36 Hours in the South of End

Someone anonymously left a comment on one of my postings regarding not one but two new bistros coming into the building currently under construction at the corner of Washington Street and Union Park in the South of End. Of course, both will have valet parking. How sad that a)apparently the majority of new businesses that keep popping up in the "End" are restaurants, and b) pretentious ones at that. It seems that for every new yuppified restaurant that pops up around here, one of the affordable ones disappears. Of course there are a few affordable restaurants left, but I'm not going to let on as they're hard enough to get into already, they have enough screaming children running about, and if I see another Burberry-clad soccer mom from Wellesley or group of fresh-faced, expense account associates from Ropes and Grey looking extremely out of place here, I'm going to go insane.

It reminded me of an article which appeared in the travel section of the New York Times this summer, entitled "36 Hours in the South End." In the article, they listed a bunch of restaurants (of course) as well as new and noteworthy shops, such as Motley, Turtle, Aunt Sadie's, etc. The problem was that they actually made it sound like there was a thriving retail culture going on here. Usually when the NY Times does one of their 36 Hours reports, one gets the sense that if six stores are listed in the article, there are countless other similar ones in between and that the Times has just selected a few to get you started.

What this particular article failed to mention is that while the stores listed really are great stores (in that they are locally-owned and actually have interesting merchandise), they are pretty much the ONLY stores around. Yep, if you started out at Motley Home, continued onto regular old Motley, then hit Turtle, Aunt Sadie's, Fresh Eggs, and.....wait, I can't think of any others, you'd have a LOT of time to kill to round out 36 hours. Of course you could have brunch, lunch and dinner, but they failed to inform that basically the sidewalks roll up around 10:00 on weeknights. Not counting food, and unless you were missing a few chromosomes, you could probably do the town in more like 36 minutes. Of course you could kill a few hours searching for the perfect heirloom tomato you know where....