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You can take the boy out of Boston, but ...
By adamg on Wed, 05/11/2022 - 12:09pm
Labor Secretary Marty Walsh is in South Korea for the inauguration of the country's new president. Seoul made him feel right at home:
Success. pic.twitter.com/9o2veUNb3S
— Dan Koh (@dank) May 11, 2022
And if the name of the tweeter sounds familiar, yes, that is Dan Koh, Walsh's first chief of staff at City Hall and now his chief of staff at Labor.
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Comments
Love to support tiny mom and
Love to support tiny mom and pop shops like Dunkin, a subsidiary of Inspire Brands Inc! Global homogenization is so charming =)
They used to be local...
They used to be local...
In Japan...
... not many Dunkin Donut stores, but lots of their rival sibling chain, Mister Donut (apparently now both are owned by the same international conglomerate).
Local friendly rivals back in the day
If I recall correctly when Dunkin Donuts & Mr Donut were nothing but local chains they were each owned by men who were brothers-in-law. Mr Donut sold franchises or otherwise licensed them in places like Japan, Korea & The Philippines and some still remain there while here they merged together and all the Mr Donuts became Dunks.
Hey, lets be fair about the major cultural differences here!
Here in the States, we can't get a treat from a subsidiary of Inspire Brands Inc that's branded with the popular characters from a subsidiary of Nintendo, Inc!
Once Again, I Will Ask...
Is your bike built in Cambridge with locally sourced products?
Get me the names of all those "Mom and Pop" aluminum mines and smelters, rubber plantations, steel factories, that make up your tricycle components when you have a chance. Thanks.
Oh shut your hecc already
No
Snark gets met with snark. Simple as that.
Snark is intelligent
Have you spoken to your mental health professional about your obsession with a one-dimensional internet projection known as Kinopio?
Get Me A Name
Based on your hysteria over the years I'm sure your contact list has a few dozen of them which you use.
You need to talk to your care providers
Referral networks vary by insurance and by primary care provider.
p.s. I'm not paying rent for any internet persona, real or imaginary, in your damaged frontal lobe.
OK, both of you
Please, stop.
But ….
I didn’t get a chance to say anything!!!
:)
*yawns*
*yawns*
How much rent are you charging this "Vision of Kinopio" to take up your entire damaged frontal lobe?
Classic Marty
Pretending to be Mr. Local while oozing up to conglomerates and big money.
I'm surprised he didn't find a drive-through.
Personally I find being able
Personally I find being able to find imported Korean foods all over Boston to be very charming.
Does Walsh have
Does Walsh have really big hands, or is that a really small cup?
Yes
.
Marty
Is Marty married? That looks like a wedding ring?
Long time girlfriend
They've never called themselves husband and wife as far as I'm aware.
But they've been in a committed relationship for almost 2 decades.
Rumor has it...
He's now desperately searching for an Applebee's for dinner.
Applebees?
Don't you mean a Ninety-Nine?
ninety nine
Most definitely.
Applebees started as "TJ Applebee's" in Atlanta in the early 1980s. So not Boston.
I would have figured him a
I would have figured him a ground round guy. Or maybe Boston Chicken.
Uno's!
Local, but probably not Marty's thing.
Local?
Uno's is strongly Chicago-identified ... unless it is now based here.
Edited: Norwood. Odd, as I didn't think Boston considered a deep dish casserole to be worthy of the term "pizza".
Uno's has been here for 40+ years
It was started by someone from Chicago but the first franchises and the corporation itself has been based out of Boston since 1978.
It's kinda the inverse of "Boston Pizza", a Canadian pizza franchise with no relationship to this city.
Ah Boston Pizza
My brother lives in rural Alberta and it is the "fancy" pizza place.
Ain't too bad, actually. They do understand what a thin crust is and their toppings are decent. Certainly a notch above Papa Ginos.
Ain't anything close to my local favorites, but we are spoiled for good local pizza.
I believe the original Uno's in Chicago
is independent of the chain and still good. I remember it fondly from many years ago (I did my gap year in Chicago, have some family roots there), as well as its sequel Pizzeria Due. The concept of Chicago-style pizza was radical and fun and delicious, if staggering; I quite enjoyed it.
The franchise, on the other hand, went from okay to dire over a period of years. The last one I went to, prompted by a $5 coupon and now mercifully closed, was at the Burlington Mall. The agita from that personal-sized pie/casserole, oof. It was replaced by a Frank Pepe's, which suffers in comparison to the New Haven originals, but is rather more decent. MBAs and restaurants are a terrible tandem.
