Tuesday’s Boston Globe had an article about plans to construct housing on the site of the old Brigham’s ice cream plant in Arlington, the one that tempts you from the Minuteman bike trail.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/12/15/atlanta_developer_buying_brighams_plant_in_arlington/

The lovable guys from New England Capital Partners were always interested in the real estate when they bought everyone’s favorite ice cream company and closed it. Rumors abound over the rough treatment dealt to long term workers by these Masters of Creative Destruction.

Our landlord has revealed himself to be the hardest rockin’ elf in Santa’s workshop and so our building is sporting oversized wreaths. Next year the building will look like Rockefeller Center or parts of Somerville. But this year we are going to change our hours to reflect the fact that everyone has gone home to New Jersey.

On Christmas Eve, Th, De 24, we will be open from 8A>4PM.

On Christmas Day, Fr, De 25, we will be closed. Let’s meet in Chinatown for noodles.

NO BREAKFAST@THEBIG TABLE ON HOLIDAY WEEKENDS

On New Year’s Eve, Th De 31 we will sell Champagne Sorbet from 8AM>4PM.

On New Year’s Day, Fr Ja 1 we will be closed

NO BREAKFAST@THEBIG TABLE ON HOLIDAY WEEKENDS

A final dubious idea came from a friend who suggested that since First Night in Boston was so focused on benign activities for families with young children then Central Square should host raucous events for young adults, which she suggested calling Last Night. Last Night would be loud rock, and a cheap beer tasting by the Central Square subway stop. At midnight a mime would be thrown off a tall building. I said that all of this is offensive. You’ll be happy to know that I spoke in favor of restraint and taste.

Tonight from 6PM to 8PM Gary Strack of Central Kitchen will be pairing
wines with appetizers. At Central Bottle, 196 Mass. Ave. The old
Necco factory, now improved beyond anyone’s dreams.

Dorie Greenspan might be the most famous cookbook editor in the world,
which impresses a few people besides myself. She now has a column in
Parade magazine, the daffy, oddly liberal Sunday supplement that
features Walter Scott, and the wonderfully named Mailyn von Savant.
The magazine has gone wobbly since the death of Shiela Lukins and back
of the book fixture James Brady. Parade might be a mixed media
alternative mashup of Barney Miller and the Saturday Evening Post,
with its table of regular contributors walking onstage and offstage
like characters in a familiar situation comedy. Lukins was one of the
founders of The Silver Palate and handled the foodwriting. Now
Greenspan has been parachuted in. She seems better suited to the
NYTimes Sunday Magazine or Gourmet but this may be steadier work.
Does Pierre Herme agree with baking tips like “Stockpile piecrusts in
the freezer.

So last week my Bush Administration cellphone turned into a turtle
from Woolworth’s and i followed the Sage of Wellelsey’s advice and
bought an iPhone, under the Coolidge-like scrutiny of our company’s
CFO. And within two days I lost it. Somewhere I lost it. Was it in
the pocket of one coat or four others? Was it under my bed or in the
layers of bedding? Was it in one grocery bag full of important papers
or in another reusable grocery bag full of possibly important papers?
Was it stuck between the CD’s I keep in the car -including the
lackluster new Lyle Lovett? Maybe it was in my office so I started
using the store telephone to call my new iPhone. I asked a friend to
call my apartment at 1030PM while I stood stock still and listened for
Steven Jobs-approved chirps. I borrowed a phone and called from my
car and apartment. Nothing. I have heard that there is a clever
“app” that will report your missing phone to your computer, using GPS,
but I didn’t have time to install it. The missing phone itself grew
discouraging. There was a recording saying “The Mailbox is full” and
then there was a more conclusive message that I had not yet set up a
mailbox. A bit of a reproach there. And if the phone wasn’t soon
recharged it would run out of power and i’d have to literally step on
it in order to locate it.

Maybe it was stolen or some other iPhone user had mistakenly taken it
so they could listen to my assortment of Afro Pop, Techno and hip
country music.

