Bad news for people who drive to New York
By adamg - Fri, 01/04/2008 - 11:29am.
... The chicken salad was disgusting! It had a ton of dark meat, the portion was skimpy (but who cares bc it was gross) and the roll was not the freshest. It was not the chicken salad we have had so many times before!! ...
- Add new comment |
| 
| 
Say it ain't so!
I depend on that for (re-)entry to NY style food when driving to and from the city.
By the way, why can't someone produce NY style rye bread in Boston? I bring back loaves from Orwasher's on East 78th Street -- double-seeded rye, of course. (I've long ago given up the Yankees for the Red Sox, but I can't let go of the rye bread. It is a childhood memory. Especially during the evening after Thanksgiving dinner, when it is the best for turkey sandwiches, with lots of mayo.)
I've been depressed ever since ...
Bagels Bagels Bagels and More in Framingham closed, cutting off my supply of real meat knishes (not the pasty horse pills that pass for meat knishes around here) - trucked in from Oceanside, LI, no less.
But yes, a good rye is worth its weight in gold ...
Uh oh. I always get a reuben
Uh oh. I always get a reuben at Rein's when I drive to NY. It's going to be very disappointing to deal with the line and the slow service if the food isn't going to be amazing.
Maybe just an off day
There's now a reply to that original post that says Rein's is just as good as ever.
I dunno, settling the issue might involve a field trip ...
Boston Blogger Road Trip???
Perhaps we could rent a van?
There's an idea
Is that restaurant/book store still open down thataway? If so, would be a good place to go if Rein's proves a bust.
Minivan
Seats seven.
Huh
I lived a ten minute drive from there for about 19 years.
I've never actually gone inside, nor understood the following it has until just now.
warp in the space-time continuum
I went through MA and PhD at Storrs. When a friend from Manchester CT took me to Reins, it boggled my mind. What was it doing there in the middle of nowhere in northern CT? It seemed so lost.
I think it may be a warp in the space-time continuum -- perhaps the same one that sucked up part of the Bronx, threw it in the woods, and called it Willimantic.
Living just down the road from UCONN
The number of culinary choices was so limited, that a journey to the Buckland Food Court was leap and bounds beyond anything I could experience at home.
I do have a soft spot for the now-departed Paul's Pizza though, but I should point out that Kathy John's is terrible now. Absolutely awful.
As for Willimantic, it has been, and will be one of those cities without hope. Anytime I feel discouraged about a neighborhood around Boston I just quietly say "At least it's not Willi."
Willimantic
Never been there, but the Wikipedia page and this and this make it sound like a quirky place with unusual local traditions. How bad can a town of only 16,000 people be, anyway?
One word: Heroin
The city has lots, and lots and lots of it. Roving bands of citizens needed to pick up dirty needles and all that.
It's not the worst place in the world, but it's not too great, either.
I was in willimantic just
I was in willimantic just last week. it has its ups and downs, and it's relatively up right now. the food co-op expanded into a nicer space -- this may have happened ages ago, but I just saw it, and was impressed. and I had a wonderful lunch at the brewing co.. too bad about the hard drugs, etc.
I grew up in coventry, and mallratted in manchester, so I can say with some certainty that willimantic was always bizarrely out of place in that part of connecticut. it's been on the cusp of being a viable downtown for as long as I can remember.
sad to hear about rein's, and kathy john's. my mom tells me that caprilands sucks now, too.
Follow the links...
Small Town, Big-Time Heroin Use
Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of nice things about Willi. It has lots of lovely Victorian houses, a great brewpub, a decent co-op, and ECSU, where I taught briefly. But it also has street gangs, murders, arson, teenage prostitutes, and rivers of heroin running through it all. And in a town of only 16,000 people, that doesn't leave much.
So you remember the big fire?
I ate there the very first time I went to NYC, back in the NYC=thrilling scary place for an 19-year-old rube days. We ate at the temporary location while they rebuilt. I had a client in New Britain and my coworkers and I would eat there on the way back. I also would leave Boston early and hit it for dinner on my way to DC when my dad was there for a year, as well as on trips to friends in Roanoke and Winston-Salem.
Sorry to hear that it has gone downhill. Management change?
The Rein's fire
I remember the fire very well, and it seemed like it would take forever for them to rebuild. Maybe I was just young and didn't fully appreciate the passage of time, but it seemed for a while as though it would never re-open.
Building the temporary Rein's
Only eight days - 1990.
Amazing
I know the old building remained a gutted shell for ages.
Day 10
We were on one of our DC trips where we left work early and hit the road ahead of Boston traffic but behind Hartford. We got there, found it burned out, and followed the directions to the "new location". No decor up as yet, mismatched dishes, but the food was Reins all the way.
I was stunned to find out it had burned only a few days earlier.
According to my Jewish mother ...
According to my (Jewish) mother, Rein's stopped being good in the past year or two and she no longer insists on stopping there on trips to NYC. In fact, when I suggested stopping there the last time we were on that route together about a year ago, she gave me quite a lecture on why she wouldn't go and exactly what she disliked about it: There's not enough meat in the sandwiches any more (a requirement for deli mavens) and the quality of the food has fallen off considerably. She said that the last few times she was there, the food was "terrible." I think that makes it official.
Wait, Adam,
did you say Oceanside? That's where I grew up. For years, I thought that was the only Nathan's. It wasn't till I was 20 that I learned there was "another one" at Coney Island.
Anyway, I can't tell you how many times I stopped at Rein's with the girls on my soccer team going to and/or coming back from Memorial Day tournaments in Connecticut. You would be amazed how many pickles can be eaten by 18 15-year-old girls after playing two days of soccer. And, as Cynical notes, they would swallow those extra large sandwiches like they were going out of style. I am sorry to hear that they may, in fact, have gone out of style.
Ah, Oceanside
Wait a minute: You grew up on the South Shore and were a Yankees fan? Just doesn't make sense :-). Wasn't there a kiddie amusement park in Oceanside? I seem to recall it from our brief foray into suburbia (Woodmere and Atlantic Beach).
Nathan's is a place of mystery - It wasn't until after I'd graduated college that my father initiated me into their secret dining room in Coney Island (who knew they had one?).
A bit closer to (present) home, what about Joan and Ed's? Back when our office was in Framingham, I used to spend a fair amount of time there, but I remember some people just couldn't stand the place, at least in its Shoppers World incarnation.
I lived in Caldor's parking lot,
well, right next to it in Framingham (Lord Chesterfield apartments -- there's a misnomer!) for a year when I was in college, but somehow never made it a few hundred yards over to Joan and Ed's.
There was an kiddie amusement park on Sunrise Highway, but in Baldwin or Freeport. I often rode that carousel. You could grab the brass ring only if you knew which horses to ride. Other horses would never go up high enough at the right point in the carousel's rotation.
There was also a traveling carnival that would park itself behind Nathan's once a year.