Steampunk Fashion: boston

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We Bostonians love our chowdah. (IN AH TROUSAHS!) Clam chowder is Boston’s most famous regional dish, and you can find dozens of varieties throughout the Boston area.

Traditional New England clam chowder is white (never red!) with huge chunks of clams, potatoes and onions in a milk-based broth flavored with bacon and sherry. But chowders within vary widely, from consistency of the broth to unusual ingredients added.

So, where do you find the best clam chowder in Boston? Legal Sea Foods .

Legal Sea Foods is a Boston landmark, and their chowder is as classic as it gets — a perfect balance of all the aforementioned ingredients, thick, creamy and delicious. (Oh, and don’t try their reduced calorie version. That’s an insult.) If you ever visit Boston, you must drop by Legal’s for a cup of chowder!

Every year around the Fourth of July, Boston puts on Harborfest , a week of festivals around the city. One of the events is Chowderfest — or Chowdafest — where different restaurants compete to win the title of best clam chowder in Boston. (Of course, since only a handful of restaurants compete each year, the survey is far from accurate!)

Believe me, nothing says summer in Boston like drinking hot soup on a 98-degree day! Back in 2003, it was so hot that we actually ate our chowder while walking through the misting tent.

For $10, you can enter and sample as many chowders as you’d like. They get served in tiny cups.

Below are my thoughts on each competing chowder. Each can be summed up in one word:

Mr. Dooley’s Boston Tavern : Bacon. This was the closest to classic clam chowder, and it was made with Irish bacon.

Yankee Lobster Fish Market : Smoke. Very smoky flavor to this chowder. To remember that, I imagined Yankee Stadium on fire.

Anthem Kitchen & Bar : Cream. Like drinking a carton of heavy cream. One girl actually asked me if I had any Lactaid on me!

Fish Pier Restaurant and Market : Onions. Tons of onions in this chowder — interesting flavor.

Oceana at the Marriott Long Wharf : Vegetables. This chowder had quite a bit of peas and carrots mixed in.

Farmer Brown’s : Potatoes. I love potatoes, but these tasted almost raw. They had skins, too, which is unusual.

Parker’s Restaurant, Omni Parker House Hotel : Sherry. This chowder was boozing it up, big time!

Also exhibiting, though not competing (as they’ve won too many times) was the Chart House, with a wonderful, complex chowder filled with so many flavors!

While most of the competing chowders were delicious, none of them could compare to Legal’s. I voted for Mr. Dooley’s by default, since I’m a purist.

Turns out that Anthem won — and I was shocked! It tasted like they took million-calorie, butter-stuffed vanilla ice cream, melted it down, added a few clams and no potatoes, and threw it in a crock-pot. Not good at all.

No wonder this country’s so obese.

I’m telling you — if you want Boston’s best clam chowder, make sure you stop by Legal Sea Foods. And if you’re in Boston for the Fourth of July, Chowdafest is a must!

I love Boston movies — and I love that there are so many of them lately!

That’s because Massachusetts began offering tax credits to film studios in 2005. Since then, movie after movie has been shot in the Boston area. Coincidentally, a wave of gritty Boston crime movies began around that time — first, Mystic River, followed by The Departed, followed by Gone Baby Gone, followed by The Town.

So when On Location Tours offered me a chance to come on their Boston Movie Tour, I jumped at the chance. My friend Lisa and I were excited (mostly to relive our eighth grade crush on Ben Affleck).

We learned right away that the tour had a theme: THE BACK OF MATT DAMON’S HEAD!!! Our tour guide, Dave — a hilarious guy who had us cracking up the whole time — had printout after printout of the back of Matt Damon’s head all over Boston!

The tour started on Boston Common and continued via bus through dozens of neighborhoods, from Back Bay to Southie. Along the way, movie and TV clips were shown on the bus as we drove by the destinations where they were filmed. The clips made it perfect — you didn’t have to watch the movies in advance!