Finally I found it in the other truck at Magazine Beach Shell Now I
am forced to contemplate what to do so this search doesn’t become a
weekly event. And I have a sudden respect for those multi-pocketed
jackets that were always in Wired magazine’s Christmas issues. A
little geeky but maybe an integral antenna running up my sleeve would
be helpful. Or i could revive what Bill Cosby called Idiot Mittens,
the long piece of string that prevented grade school kids from losing
their mittens. I also thought about reviving the round your neck
African wallet from those old Panther demonstrations. I may be the
wrong person for this clever device.

The We De 2 issue of the Harvard Crimson has an article by Julia Ryan
reporting that a new cafe may take over the location of Z Square. The
Grafton Group already operate Grafton Street, Temple Bar and the
Redline in Cambridge.

Meanwhile Charles Kelsey will NOT be opening a hip food truck in
Cambridge. Kendall Square already has the well-regarded Clover Food
truck hidden away behind the Kendall Square subway stop, and other
cities have well-known examples of good food food being served from
trucks. Kelsey will be opening Cutty’s in Brookline, serving
breakfast and lunch, in a traditional storefront. In a Boston Globe
article he says “I had so much support from nearby businesses, but the
Cambridge bureaucracy is tough. I felt as if I was trying to open a
gun store in Cambridge. That’s how I felt I was treated. It was
hilarious. I do respect their decision. Cambridge has a huge problem
with filling retail space, and they feel an obligation to fill that
first before putting stuff on the street.”

If the city wants to protect landlords and restaurants it should pay
more attention
to the ever-expanding activities of Harvard Dining.

Food and Wine and its website, FoodandWine.com name our Main St.
neighbor one of the best restaurants in the world. Oleana and Hungry
Mother are also on their list.

It has not been much of a secret that Joanne Chang is looking for a
Cambridge location for a third Flour Bakery Cafe. Now the biweeklies
are reporting the idea that she may come to Central Square or Kendall
Square.

Emerge is a global charity that helps women recover from abuse. The
organization grew out of the long crisis in Sri Lanka. They are
having their Christmas jewelery sale in Lobby 10 from We De 2 to>Fr
De4, 9am-4pm in Lobby 10 at MIT. Lobby 10 is an address you could
only find at MIT.

The annual New Yorker food issue is still at your doctor’s office, and
it is good enough, if not up to past food issues. My favorite
contained a photo of Gordon Ramsay holding a lamb while looking like
Hannibal Lecter’s Scottish cousin. This year Raffi Khatchadourian has
a long article about artificial flavors. “Vanillin was synthesized in
1874 by two German scientists from a molecule found in coniferous
trees. Today vanilla is the world’s most popular flavor, and
thousands of tons of vanillin are synthesized from industrial
petrochemical and waste from the production of wood pulp. (It is
possible to extract it even from cow dung, as Japanese chemists
demonstrated in 2006.) There is no molecular distinction between
synthesizd vanillin or vanillin extracted from vanilla beans.”

Those Japanese scientists earned a coveted IgNobel Award for that
achievement. And Toscanini’s, while unable to obtain any of the new
flavor, made an ice cream in homage to those scientists and those
cows. It was served -in the middle of a paper airplane storm- to real
Nobel Prize winners at Harvard’s Memorial Hall.

The newer November 30 issue of The New Yorker is full of surprises.
John Lahr reviews “In the Next Room or Vibrator Play,” as well as a
revival of Finians’ Rainbow. Mike Sacks’ “My parents, Enid and Sal,
Used to be Porn Stars” is very funny. A long piece by Ariel Levy is
concerned with a South Africa woman runner and the issue of gender
identity. It is a very long New Yorker story, similar in effect to a
long summer sermon. Finally The Talk of the Town includes a piece on
the Mr. Skin website and the revelations to be gained from revisiting
old movies now available in Blu Ray format.

This issue does not have a name but maybe it is The Sex Issue

Texas Monthly is always better looking than The New Yorker and much
more democratic. The December 2009 issue has a wonderful cover story
on small town Dance Halls. There is also a puffy piece on Houston
Mayor Bill White that people in the northeast should probably read so
they won’t be surprised.