pt at large

The Spot Café: Left Bank Meets Main Street

The Spot Café
385 Main Street
Watertown, MA 617-923-2339
Tues - Sun 7 AM - 3 PM
“Breakfast and Lunch, All Day”
Breakfast $4.95 - $7.95. Lunch $5.95 - $7.95, Lunch Special 1/2 sandwich, cup of soup $7.25, Soups, Muffins, and Crumbcakes all made from scratch

Whether a mom and pop operation, a one-man/woman show, or a whole family, there’s something special about an owner operated business. Teeny little Watertown, weighing in at just 4.2 square miles and 32.000 people, is a hotbed of familial entrepreneurship.This is the first story in this series.

Marco Hanna, baseball cap perched on his head, is likely to pop out of the Spot Café’s kitchen anytime what’s on the grill can sizzle for a few minutes without his direct attention. His co-owner wife Suzan is in front, taking orders behind the café’s counter or circulating the tables in the jewel-box sized eatery.

When he strolls out, wiping his hands on his apron and says, “How did you like the food?” he means it. The man’s wide smile says it all. He loves what he does and he wants to be sure you approve of what comes out of his kitchen.

The trail leading to the hot grill in the Spot Café’s kitchen started in Egypt. But if the food wasn’t good, there wouldn’t be a story so let’s start with breakfast.

Eggs, Pancakes, Waffles, and French Toast - all good choices here. The omelets are generously proportioned.  Many of the egg dishes come with gently seasoned, well cooked home fries and choice of bacon, ham, or sausage. The bacon is crisply pressed and non-greasy. The three egg Tomato and Feta Omelet Breakfast is a tangy treat.

Want to eat and run? Try the Breakfast Omelet Sandwich (egg and cheese sandwich with choice of ham, bacon, or sausage served on breakfast roll, bagel, croissant, or toast) or the Breakfast Quickie (Swiss cheese and pastrami on your choice of bread). And if you’re with your non meat-eating aunt, there’s the Veggie Omelet.

Got an appetite, do you? The pancakes of the Pancake Breakfast are the size of the plate and come with ham, bacon, or sausage and home fries. The Belgian Waffles have some crunch on the outside and softness inside. If you’re in the mood for Buttermilk Pancakes, fire away.

Half a dozen salad plates are on the lunch menu but the best deal is the soup and half sandwich, the sandwiches ranging from turkey, prosciutto, pastrami, tuna salad, steak and cheese, and mozzarella. What lifts them out of mundane are the roasted red peppers, or baby greens, or fresh basil, or Dijon mustard, or other tasty ingredients.

 

A look into the pastry case is dangerous. Suzan, who earned a B.A. degree in Art at Cairo University, creates  edible beauty in the oven. She makes all the muffins, and, oh yes, three kinds of crumb cake, from scratch. The apple version I tried was covered with a warm layer of light-as-a-cloud whipped cream. The raspberry and blueberry cakes will have to wait till next time.

The bread here is magnifique and requires its own paragraph. Shipped from Au Pain Doré, an exclusive artisanal bakery in Montreal, the dough arrives frozen. The scrumptious bread loafs and baguettes and even the croissants are baked on the premises using doughs from Au Pain Doré.

The Spot Café has an owner/operator pedigree.  The Hanna’s bought the restaurant three years ago from the original owner, who had done a splendid job of designing the interior, choosing the furnishings, the art work hanging on the walls, the terrific paint scheme, and finding Au Pain Doré. The closely clustered ten-table, twenty seat café has the feel of the Left Bank.

And the feel of an American Dream that spanned three continents. Teenager Marco headed across the Mediterranean from Egypt to Zurich in 1974 and found work as a dishwasher.  His culinary fate may have been sealed when the owner one day asked if he wanted to work in the kitchen. He hasn’t been far from a kitchen ever since.

“There aren’t many things in life you can add to,” Marco says. “ l like to break recipes and with food, you can add something and see the results right away. If you write a book, you have to wait to see how many are sold. With food, you can make your own recipe and see right away on the face of your customer whether you succeeded or not.”

