• There’s no review from Vettel this week, so to flesh out today’s Tribune roundup we’ll dip into The Stew for Chris Borrelli’s First Bite take (blah blah, not a real review) on The Bristol. It’s only been open for a few weeks, and while Borrelli is a little underwhelmed by the decor (“the overall impression is, sort of, um, how do I put this… the overall impression is brown. No, beige.”) the food is an explosive success. The quirky, varied menu runs almost entirely perpendicular to expectations: instead of a BLT, it’s an ELT (that’s for “eel”), breakfast radish with whipped goat butter, even the much-discussed monkey bread all turn the quickly-becoming-staid notion of a gastropub on its ear. It is also quite intriguing to us that Borrelli posted this to The Stew at 3am, and yet it is remarkably devoid of both typos and beer-induced declarations of his love for us.
• Besides her somewhat gut-churning piece this morning on the city’s health inspectors, Monica Eng is also curious about salted caramel. Namely, where can she get the best version of it? She hits up Starbucks (for their salted-caramel hot chocolate, which we have not yet mentioned to MP:Boston editor Leila, but which we are 100% sure will cause her to make a loud noise at her desk), Hub 51 (for some intensely flavorful butterscotch pudding with salted caramel sauce), and Hot Chocolate (for the chocolate tart served with salted caramel ice cream and pretzels). All are hits. Because salted caramel is scientifically impossible to make un-delicious. We’ll prove it if you promise us a Nobel.
• Trine Tsouderos pays a visit to old favorite Kuma’s Corner for the Cheap Eats column, and the venerable temple of burgers and death metal rates high praise: 3 (out of 4) forks, bogged down by some inconsistent service. Tsouderos quite brilliantly brought along her 81-year-old father in law, because Kuma’s serves family-friendly death metal burgers.
• Tsouderos is also on the what the heck do marathoners eat beat, rounding up her friends to consume super-gross-sounding liquid-jellies and bars in the name of journalistic inquiry. We think the fact that she used highly competitive athletes as her sounding boards skewed the trial, though, because those people are insane and therefore we do not trust their palates.*
*Excepting Laurent Gras of L.2O, who apparently cycles hundreds of miles a week.
[Photo: The Iron Maiden burger at Kuma’s, via sgt fun’s Flickr]