However, I will say this — before going on this tour, you should have seen Good Will Hunting and The Departed at the very least.

We learned a lot of cool movie facts from Dave. The film Blown Away was shot in Boston, and there was an intense explosion scene. Boston residents were freaked out by all the explosions and kept calling 911! And that’s not all — the crew accidentally blew out 8,000 residential windows, costing an extra $1.5 million on top of a $1 million explosion.

Later, Dave was quick to point out the apartment that Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez bought back when they were together.

But perhaps the coolest fact was that in The Departed, whenever a character was in danger, the letter X appeared on the screen in some shape or form. Scorsese sometimes does this in his other movies.

Lisa and I, of course, have been avid hecklers for the better part of a decade — and once we learned our guide could take it, we enjoyed heckling him.

Dave: “All right, I want you guys to guess my favorite Kevin Bacon movie. And don’t say Footloose!”

Lisa: “Wild Things?”

I nearly fell over.

Halfway through the tour, we stopped at Woody’s L Street Tavern — better known as the Good Will Hunting bar! Lisa and I sat at the exact table.

Now, I’ve been on lots of tours that finish at a bar, and I fully advocate that. But a tour that stopped at a bar halfway through might actually be better!

Our other big stop was in Fort Point, at the building in The Departed where the body is thrown off the roof. (And just one block from my old office!)

Dave had a kid act it out:

Soon after, we finished our tour steps from the Common, at the Bull & Finch Bar — better known as the bar that inspired Cheers.

I loved this tour. It’s expensive at $40 per person, but it really is well-executed and full of entertainment. If you treat it like the special activity that it is, that makes it worth the price.

If you’re looking for a special gift for your movie-loving, Boston-dwelling friend or family member, this tour is a solid choice, and one that I recommend. And if you’re planning New York holidays , On Location has a number of tours in New York as well, from Sex and the City to The Sopranos!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to Chinatown with Jack Nicholson.

I received two complimentary tickets to On Location Tours’s Boston Movie Tour . All opinions, as always, are my own.

Every city has a moment when it’s set on fire. In Boston, it’s that moment on a hot summer evening when the sun’s mostly down, but every color intensifies brilliantly.

I used to call this time twilight, before that godawful franchise came along and started teaching teenage girls that abusive relationships are okay if he really, really loves you. But I digress.

Boston and I have a complicated relationship.

I’ve gone into that so many times before. How could the city where it makes the most sense for me to live be so mercilessly unlivable?

Let’s forget that for now. I don’t want to push Boston’s buttons when we’re getting along.

But on nights like these, I want to forget it all, forget fall in Europe, forget the cheap flights to Lanarca , forget ever getting on a plane again, and just wrap myself in this night.

And then it hits me — the three-foot snowstorms, the freezing cold, the five-month misery of winter, the shoveling. Oh, and the ridiculous housing prices, the early bar closings, the provincial attitude that dominates the landscape…

I can’t live here anymore.

But those fleeting moments of Boston at twilight put up a good argument.

Yesterday I went to watch the Boston Marathon. A few hours later, we were recovering from a devastating attack on our city.

My friends, family, and I are fortunate to be uninjured. We were watching two miles away from the blasts in Copley Square.

Boston: Home to the World’s Best Marathon

Boston is a lot of things — an intellectual hub, a technological hotspot, a historical treasure trove. We’re fiery, we’re smart, we’re independent, and we celebrate Patriots’ Day — a Massachusetts-only holiday that celebrates the occasion when the British were driven out of Boston during the American Revolution.

Boston is also a sports town. Oh, are we ever a sports town! Even for someone like me who isn’t a sports fan, sports are the lifeblood that bond Bostonians, and we have some great teams (all of which won championships in the past decade). The Red Sox will beat Baltimore and a “Yankees Suck” chant will materialize on Yawkey way, itself a bonding ritual more than an insult. Hell, the Celtics can beat the Lakers and we’ll be doing the same thing.