Marco leveraged his 1977 degree in Business Administration from Cairo University to open his first restaurant, a pizzeria in Rome in 1982. In 1990 (“right after the world cup,” he recalled), Marco returned to Egypt to be the camp superintendent for a construction company building a tunnel under the Suez Canal. From 1991 to 1997, he was in charge of the food operation feeding about 60 of the firm's ex-patriots. Imagine the creativity he needed to satisfy the palates of men and women from at least seven countries.

Married in Egypt in 1992, Marco and Suzan gathered their two children and emigrated to America on December 12, 1998.

These days, when Marco isn’t working nights as a cook at Boston College, he’s listening to classical music in the tiny kitchen and making sure he connects with the customers. The good comfort food makes a difference but so does the attention of the two owners, living the American Dream by satisfying the appetites the diners who find their way to this cozy little place on Main Street, USA.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

 

Aurélia’s Oratorio: A Contemporary Cirque Dazzles

This show is advertised for audiences from 8 to 100. The full house on July 22 hit the low range and a handful of patrons were within hailing distance of 100. If the volume of laughter and applause were any barometer of success, the sandaled, sundressed, straplessed, Bermuda shorted, business suited audience was tickled by the Oratorio’s illusions, dance, and acrobatics. This is no circus act. It is theater at its most imaginative, illusory, and sophisticated. A word for you… Go.

Aurélia’s Oratorio
Written and Directed by Victoria Thierée Chaplin
Starring Aurélia Thierrée, with Jaime Martinez
Loeb Drama Center, Brattle Street, Cambridge, MA 617-547-8300
http://www.amrep.org/2009/
Exclusive Return Engagement July 22 - August 2, 2009

So what the heck is Aurélia’s Oratorio? It’s hard to answer that question as you walk out of the Loeb Drama Center at the American Repertory Theater after witnessing this… this… highly refined theater experience. You’ve witnessed a heady mix of ancient theater arts - acrobatics, dance, comedy, aerial arts, and a load of illusions that made you think “Whaaaat?”  It’s like trying to explain a dream.

Everything is slightly - or mightily - out of whack. Kites fly people. Ice cream burns your mouth. People dance on their hands. Coat racks dance a merengué. Just about everything is topsy turvy upside down inside out right side down up sideways. And glorious.

In the place of dialogue and a story line were sound effects and music - gypsy jazz, French cabaret songs and accordion, classical, electronica, - perfectly matched to the core of whatever in a seventy-minute series of vignettes was being acted out.

Performer Aurélia Chaplin Thierrée has the timing, the sense of silent kinetic amimation of her grandfather, the Little Tramp himself. She projects volumes with tiny gestures. And oh, those big-as-saucer eyes that ought to get credit somewhere in the program for their skill at projecting wistfulness, bewilderment, surprise, or fear all the way to the back row of the theater.

Performed is too shabby a verb. Aurélia charms and delights us with her fluidity of movement whether dancing or floating high above the stage, an aerodynamic nymph soaring on swaths of ruby red velvet.

Writer and Director Victoria Thierrée Chaplin displays the meticulous attention to every teeny aspect of performance that her famous Poppa Charlie Chaplin invested in film productions that made him an icon of film history. Even the ruby textured stage curtains have choreographed roles.

The show opens with a worn wooden bureau at stage center. All of a sudden, a drawer mysteriously pops open, a hand appears from one drawer, a foot from another, then all sorts of things happen involving telephones, candles, flying lingerie, from any one of the nine drawers.

How on earth can someone contort herself to stick her head or limbs out of those drawers, And when Aurélia finally emerges after a few minutes of sleight of body tricks, she hauls a fake leg out of the bureau explaining some of the mystery.

The audience responds with laughter and applause. We were fooled and we loved it. Showing us how we were fooled added to the experience. How grand. Aurélia, and later Jaime Martinez, often make no effort to hide the conceit of the illusion then go right ahead and we fall for it hook, line, and sinker.

This show is lovingly put together. Aurélia’s mother, Victoria Thierrée Chaplin was inspired when she found medieval illustrations of just such topsy turvyness and decided to incorporate them into a ‘cirque,’ a contemporary form of theater art with ancient sensibility. The choices of music, the degree of luminousity that bathes the curtains and the performers, are perfectly attuned to each vignette.

Some of the conceits are so subtle it takes your brain a moment to see how you’re being fooled. You never know which part of the audience will get the joke first. More than once I heard a pair behind me tell each other what they just missed.

