A Brief and Delicious Trip to Boston: Part Two

Continued from Part One...

After waddling home from the North End to refrigerate our leftover pastas, we refreshed and re-grouped and hopped a bus to Cambridge to take in the scene around Harvard Square.  After a brief and dimly lit tour of the Harvard Yard (fertilized with compost tea!), we ducked into Grendel's Den. Despite the thick smell of drawn butter and celery salt, we immediately knew we were in Cambridge by the following warning printed both over the bar and on the menu:

"No Bud. No Coors. No Bud Lite, No Coors Lite. No Miller. No Michelob. BASTA!"

Beer snobbery is snobbery I can support. (Basta is Spanish for "Enough!").  We didn't get food - we were still plenty full of squid and other kinds of seafood - but we had several rounds of beer and cocktails, including my first-ever Pimm's Cup (refreshing and not too sweet), and Zach's new obsession with French martinis (I will reserve the girly drink jokes).  The scene was pretty laid back, but we had a great server and a good time before cabbing it back to Back Bay.

The next morning we awoke, somewhat slowly, but with great purpose - for it was our day to eat a whole lobster by the sea.  When planning this visit, Zach and I had wanted one thing and one thing only, and that was fresh lobster in the shell. Leah, a veritable encyclopedia of useful knowledge, knew exactly where to take us for the cheapest and arguably the freshest lobster in Massachusetts: the Roy Moore Lobster Company in Rockport. 

Rockport - or rather, the area we were visiting, strangely called Bearskin Neck - is a quintessential New England coastal town, filled with seafood places, pastel B&Bs, American flags, and ice cream.  Roy Moore has two locations on this spit of idyllic Americana, but the one to check out is the tiny, blink-and-you'll-miss-it shack where they sell fresh fish, clams, scallops, and the lobsters. When we arrived, a guy was filleting a freshly-caught tuna on the fish cooler, and sunburned teenagers were hauling in a tub of live lobsters to add to the tank.  Roy's is primarily a fish market, but they have a few prepared and refrigerated options like stuffed clams that they'll warm up (in the microwave over the fish cooler) while you wait, as well as piping hot clam chowder.  Zach ordered both. 

And then there's the lobster.  Boiled in seawater right behind the register, we ordered 3 half-poundish lobsters for $36.  That's right, $12 a piece for a whole, fresh lobster and drawn butter, and very-necessary Wet Wipe.  To dine, you're amiably waved out the back door, to improvised tables and benches made of wooden lobster traps (or maybe faux-lobster traps, they seemed a bit like props) on the deck. 

This was Zach's first lobster-in-shell experience, so Leah gave him step by step instructions, made easier by the friendly lobstermen inside who had cracked the shells before serving us.  The lobster meat was delicious, salty from the seawater and incredibly sweet--some lobster might be an elaborate vehicle for butter, but this was juicy and rich enough to eat plain.  Couple that with a view of the very water from whence your lunch came, and the boats who brought it in, and that's one hell of a satisfying meal.

We didn't have a lot of extra time before making the drive back to South Station to catch our bus, but we did take a stroll through the rest of the "neck," fulfilling our weekend-long craving for root beer floats, and buying a pound of super-fresh saltwater taffy from Tuck's--the only shop in town that we saw where you watch the taffy being made.  On our way back to the car, we ran down a tiny little beach to dip in our toes in the water (still frigid, even in August), and then packed it up to go back home.  A more satisfying summer weekend will be hard to find.


Grendel's Den photo courtesy About.com:Boston.