Hey, there! Log in / Register
Red eyesore of a defunct chicken place to be replaced with 'Italian-influenced' American restaurant
By adamg on Wed, 04/20/2016 - 11:31am
The Boston Licensing Board decides tomorrow whether to let chef Douglass Williams buy the beer and wine license from the defunct CluckIt so he can open a neighborhood place serving "Italian influenced, American executed" food.
"We love Italy, but we're not bound to it," Williams told the board at a hearing this morning, saying he's looking forward to experimenting with "saucy, crunchy, spicy, charred" noodles and other dishes at the restaurant on Tremont at Mass. Ave.
Samuel Chambers, neighborhood liaison for the mayor's office, offered strong support for the license sale, calling the bright-red exterior of Brian Poe's old CluckIt "an eyesore" that does nothing for the neighborhood in its current shuttered state. Aides to at-large City Councilors Michelle Wu and Ayanna Pressley also supported the proposed license transfer.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
Ad:
Support Universal Hub
Help keep Universal Hub going. If you like what we're up to and want to help out, please consider a (completely non-deductible) contribution.
Comments
Would be great to get
Would be great to get something into that location. It is indeed an eyesore sitting there empty plus helping no one.
So much for the great "If you make it all about the piri-piri,
they will come" experiment. I was always amazed that that concept passed the smell test in that restaurant group.
The new chef/owner comes with some very interesting experience. It's a low bar, but I don't see how he doesn't improve dramatically on Cluckit!
I know there is a map, but...
For those of us who've never heard of Cluck-it, this story lacks the basic "Where the Cluck is it?" info.
505 Massachusetts Ave.,
505 Massachusetts Ave., Boston; 857-250-2999 or cluckitboston.com.
http://www.bostonmagazine.com/restaurants/blog/2015/06/10/estelles-close...
Oops, sorry
Looks like I left the address out of the post. Will add.
It is really too bad...
that a restaurant with the name of "cluckit" went out of business.
Right up there with....
....that place in the North End which lasted a few months and was named after some phony Italian American saying....so bad I can't even remember what it was called, thank God.....fuhgettaboudit?
Got these non Italians
Got these non Italians opening up Italian restaurants in chic neighborhoods, unless you have grown up in an Italian household eating real Italian food cooked by your Italian born mother I'll eat at your restaurant, if some chef says my Italian nana cooked this cooked that while growing up, I don't buy it, when someone says the word nanna , I ask myself , What is a nanna? It certainly does not mean grandmother, the word nanna was created just like the lasagna by Italian Americans sometime in the 1940s .
There are chefs with zero Italian ancestry who can
cook Italian cuisine superbly. There are plenty of chefs with Italian ancestry who are complete hacks. DNA is not destiny in the kitchen.
Actually, "Nanna or Nana"
is a pet name for Grandmother (i.e. like Gran, Grandmama, Granny, Grams, Grammy, etc.) And, yes, it was created (like all words were) but it has been around for quite a while.
I still think fondly
of the short-lived rice pudding place in Coolidge Corner called Pudding It First.
Not just rice pudding!
In fact, I didn't even know that they served rice pudding. We always went for the various bread puddings, like banana bread. The setup was kind of weird and awkward--it felt like a long march to the counter where the servers stared at you impatiently, but the product was great!