It has been a great week to travel around Boston. Spring has finally come in full force with pleasant days and (more importantly) warm evenings. We decided to get out of the city and go South to Quincy Center to see what we could find.
So, we got on the T during the evening rush (standing room only cars) and arrived in Quincy Center around 7:00 p.m. Much to our surprise, everybody else on the T was getting off at that stop as well, crowding the platform and the escalator on their way out to their cars in the adjacent parking lot and to the streets of one the hippest little district in the metro area.
A quick right out of the station brings you to Quincy Town Hall with a tree-lined park. There is a statue of one of my favorite founding fathers, John Adams, to welcome all to the town that bears his son's name.
As a history nut, one of my favorite things to find are old Revolutionary Era cemeteries and was delighted to find, not two minutes from the station, Hancock Cemetery. The arch above the entrance gate proclaims "The Mortal Shall Put on Mortality." The cemetery is the final resting place for the men of Quincy in the American Revolution as well as John Quincy Adams. A little morbid but otherwise fascinating.
After a quick stroll through the cemetery (my companion was a little creeped out) we wandered into the cluttered bar/restaurant district. The Granite Trust building dominates the square ("An Old Bank With A Young Spirit" printed on the ground at the entrance) and the road splits. We took a left, mostly because we saw a hopping little restaurant called The Fat Cat.
Apparently, this is the place to eat in Quincy. The place was bursting at the seams, we could not even make it in the door. A return visit will be in order to see what all the fuss is about.
So, we turned back down the street, passed Sully's bar and turned the corner where we found a local, a middle-aged man named Fred. He gave us a quick rundown of the area.
"Bunch of great places around here. Good food at Fat Cat. Sully's is for the old guys, Tully's is a little shady," Fred said. He was headed to the bar next to Tully's called The Granite Rail. "Stay out of Tully's or you will get kicked out of the Rail. They can tell if you've been there."
Seemed like some good advice.
We continued our trek around the main drag and were astonished to find that there is a bar or restaurant every ten steps in Quincy Center. A fair amount of Irish Pubs (Finnian's, Clash of the Ash) and ethic (Fuji 1546, Terra Brasili's) eateries mixed with an inordinate amount of hair and nail salons and a couple boutiques.
The further went from the T station though, the more we noticed that the falling economy has hit Quincy just as hard as everybody else. It is a town that reached the saturation point of bars and fine restaurants which means that interspersed with the hopping establishments are the closed, empty shells of former brethren. Among the victims we found were Elegante Boutique, Trattoria Alba, Tusos Pizza Euro Cafe and The Holy Ground.
We looked for a place for a pint and an appetizer and eventually found our way to a funky little bar called Blue 22 Bar and Grille, which we will focus on in another post.
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