Only Beautiful Food, and Beautiful Wine, at B&G Oysters, Boston

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Only Beautiful Food, and Beautiful Wine, at B&G Oysters, Boston

Posted 10/02/2008 at 09:41 AM by Cathy

What if we spent our lives eating only beautiful food?

(This, I wondered as we ate dinner last week at B&G Oysters.)

I'm not talking about food that is made to look beautiful on the plate. I'm talking about food that looks beautiful "in person" and then is still identifiable as that food when it is presented on a plate.

I'm talking about food that J. Ruth Gendler would have recognized 25 years ago when she wrote this about Intuition in The Book of Qualities:

[Intuition] doesn't cook much. She eats beautiful foods, artichokes, avocadoes, persimmons and pomegranates, wild rice with wild mushrooms, chrysanthemum tea. She doesn't have many possessions. Each thing is special. I wish you could see the way she arranged her treasures on the fireplace mantle. She has a splendid collection of cups, bowls, and baskets.

The staff at B&G Oysters are on to beautiful food.

The artichoke that's at the top of Gendler's Intuition list also makes the list of B&G's appetizers.

The artichoke is beautiful "in person." Parts of its anatomy are called the heart and the bud, and it is sometimes planted for its bright floral display of bold foliage and large purple flowerheads.

The beauty of the artichoke is still identifiable, especially at B&G Oysters, on the plate. It takes some getting to. The bottoms of the petals are still intact; pluck them one by one. The heart of the artichoke lies buried, as it does in nature, and that is where the treasure lies.

Along the way, petal by petal and bit by bit of the heart, B&G gives you (gifts you) Parmiggiano aioli for dipping. It is extraordinary. And it is one of the few foods beautiful and complementary enough on its own to pair with the artichoke.

Which leads me to the wine.

What wine goes with artichokes?

Not many, according to the experts who consider artichokes one of the most difficult foods to pair. The cynarin in artichokes tends to make wines taste saccharin-sweet.

But... What wine goes with artichokes when they are presented as beautifully as they are at B&G Oysters?

Something beautiful. Of course.

The 2005 Roquefort Corail Rosé was beautiful, in its color and its nose and its body, and in the way it enhanced the already-beautiful artichoke and aioli. Not too aggressive, not too sweet. Just side by side, companionably, with no one taking the lead.

It was also beautiful in that place, on that night, with those people around me.

What if we all dined, and drank, this beautifully every night?

Just imagine.

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About the Author

Cathy Huyghe

Cathy Huyghe writes about drinking wine every day in the Boston area. She finds the quirky characters, the after-hours events, and the surprising stories that make up Boston's vibrant local wine scene. But no matter where she is, what she's doing, or who she's with, she mostly just wants to drink the stuff.

Her first restaurant gig was at Chez Panisse, when she knocked on the kitchen's back door and asked if she could work there. She's also worked for Jean-Pierre Vigato in Paris and Thomas Keller in Las Vegas. She went to graduate school at Harvard (twice), and her writing has run in Boston magazine, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Edible Boston, and on Nevada Public Radio and Grist.org.

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