I have fond memories of what Dunks used to be. Favorite memory was my kid sister and me, maybe 11 and 14, routinely sneaking out of the house at 2am to walk a mile to the Dunks in the Nowhere Masshole Town where we grew up for coffee and crullers. There's another example of chain-y decline. Those donuts, made in the shop from a variety of batters, were awesome, and are unspeakable now, all made in central locations from a single shitty dough base. The coffee no longer speaks to me, either. Sic transit gloria.
Not sure if we ever got to the original Uno's in Chicago...
... but we did go to Due's -- which was quite good. However, there were places called Giordano's and Edwardo's (started by people who had worked for Uno's) close to our home -- and they were good enough that it didn't warrant going further afield for the same sort of pizza. Nowadays, however, I stick to thin crust pizza.
My memory is that the pizzas at Uno
and Due were equally good, but the original was a much tougher table. I also remember a bunch of amazing meals in Greek Town, notably at The Greek Islands. I was awed to once stand in line there behind Studs Terkel, didn't have the nerve to speak to him about how much I enjoyed "Working".
Chicago in general was a big culinary eye-opener for a kid from small-town MA with no prior experience of German, Slovakian, Puerto Rican, and a host of other traditional cuisines, never mind local specialties like the weird pizza, Chicago dogs or Italian beef. The only traditional cuisine I'd had to that point (outside of Mom's bland, mid-century-American home cooking, meats all cooked well, vegetables all boiled into pale, mushy submission, sweet paprika considered spicy*) was the result of cadging invites to the homes of friends for their grandmothers' Azorean or Portuguese-mainland cuisine. Chicago truly birthed my food geekery.
* No shade intended on Mom. She fed a huge family on a very tight budget and the wan ingredients our local grocer stocked. We never went hungry. She made dessert every night, usually a Jello pudding or a Jiffy cake: you finished the casserole of the day or no dessert, a very effective incentive.
Chicago dining
>> Chicago truly birthed my food geekery.
Same for me. So many "exotic" restaurants. One of our favorites (long gone, I'm sure) was the Golden Bull (Hungarian -- so far north it was almost Evanston). Another was the Golden Shell (Croatian -- so far south it was almost Indiana). Incredible Mexican restaurants. So many others.
I used to think Los Angeles was
a culinary wasteland. I was there on business, eating at fancy places, utterly unimpressed. Underfed entertainment-industry types pushing prettily-plated, expensive, unextraodinary food around on their plates.
Then I discovered my food-writing hero Jonathan Gold at the alt-weekly LA Times, and learned that LA was a giant trove of obscure-to-me traditional cuisines catering to small pockets of immigrants from all over, notably Asia and the Americas. You just had to get out to the remote neighborhood strip malls where ex-pat chefs were cooking for their own ex-pat folks.
Chicago definitely had a bit of that going with its older legacy of immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, including my own great-grandfather.
I wonder how much is left....
... of these "legacy restaurants" in Chicago now ... 30+ years later.
Amazing places tucked into neighborhood strip malls (and/or in the middle of nowhere). One finds these every now and then.
It's not...it's gross.
It's not...it's gross.
Apropos of nothing
Dan Koh must have gotten in on twitter early to get such an awesome handle as @dank.
October 2008 according to his
October 2008 according to his profile
I bet
I bet the donuts were bigger and better there than there at most Boston area dunkin donuts.
I used to travel for work and always sought out Dunks is there was one nearby where I was (sorry Starbucks is gross). Every time I was in an area that didn't have a large DD presence... the donuts were always bigger, better, and fresher. Every time.
It really puts our DD's to shame how bad they really are now.
Someone posted this pic to twitter and I was like "WHERE IS THIS DUNKIN DONUTS" cuz I haven't seen a stocked case (or a case like that itself) like this since the 1980s. Person was like all of them closed around there 25+ years ago, and this was the remaining one. Its so old, he says it had counter seating at one point that was replaced by the Baskin Robbins ice cream counter.
So where is it?
You know
You know.. I never found out where.
I think in Tennessee or some place down south.
That's what DD used to be
That's what DD used to be like when each store baked all of it's own products. Now it's done at a big commissary kitchen and they're gross.
Dunkin’ Donuts’ new spokesperson?
Doesn’t Biden pay him enough?
You’d think as Secretary of Labor he could do something about that.
I thought he was a Doughboy
Donuts supporter when he was in office- Dunkin seems so corporate compared to Doughboy- that wonderful 24 hour shop right across from the T garage in Southie.
It's a long walk
from Seoul to Doughboy.
Jeez, lighten up, folks
You have to admit, seeing a Dunks all the way over in S. Korea would be a bit of a shock and Insta-worthy.