A Brewer And A Patriot
Originally published on May 1. Once we tried to make a "Sam the Malster" joke. Unsurprisingly, no one got it.
As Bostonians, we're all privy to a rich cultural history. We live among several first-rate museums, the Freedom Trail, a host of historic residences and, of course, the Samuel Adams brewery. Sam Adams is quite possibly our best-known export (sorry, cranberries). We love Sam Adams (particularly the Summer Ale, which is finally back on shelves and on tap!), but we wondered: why is a beer that has only been distributed since Marathon Day in 1985 named after a man who's been dead since 1803?
The Boston Beer Company (makers of Sam Adams) was founded in 1985 by one Jim Koch, the oldest son of a brewing family. Fed up with the subpar brews currently dominating the beer scene, Koch decided to try marketing a better-tasting beer. Rather than creating an entirely new brew, he looked through his family's brewing archives and found a recipe for a beer that his great-great-grandfather had made between the 1870s and Prohibition. The name? Louis Koch Lager. Figuring that the name lacked a certain...zing, Jim Koch decided to rename the beer after Samuel Adams, since Adams, like Koch himself, was a brewer who had inherited a tradition of beer-making from his father. Adams was, in fact, a huge beer enthusiast. When not helping to catalyze the Revolutionary War or signing the Declaration of Independence, he worked at his father's brewery for several years and was frequently called "Sam the Maltster" based on his habit of carrying large amounts of malt through Boston. Classy!
As the beer's label reminds us, Sam Adams was both a brewer and a patriot, which sounds like a pretty excellent job description. We're certainly glad for his accomplishments as the latter, but we're also thoroughly indebted to Jim Koch for his skills as the former.
Samuel Adams [Wikipedia]
History of Sam [Samuel Adams-World of Beer]
Samuel Adams (beer) [Wikipedia]
When we were growing up in Roslindale, it wasn't much of a culinary destination. The area's dining options consisted one or two diners that seemed to cater exclusively to the area's more senior population, a truly sketchy Chinese restaurant, and a bakery. Now, a good decade and a half later, Rozzy Square (which we've never heard called "Roslindale Village" by anyone who grew up there) is becoming a destination for Boston's food lovers. Although we're tempted to let the Square's great restaurants stay a secret, we must admit that nothing makes us happier than introducing others to our beloved home neighborhood, so for your epicurian edification, 
The entire idea of state symbols has always made us giggle a little bit. Why, exactly, do we need an Official State Polka Song (
Curious Liquids was, for us at least, the real Beacon Hill destination where everybody knows your name. At the cozy coffeehouse across the street from the State House, we'd run into people from the high school we started out at, the high school from which we graduated, our citywide theatre group and people we just knew "from around." We'd sit in the antique chairs in the alcove room that looked out onto Park Street, nurse mocha steamers and gossip. It wasn't just us either. Throughout the cafe, groups would cluster over books or the board games from the shelves. In one corner, Suffolk students held a study group. In another, State House types tried not to spill coffee on their suits. The tables were covered with Edward Gorey cartoons and the music was never obtrusive and, to our teenage mind at least, the absolute height of cool. The place was open until 2am, making it one of the only options for underage Bostonians after dinnertime. The staff was even friendly! They'd spot you a slice of the (really very good) cake when you were low on cash and, perhaps more impressively, they refrained from laughing at the myriad teenagers embarrassing themselves throughout the upper level. As a teenager, we'd fantasize about having study groups at Curious Liquids during our college years and bringing our kids there for hot cocoa someday, but sadly, that was not to be as the cafe was evicted in 2000.
In college, we, along with a friend, had the phenomenally brilliant (if not necessarily stone-cold sober) idea to open a bar called TGIF. No, it wouldn't be a knockoff 
True story: one summer, we had a temp job at a Downtown Crossing company that shall remain nameless. All day, we opened envelopes, took the letters out of the envelopes, stapled the letters to the envelopes, and put the envelopes in boxes. As you might imagine, we had a lot of time to think. As you might further imagine, the absolute highlight of our day was when we got to leave the office for a blessed hour and get some lunch. Due to these conditions, we spent most of our mornings seriously pondering the question of where to get lunch and every morning, it was a little bit depressing because there is really not too much in the way of decent food in Downtown Crossing. Or is there? Once we did a little bit more research, we learned that Downtown Crossing has more to offer the epicure than that delicious, delicious tourist lemonade outside of the Park Street T station. Because we're all about the giving, here's a week's worth of lunchtime suggestions for all you Downtown Crossing office workers.
Name: Laura Bridget Regan
Although Americans certainly have a well-deserved reputation for gastronomical excess (see: "Super Size Me" or any all-you-can-eat buffet), our friends abroad have a history of going overboard with food as well. A terrific 
A reader writes in...
