Right now the thing to do is to mock bad, shoddy, elaborately designed, noisy, pompous, or otherwise destined-to-make-your-laptop-explode restaurant websites. But sometimes a restaurant’s site is so odd, so curious, so charmingly out of step … that it’s good. This morning we stumbled upon the website for the Pillar House, the legendary Newton blue-hair emporium that closed back in 2001 (and had its heyday in about 1975). Weirdly, the restaurant’s site is frozen in time. From the looks of it, we could dial up an OpenTable connection on Prodigy, make a reservation for this evening, and look forward to a very nice souffle. It was the type of spot where Don Draper might have wooed a lady friend over oysters Rockefeller or chicken Diane; a place where three-drink lunches were customary and every meal concluded with a complimentary red rose. The place was in business since 1952, and the website remains charmingly untouched; it’s like discovering Mrs. Havisham, sitting primly at the bar, nursing an ice-cold martini. Check it out. [Pillar House]