The dance piece in which Aurélia and Jaime Martinez squeeze into the same coat and pair of pants is the most clever and joyous tango I’ve ever seen. My brain watched them get into the clothing but my eyes kept getting fooled by the illusion. I loved it.

Moments of darkness and mystery give the show depth and range. A vignette with a lace monster is an elegy of longing, unrequited love and implacable fate (that’s my interpretation and I am certain others may analyze the vignette differently). A vignette with little puppets starts with a comic Punch and Judy show and devolves into something more like The Lord of the Flies.

These are the exceptions to an evening of stunning visual comedy and graceful animated movement. At some point in the show I guarantee you will spontaneously clap your hands together in chlldlike wonder at what you’ve just seen…or think you’ve just seen. Aurélia’s Oratorio is a chance to see an updated version of the kind of entertainment that’s been making us laugh for centuries.

Photos by Richard Haugton from the amrep web site.

Westport Friends Used Bookfair: Books Galore

CAPTION for photo appearing on Westport Shorelines edition July 22, 2009

The 48th Annual Friends Used Book Fair attracted hundreds of book lovers and bargain hunters at the Saturday July 11 event held in front of the Friends Meeting House on Main Road. Over 30,000 hardcover and paperback books were donated to the book fair. Volunteers began sorting, cataloguing, and pricing books last fall. “Books for next year began coming in today. We sort, price, and store books from September till just before the book fair,” Meeting Treasurer Deana Chase said as she surveyed the lines circulating around the 80 book-crammed tables under two huge yellow and white striped tents. The proceeds are used to maintain the Quaker property on Main Road and are used for “Benevolences ” - local causes or Quaker causes chosen by a committee. 

CJ Chenier: Zydeco Royalty Visits Johnny D's

CJ Chenier and The Red Hot Louisiana Band
Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant
17 Holland Street, Somerville, MA 02144
First Set
July 16, 2009

When a lean, lanky black man wearing a two-piece magenta outfit and wielding an over-sized gleaming white accordion steps onto the stage, you can rightly expect the man has attitude to go along with the ensemble. If this apparition didn’t knock you out, the music was about to.

Straight outta Louisiana, CJ Chenier proceeded to light up the stage at Johnny D’s in Somerville last Thursday night. What his Red Hot Louisiana Band - washboard, percussion, guitars - lacked in their own colorful fashion statements they made up for in energy. They played in technicolor.

Know this about zydeco and Cajun music. It’s upbeat and infectious. Even when the songs are in Creole, jubilant or lachrymose, you understand the sentiment and feel compelled to dance to them - whether your’re wiggling in your chair or dancing jam packy on Johnny D’s little dance floor.

You sweat, you begin singing in Creole, you dance with every partner you can find. That ain’t hard because it seems like every zydeco fan in a hundred mile radius has shown up. They’re party people of the first order. The hell with the fact it’s a Thursday night - we’re talking CJ Chenier. We’re talkin’ zydeco  royalty.

Most of these zydecoholics will get home in the wee hours and show up late for work or on time and shuffle across the parking lot in a Chenier beat since the music has a shelf life of several days.

Another thing to know about zydeco and Cajun music. Zydeco is a syncopated eight-count partner dance with lots of room for improvisation and self-expression. You don’t have to be a champ to get out and dance to it. The beat is so insistent that you move with it, sort of like being in the second line in a New Orleans parade. I danced with two women who didn’t know zydeco from zabaglione. And we had fun.

 
Zydeco is a form of American roots music that evolved in southwest Louisiana in the early twentieth century. Accordion and washboard (Frottoir) were all that was needed to produce waltzes, two-steps, blues and rock and roll. Since then, drums, guitars, fiddles and such have been added to the bands but the tang of Louisiana is at the core of the music,
 
The bang tonight comes from the guy with the big grin, one gold tooth prominently glinting in the spotlight as he sings and shouts out to the crowd. CJ (Clayton Joseph) is the Creole son of the late Grammy Award winning Louisiana musician Clifton Chenier, the man who brought zydeco from rural Opelousas, LA to nationally broadcast programs on PBS.

