’t remember where West is going to be. West Roxbury? West End? I just we’ll just have to wait to find out.

Unfortunately the pattern is broken by Ocean, a seafood restaurant in Southie that will open before West. It’s always crushing for us math people when we think we’ve detected a simple and convincing pattern and then find a counterexample. Sigh.

Anyway, I am delighted to report that Barbara and I had an excellent experience at South, and we highly recommend it (even though that might be premature after only a single visit). On arriving there, we encountered a good omen: a parking space on the street right in front! For Southie, that’s pretty remarkable. Our good luck continued to hold. We had two different salads, both of which were pristinely fresh, crisp, lightly dressed, and beautifully arrayed. Barbara had a huge ribeye and I had the prime rib, each of which easily provided a second meal’s worth of leftovers. More important, both were flavorful, tender, and cooked exactly as ordered. Vegetables and potatoes were varied and also cooked just right. We had no room for dessert, of course, but I can vouch for the espresso. The wine list contained a lot of good choices; it was pricey, like almost every other wine list, but not unreasonably so. Finally, the service was consistently attentive — a bit too far on the friendly side of the friendly/professional line, but maybe that says less about the waiter than it says about me. Try it out yourself!

Labels: food