But the Boston Marathon is different from other Boston sports. It’s inherently joyful. It’s not competitive — well, aside from briefly wondering if this will be the year that an American will finally beat the Kenyans and Ethiopians. No matter who leads the path on the 26.2-mile jaunt from Hopkinton to Copley Square, we cheer for them like crazy, and we keep cheering for the runners that cross our path over the next several hours.

I never got Patriots’ Day off when I worked in Boston, but I’d always take it off anyway, going down to the finish line to watch the runners and take in the atmosphere. When it came time for me and Mario to plan our visit home, I suggested we time it around Marathon Monday. My friend Beth and her boyfriend Brian invited us to skip Copley Square and watch by their place in Brookline instead.

We cheered on the runners on Beacon St., reassuring them that with infamous Heartbreak Hill now in the past, they were in the home stretch of the marathon. “You’re almost done! Keep going!” we cheered. “You can do it!”

“God save the Queen!” Mario called out to several runners decked out with union jack shorts, which often elicited a pumped fist in reply. “I love you, Tinkerbell!” I yelled to a man dressed in a green fairy costume with a wand.

Behind us was a group of college students barbecuing on their roof, red solo cups in hand. The more time that passed, the drunker they got — but they never stopped cheering for the runners. They yelled out the names people had written across their shirts, along with a raucous “U-S-A! U-S-A!” whenever a fatigues-clad soldier walked by.

At one point, a runner dressed in green fell to his knees, clearly in pain.

“Come on, green!” yelled the college students. “YOU CAN DO IT! Pick yourself up, green, you’re almost finished! You’ve got this! YES, YOU CAN! YES, YOU CAN! YES, YOU CAN!” And before long, the man in green picked himself up and started jogging again, throwing a grateful glance in their direction.

That’s the Boston Marathon. It’s so positive and uplifting.

So for someone not only to brutally attack innocent people, but to do so in the context of such a joyous occasion, was an unbelievably coldblooded maneuver.

Shock and Horror

Mario, Beth and I were having lunch at a Thai place on the Mile 23 mark when my dad called me, telling me that there had been an explosion in Copley Square. My stomach dropped. The three of us immediately got on our phones and began updating social media and calling our loved ones.

Minutes earlier, a band outside had been playing “Hello, It’s Me” to the crowd as smoke billowed from a barbecue. The elite runners had long crossed the finish line, but people were still cheering on the runners that passed, offering them water and orange slices. But as word of the disaster spread, everyone on the sidelines had their phones out. The music and the barbecue stopped. The atmosphere turned dark. Before long, the police started intervening on the route, telling the runners to go home.

We headed back to Beth’s as more details slowly trickled in. Two people had died (a third died later). More bombs had been found (this was later found to be false). A lot of people had lost their legs, and photos surfaced of people with their limbs missing.

Mario, being a journalist, immediately got a call from the BBC asking him to go in and report. And as much as I didn’t want him to, with us having no idea if there was another bomb just waiting to go off, he went. That was awful.

The Impact

I can’t imagine to think about what the victims and their families are going through right now, especially the family of the eight-year-old boy from Dorchester who lost his life, and the people who are now going forward without their limbs. My heart goes out to them.

I’m sad for my city, my community, and my former neighborhood, Back Bay, where the blasts went off and where I lived for two years.

I’m humbled by the first responders. Could you imagine seeing an explosion go off — and having the instinct and strength to run straight into it? I’ve always respected these people deeply, but after seeing the video of them running directly into the blast, having no idea what lay ahead, my respect and admiration have gone up exponentially. Thank you SO much for all that you do.

I’m inspired by the Bostonians who immediately stepped up to offer whatever help they could, including offering to house runners without a place to stay. I’m floored by the marathoners who continued running straight to Mass General, another mile and a half, to donate blood.

In the coming days, more details will unfold about this attack. But for now, know that my city will get through this. We Bostonians have a long history of making it through difficult circumstances. We will survive this and thrive once again.

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Best Clam Chowder in Boston: Find Out at Chowdafest!