Before accepting his father’s 1978 offer to join him, CJ spent his early years in Port Arthur, TX playing his saxophone to everything from James Brown to John Coltrane to Motown. By the time he took over for his ailing father in 1985, he’d learned accordion. He can squeeze the daylights out of it for a joyous two-step and caress it slowly for a hold-on-tight smoky blues number.

The next time the little 300 capacity Johnny Ds wants to fill the house, all they’ve got to do is invite CJ Chenier and the Red Hot Louisiana Band. The local zydeco community, along with people who just want to ‘laissez les bon temp roulez,” will do the rest.

Westport Friends 48th Annual Used Book Fair

Glorious sunshine reflecting off two huge gold and white striped tents set up in front of the Westport Friends Meeting (Quaker) House on Main Road acted as a homing beacon for hundreds of book lovers from all over the region. The highly anticipated 48th Annual Used Book Fair opened for a two week run at precisely 11:00 AM on Saturday, July 11.

By 10:45, book lovers of every age and description surrounded the tents. A few tantalizing feet away and cordoned off by a yellow rope lay the objects of their desires - large folding tables jam packed with paperbacks and hardcover books of every category.

Enthusiasts behind the ropes craned their necks to focus on titles of books an arm’s reach away to see if they could make out books they might pounce on at the opening.

At the two minute warning, several mothers were seen moving their small children back a pace or two, not wanting to watch them get swept into the sea of books when the crowd surged in. At the blast of a shrill whistle, the yellow ropes surrounding the tents were dropped and a cheering throng descended upon the tables like locusts.

The book sale is one of the biggest on the south coast. “We took in over 35,000 books,” Westport Meeting Treasurer Deana Chase said. “We begin sorting in September and continue through the year. Books are sorted, catalogued, priced individually and stored in cartons. Books are culled if they’re moldy or in poor condition,” Ms. Chase said. The 190-year-old Meeting House was filled with children’s books and the Macomber Community House with overflow from the two tents outside.

A staggering 30,000 books were up for grabs at bargain basement prices. Many hardcover books were priced a tenth of retail cost. Better books were priced at bargain rates, some paperbacks were six for a dollar. Categories ranged from novels and literature, to history, romance, mystery, humor, science fiction, philosophy, reference, cookbooks, large format books, and the newest category, self-help.

Lousy economy or not, people don’t want to pass up good deals. Jolly volunteers hand out paper bags and cartons. Patrons fill them up with gusto. Some fetch an armload and head for home. Many find a place to sit outside the tent and sort through the booty for keepers then return unwanted books back to the table.

“It all started out in 1962 when we needed to raise money to fix a leaky roof at the parsonage across the street,” Dr. Stuart Kirkaldy said. He should know. He was there then and has been at just about every one since. “Our student pastor John Ruth, who’s quite a bibliophile, suggested we organize a book sale to help pay the roofing bill. We raised $410, and fixed the roof.”

Encouraged by the amount of books people donated (and the first year help from the Odd Fellows Library in New Bedford), the committee decided to reprise the book sale.

“John Ruth came up from his parsonage in King of Prussia, PA, to help us price the books. One day, in a calm voice and with perfectly neutral expression, he handed me a book and said, ‘You may want to keep this one. It’s a first edition of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.’ “

If there were any doubts whether the book sale would become an annual event, they were dismissed that day. A reputable book dealer paid $425 dollars for the book.

Over the next thirteen years, the book sale was held on the second Saturday in July. No tent, rain or shine. The volume of books donated and the crowds attending grew exponentially. By the fourteenth year 1974, the committee rented tents and extended the sale. Today’s sale featured eighty tables packed with books, a long way from the dozen or so tables for the first events.

“The money we take in helps to maintain the Meeting House and grounds and for what we call “Benevolences,” contributions to local or Quaker causes we identify,” Dr. Kirkaldy said. Although he lives in Middlebury, VT, the venerable retired Westport physician is a fixture at every year’s fair.

“No one likes to throw away books,” a Dartmouth resident and Westport Meeting member for twenty years Gretchen Baker-Smith said, “ so they all bring them here.”  

And on the second Saturday of every year grateful book lovers from miles around rejoice at this “Friendly” tradition.

