Year 2, Day 311: Place Too Eat!

Though I ate very badly in my 30s, my college years were worse— fraught with bad eating. While mostly this can be blamed on poor food choices I made, a small amount of the blame must be placed on what was available. Many of the eating establishments in close proximity served only the worst, carb-laden greasy foods like steak'n'cheese subs and pizza, and the university food was hardly worthy of the university or of the name 'food.' We often sought out McDonald's for warm, cheap comfort food, and sometimes if the rent wasn't due, we'd treat ourselves to a place called Deli Haus in Kenmore Square. Though we often ate there at 1 or 2 in the morning, Breakfast was the must-order meal, and among the pages of the breakfast menu, the "Beat the Haus" special was king. It had four eggs, sausage (or bacon) french toast and toast (or bagel) and coffee. It was one of the pleasures of my life to eat that with ketchup on the eggs, butter on the toast, and the sausages soaking in the imitation maple syrup.

Breakfast
Kashi Go Lean!
Heritage Flakes
Ikea Muesli
Blueberries
Banana
Unsweetened Soy Milk
Coffee

Lunch: Russo's ($5.51)
Romaine, red pepper, red onion, feta
chicken, broccoli, mushrooms, broccoli slaw
balsamic vinegar, pepperocini

Snack
1 oz Boston Lite Popcorn
4 Beef Jerky Sticks

Dinner:
Tuna (black and blue)
Bok Choy
String Beans
Assorted Blue Ribbon Meat

On the other side of Kenmore Square, across the Mass Pike, their lay another neighborhood where I lived, called Audobon Circle. It was a little residential enclave whose claim to fame was that it sat in the shadow of the evil trifecta of Fenway Park, The Mass Pike and Boston University. Aside from that, it was awash in strange cars, as it bordered Brookline, whose draconian no-overnight-parking-rules drove its more parking-challenged residents to seek solace on the more friendly (but more crime-prone) Boston streets. The food scene in Audobon Circle in the early 80s was uniformly poor. The restaurants and even Pizza shops were among the worst I have ever encountered. Taurus was a Greek sub shop whose buns were greasy before anything went in them. Ta Chien II was a Chinese Restaurant whose close-to-edible cuisine convinced me that their name was French, not Chinese in origin (For those who don't speak French, "Ta Chien" translates to "Your Dog." I'm not kidding, look it up). Despite the existence of these two restaurants, there still was one place worse, and that was the even-more-poorly name "Place Too Eat!" I'm not adding anything, its marquee sign had the exclamation point. Of all the dingy, greasy, unappealing sub shops I have ever had the pleasure and dyspepsia to find myself in, this one really took the cake. While Taurus and Ta Chien II needed multiple visits for me to conclude their food was unfit for even college students, Place Too Eat! convinced me in only one. It didn't help that my one and only conversation with the staff started and ended like this:

Me: What's good here?
PTE!: Everything.

After a decade, things turned around for Audobon circle. The B&D Deli opened up a second store (which crashed and burned, leading them to eventually go out of business) but then that location was taken over by an Irish Bar with a name I can't spell OR pronounce that's still there. A fantastic eponymous restaurant also opened up where there was once a liquor store of ill-repute. Taurus was replaced by a sushi restaurant called Ginza, in its second restaurant, and Ta Chien was replaced by a series of equally bad Chinese Restaurants until the curse of that location was broken in the late 90s by the arrival of the Elephant Walk, one of the greatest restaurants in Boston or any city, which is still there today. Place Too Eat! was ignominiously replaced by an ROTC walk-in center. And that's all I have to say about that.