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Social History – The traditional past and Locke-Ober… still the Boston Brahmin dining retreat!

American social history: Locke-Ober… the grand French restaurant in Boston.

The Brahmin city is so lucky. Jack’s in San Francisco and Perino’s in Los Angeles are gone. So are most of the wonderful American traditional restaurants. These were dining establishments that would have never permitted some parvenu wearing a baseball cap or backpack to dine amongst the swells. Even if the dining dude had founded Face-book. He would still be just branded a déclassé nouveau geek creep.

YouTube video of Locke-Ober: “Locke’s” is the traditional Boston restaurant, a power-broker favorite since 1875. Famed Boston restaurateur Lydia Shire bought it in 2001, but if the ghosts mind a woman boss, you’d never know it. In an alley off a pedestrian mall, the wood-paneled restaurant entertainingly evokes a waspy men’s club. The long, mirrored downstairs bar dates from 1880, and the service is 19th-century-style courtly. The food deftly combines old-fashioned and contemporary. Traditional fish cakes sit alongside jasmine rice, red-pepper aioli comes with Maine crab cakes, and delectable scalloped potatoes accompany the signature roast beef hash. Other traditions, including excellent steaks and chops, Wiener schnitzel a la Holstein, and broiled scrod with brown bread, endure. So does Locke-Ober, an “only in Boston” experience with no equal.

Lydia Shire has a long history in Boston beginning with Season at Bostonian Hotel in 1982, BIBA (Back in Boston Again – after opening the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills) in 1989 and Pignoli in1994, now all in her past. In 2001, she rescued the beauty and grandeur of the historic Locke-Ober Restaurant, where she is still currently serving as Head Chef. She is also the creative mind behind Scampo at The Liberty Hotel and Blue Sky at the Atlantic House Hotel on York Beach in Maine.

The Fall River Line was popularized by this famous song. A romantic and engaging way to travel between New York and Boston.

It all began fittingly enough with Robert Fulton, who planned to vanquish Long Island Sound as he had the Hudson, even though he died, at an untimely fifty, just before the attempt was to be made. And the slow funeral cannonade from the Battery had barely died on the wind when his steamboat, unblushingly named the Fulton, paddled up the East River into the dreaded waters of Hell Gate, the narrow passage where the tides rush in and out of the Sound. “

The Fall River Line’s PRISCILLA.

The Fall River Line’s first boat was the steamer Bay State, 300 feet long and forty wide, lit by oil lamps at night. Her cuisine attained considerable renown, at fifty cents for the grand table d’hôte dinner, served at long candlelit tables: ceremoniously the Captain and his guests were seated first, for these were no ferry boats and they affected the grand manner of the transatlantic trade. Very soon the Bay State encountered Law’s cocky Oregon, with her proud owner aboard, and not only bested her in a race up the Sound but even triumphantly crossed the loser’s bow, so that there should be no misunderstanding about who had won. The line was so profitable that two new boats, the Empire State and the Metropolis, could be bought out of profits in a few years. This seemed too good to betrue, and Wall Street men listened and moved in to begin a series of major financial mergers and shufflings which lasted over many years. [Read more...]