PHOTOS by Paul Tamburello

Jimmy Heath: Still Bopping at 82

Jimmy Heath Quartet
Scullers Jazz Club
September 20, 2009
(This review was completed on an airplane to France, mis-filed in LaptopLand, now belatedly published)
Second set

It is quite possible that Jimmy Heath and his brother Tootie have been playing jazz more years than you’ve been alive. Good jazz. On their own or with some of the giants of the twentieth century.

To applause of the full house at the second set at Scullers Jazz Club, here saunter two guys in their late twenties/early thirties, one very spry octogenarian and his 74 year old brother. This is the quartet Jimmy Heath’s been on tour with lately. If you’ve paid any kind of attention to jazz in the past half dozen decades, you know the Heath name.

Jimmy announces he’ll open with a piece from Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon suite. “It used to be the theme song of a smoking advertisement. Smoking went out of style but this song is still a happening thing,” he deadpans. Well, it’s happening in a way that you recognize for the first few bars then Jimmy takes his well-worn sax and explores trails into the musical canyon that most musicians couldn’t find with a compass.

The man still loves his music and the business of making it. Big smile as he steps back after his solo to enjoy what the others in the quartet have to say. The brown sport coat he wears fits a little loosely as clothes tend to do as our frames retreat as our age advances. Tootie, in the corner right behind his older brother, sits regally at his drum set as if it were a throne. He sports a red bow tie, white shirt and dark suit - a fashion statement you won’t miss from the back row of Scullers, where I happened to be sitting.

Jeb Patton, whom Jimmy gleefully calls “General” Patton, at keyboard sets expectations for rest of the night high with a wildly imaginative solo and opens the door for standup bass player Corcoran Holt to let it out. By the time what Grofé originally wrote has been genetically altered and returned to its original shape, you figure you’re in for a night of traditional jazz with a distinctively hard bop edge to it. And you get it.

Sometimes Jimmy announces his choice of music, sometimes he doesn’t, which accounts for the sparse documentation below.

The young Turks are on piano and bass. Piano player Patton’s been with Jimmy since he graduated with master’s degree from Queen’s College in Brooklyn, where Jimmy taught music before he retired and took Patton with him on tour. Holt, another protégé, came along later. Jimmy Heath clearly relishes sharing the stage with these two ‘youngsters,’ mindful they’re a living trust that will carry his musical soul well into the twenty first century.

A Billy Strayhorn number is Exhibit A for why Heath was so impressed with Patton. He plays the lovely ballad with light flourishes up and down the keyboard that often stop on a dime and float into keening emotional passages. A whiff of Bill Evans in a melancholy mood, perhaps, but this is all Patton’s signature.  Patton plays with this with elegant, moody restraint.

Heath announces the next song as “Everything Happens To Me,”  Corcoran Holt’s time to shine. Holt bows the ballad with supple tone with Tootie rustling the brushes in accompaniment. Starkly beautiful.

OK, satisfied that we know the quartet can knock mellow out of the park, it’s time for more bop. ’Invitation” jolts the club with up-tempo speedball solos all around. Tootie is tatting expressively. “Invitation” is taken for a wild ride and left at the curb to catch its breath.

Time to slow down again. Jimmy picks up his soprano sax and floats a lovely ballad, Tootie playing just underneath him. Jimmy switches to tenor and the quartet swings with a classic solo swapping finish

Next it’s Tootie Time - a solo with mallets and brushes that percuss muffled thunder off every touchable surface on the man’s drum kit. Halfway through, he gets an idea, holsters the mallets and finds more places to make the drum set talk by using his big hands and fists. By the time “General” Patton gets his solo, it turns into a boogie and stride piano, bass player Holt fingers up and down the neck of his standup bass with nimble speed. Quite a jaunt.

Jimmy announces the last number as “Soul Eyes,” a mid-tempo Mal Waldren composition that goes down real easy. What also goes down so well is watching a legend at work. Jimmy, and Tootie for that matter, have stood on stages all over the world, Jimmy’s 1948 band in Philadelphia included John Coltrane and Benny Golson. He’s played with Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Gil Evans, Art Farmer, and Milt Jackson.

There he is, looking out at the audience over his gold rimmed glasses to see who’s listening out there just beyond the lights of Scullers small stage.  Judging by the twinkle in his eye and the way he listens to Patton, Holt, and his brother, smiling when he hears a new wrinkle in a solo, you’d swear he was just starting out on his career.

 Photo from Jimmy Heath's web site