Sometimes you want to eat at a stylish white-tablecloth restaurant where you'll be served a multi-course tasting menu paired with the finest wines. Sometimes you don't. Sometimes you want to go somewhere just a little dive-y and eat the kind of food your mother rejected as "too trashy" when you were a child and wash it down with a nice cold beer, preferably a Miller High Life. In short, sometimes you want a corn dog. This glorious creation consists of a hot dog dipped in cornbread batter and then fried and served, as so many good and true foods are, on a stick. While corn dogs are readily available during fair season (does anyone else miss the Roslindale carnival that used to happen every Memorial Day on the VFW Parkway? Just us? Okay, then.), they can be difficult to find at restaurants. Fortunately, MenuPages' 
As any Bostonian who's ever tried to order a chocolate frappe outside of New England will attest, most of the country does not call a mixture of milk, ice cream, and flavor syrup a frappe. Rather, they refer to such a concoction as a milkshake, a term that, in our fair state, refers to milk and syrup, sans ice cream. In other words, Kelis is not singing about what we know as a milkshake. Well, actually, she's probably not singing about the rest of the country's definition either. Hmm.
When we were small, a trip to Harvard Square always meant a trip to the Tasty Sandwich Shop, a Cambridge institution on the corner of JFK & Eliot Streets that had been open since 1916. With only 16 seats, the Tasty was more of a lunch counter than a restaurant, but we never saw less than 40 people in there at any given time. Harvard professors stood elbow to elbow with the punk kids that hung out in the Pit. Old men playing chess on the tables in front of the Au Bon Pain would come in to grab a sandwich to go, bumping into Cambridge families as they left. The food was basic as all get out, but it was always delicious. As we got older and started venturing into Harvard Square with friends and without parents, we'd inevitably eat at the Tasty, since it was all we could afford with our meager allowance. One day in 1997, we headed for the Tasty on a rainy day, ready for a good hot dog and some fountain Coke, and it was all boarded up. A few months later, an Abercrombie and Fitch opened up in the same spot. That pretty much says it all, eh?
Name: Jess Mullen
Over the past several years, Centre Street has become Jamaica Plain's own restaurant row. From Italian to Indian, Mediterranean to Mexican, you can sample many the world's great cuisines in the span of less than a mile. This embarassment of riches can be overwhelming to a non-resident, so as a service, we thought we'd point out some of the best options. For your convenience, we've even 
Truly, challah french toast is one of the more delectable dishes in the world. French toast is already an eggy, sweet, marvelous mess and adding challah bread to the mix somehow makes it even better. It turns the dish into the Platonic ideal of french toast: crisp on the outside with just the right amount of sogginess hidden underneath the crust. Yum. Challah french toast is readily available throughout the greater Boston area, but for the most part, it comes out to shine only at weekend brunch. So what do you do when you wake up on a Thursday morning craving it like nobody's business? You use MenuPages 
Maybe you allowed a little too much time to wait for the orange line and arrived at South Station a full hour before your bus is supposed to depart or maybe there's just an unfortunate two hour gap between the time the commuter rail arrives and the time your train to New York departs. Whatever happened, now you're at South Station with plenty of time to kill and a growling stomach. What to do? 
Any Bostonian worth their lobster bib can tell you that Julia Child lived in Cambridge for over 40 years, but did you know that almost 80 years before the divine Ms. C.'s show debuted on WGBH, Boston residents were influencing the way Americans cook? In the late 1870s, the Women's Education Association of Boston founded The Boston Cooking School. One Mary Lincoln began teaching at the school and in 1884 published 
Feijoada, a hearty bean and meat stew, is widely considered to be the national dish of Brazil. It generally consists of beef, several different pork products (from bacon to pig ears and feet), and black beans. The stew simmers slowly for hours before reaching its salty, savory ready state. It's a complex, robust, delicious dish, rich with porcine goodness. It's also difficult to find. That's where we come in. Using the power of the MenuPages 
In "The $20 Challenge," we face the daunting task of eating three square meals in Boston's most expensive areas for a mere Jackson. As always, we recommend ordering water and getting your meal to go to avoid the expense of a tip.
Boston has more than its share of firsts: the first public school in the United States (Boston Latin School, our one-time alma mater), the oldest continually-operating university (Harvard) and, perhaps most importantly, the oldest continually-operating restaurant, Fanueil Hall's 
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Blogston Proper is your thrice-weekly roundup of Hub-related food writing from all over the Internet. We read the blogs so you don't have to. But you should anyway, just to be nice.
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This being our second-to-last work day of 2007, we've been doing some thinking about the year that's almost over. 2007 was a huge year for MenuPages. Here at MP: Boston, we've added many, many new restaurants this year and site wide, this year we welcomed the newest member of the MenuPages family, 
While it's fortunately gotten a tiny bit warmer, we're still constantly craving hearty, substantial foods. Right now, we're having major pangs of longing for a food we don't often think too much about: meatloaf. Something about a big ol' hunk of meat and some mashed potatoes sounds just about perfect right now. We harnessed the power of the 
Blogston Proper is your thrice-weekly roundup of Hub-related food writing from all over the Internet. We read the blogs so you don't have to. But you should anyway, just to be nice.
Even though it feels like it ought to be no later than September, 2007 is almost over. This is generally the point in the year when we realize that we totally forgot to make plans for New Year's Eve and Day and panic. If you're in the same boat, never fear! We've sought out a variety of great options for both December 31 and January 1. Below, a few of our favorites.