Boston Anniversary Trip Pt 2

The rest of our trip to Boston was filled with drinking beer (mostly Sam Adams), eating delicious food, and just leisurely walking around Boston, seeing the sites, and people watching. My digital camera broke, so I had to take all my pictures on my cell phone camera. Kudos to BlackBerry for giving me a decent camera.

Sunset Grille & Tap: 380 beers in bottles and 112 on tap. Mostly microbrews and most I’ve never heard of. They had beers that were 22%, came in 750ml bottles, and cost $30. They even had a tabletop tap (which we did not order). It was a 4 foot cylinder filled with 116oz of beer and a tap at the bottom. It was awesome.

We started with an Alagash White (I didn’t like it but the wife did) and a Hazed & Infused IPA. It was tasty, a bit hoppy, but nice and cold. Then came the food. I ordered the Sunset Buffalo burger with buffalo sauce, blue cheese, jalapeno slices, red onion, lettuce, and fries. When the burger arrived, it was larger than I expected. Nice and juicy and cooked just the way I like it. The sauce had a wicked kick to it, and the jalapenos added to it. I love spicy food, and this was good. However, it did not pair well with my beer. Any of them.


The wife ordered some sort of chicken fajita quesadilla. It came out looking like a mass of food on a plate, just kind of plopped on there. To me, it didn’t have much taste to it, and you could taste too much of the grill on the chicken. Nothing special, and I wouldn’t order it again.


These are two more of the beers we had. The wife had an organic Sam Smith’s, and I had something that was supposed to be a red lager (in my mind, similar to Killian’s), but was not even close. It was much darker, closer to a stout, and went horribly with my buffalo burger.


I’ll try to breeze through the rest of the trip. Breakfast in Quincy market: Bacon, egg & cheese on an English muffin with hot sauce. Delicious. And, a coffee from Starbucks, or, as the wife calls it, Starfucks.


After breakfast, we hoped on the T and went down to the Sam Adams Brewery and took the tour. Free beer before lunch. Awesome. They even are growing some of their own hops right outside the building. We got to sample 3 beers, and I bought a t-shirt.

Lunch was at the Purple Shamrock. This restaurant/pub is less than a block outside Quincy Market. What drew us to this place? Several people informed us that they usually have live music on Saturday nights, but it was still the afternoon. So instead, we stopped in for $10 lobsters! Yup, she made me wear the bib.


Later in the day, it starting pouring as we were walking through the open air market just south of the North End. So, we hid out in the Hard Rock Café. No pictures, but we got this huge appetizer platter. It was around $19 and had southwester egg rolls, potato skins, wings, onion rings, chicken tenders, and several sauces. For an over priced tourist trap like Hard Rock, it was good. That night, we went to the Improv Asylum. If you're ever in Boston and want to laugh your ass off, check out this club.

On Sunday, we did breakfast in Quincy Market again. This time we went for some sort of breakfast burrito. It really wasn’t that great. It didn’t have a lot of flavor, but I think the tortilla was freshly made, which made up for some of the other lacking ingredients. After that, we spent some time shopping.


We stopped at the country’s oldest tavern, The Bell in Hand. It was opened in 1795 by the retired town crier of Boston directly across the street from the Union Oyster House, the country’s oldest restaurant. They have their own ale there. We had a pint (or 2). It was very similar to Sam Adams Boston Lager.


Then we went walking around the North End (a.k.a. Little Italy). We would have stopped for food, but the few places that were actually open on Sunday were these fancy looking little family owned restaurants, and we were not dressed for the occasion, nor were we looking for a heavy pasta-filled meal. So, we ended up at Joe’s American Bar & Grille.

By this time I was so hungry I never actually took a picture of the food. However, the blackened chicken Caesar salad was good. It was fairly large and well seasoned. The chicken was a bit dry and it could have used more dressing. The pan fried mozzarella was delicious. And of course, the Sam Adams was cool and refreshing. Having successfully completed the Boston Triathlon (chowda, lobsta, and beeya) and running low on funds, we headed home.