Whatever other people may try to claim, the food and restaurant scene in Boston is relatively dismal. There are a smattering of moderately priced, moderately good restaurants, and there are a handful of very expensive restaurants that more or less live up to the prices they charge. It's not bad and it's not unpleasant, but it's also nothing like San Francisco, New York, or even Portland (the canonical one, in Oregon) or Seattle. I knew this prior to moving here, but the relative scarcity of interesting restaurants in a city as big and densely populated as Boston has proven frustrating over the last few weeks.
More than restaurants and upscale specialty food stores, though, what I've really missed is good bread. Admittedly, having lived in France and grown up near one the few bakeries in the United States operated by a MOF, my standards are likely higher than those of the "man on the street". Even so, most of the bread I find at Boston supermarkets and markets is so terrible, I wonder how the bakeries manage to stay in business. A baguette I tried last weekend was limp to the point it flopped over when held vertically.
Then I finally broke down and made the 30 minute trip out to Brookline to try Clear Flour Bread, desperately hoping they would have bona fide French bread and pastries. So bad are the bakeries in Boston and so good is Clear Flour that I almost cried when I walked into the tiny shop. Indeed, Clear Flour Bakery is the first bakery in Boston that merits my neurotic, overly critical evaluation. Because it's not quite perfect, but it could be.
First, the location, at least for me, is terrible beyond terrible. It is tragic that this bakery has to locate near a run down laundromat and a block of rather lumpy apartments. (Though, as a testament to its quality, even tucked away in its anonymous corner, the bakery had a line going out the door at 2:00 PM on a Saturday.) Surely they could do an even brisker business if they moved a few miles east into, or opened a satellite location in, a somewhat nicer part of Boston proper.
Second, their French breads are not quite up to snuff. They don't sell my favorite — the French country boule, the loaf that has made Poilâne and many others famous — and their baguette is just slightly off. The crumb is not quite fine enough, and the crust is slightly too thick and too hard. These minor criticisms aside, though, the Clear Flour bread I've tried is orders of magnitude better than anything else I've found. They're so close, it's painful.
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