We're approaching the holidays, with their annual dining rite: the splurge meal. What’s a splurge meal? It’s the super-fancy meal we can’t afford, the one with pomp and ceremony and the extra calories and courses that we don’t need on a regular basis. The industry term for a splurge meal is “special-occasion dining,” but that prim phrase misses the joyfulness of the meal. It’s not just a special event; it’s a party. And when I want to celebrate, I’m willing to splurge. But when I do splurge — on food, wine, or with dollars — I expect to be coddled, sated, and given a glow that lasts for days. The responsibility of the splurge meal is to exceed expectations, expense be damned.In truth, dinner at splurge restaurants — L’Espalier, Radius, Locke-Ober, Clio, Restaurant L, and Aujourd’hui, to name a few — isn’t more expensive than it is at upscale bistros like No. 9 Park, Via Matta, Hamersley’s Bistro, and Rialto, by the time all tallies are in (though your expectation is that it will be). The cost of the meal is only one aspect of splurging. A hush surrounds the table as you take your chair, and ordering your food seems a serious matter to you and the staff. Splurge dining can be boisterous and fun, but it’s the anticipation that it’s going to be memorable that separates a splurge meal from an excellent one at a more-casual restaurant. When you go out for a special-occasion meal, full of anticipation and dressed to the nines, you expect everything — from the heft of the menu to the starch in the tablecloth — to feed your sense that tonight’s dinner will be “an event.”
I started thinking about splurge meals as I was browsing through Gourmet’s annual roster of the top-50 restaurants in the country. It’s a pretty spectacular list; many of the places on it are absolute splurges by anyone’s calculation. Only two Boston restaurants made the cut this year: Barbara Lynch’s No. 9 Park (at number 43) and Lydia Shire’s Locke-Ober, rated a stellar number 18.
Of course, both chef/owners are Boston-bred women with restaurants only blocks apart. But then I started thinking about their differences. No. 9 Park is close to perfection. Gastronomically, it’s the height of fine dining. I’m guessing that many more Stuff@night readers have been to No. 9 Park than to Locke-Ober, and are more familiar with Lynch’s food and legacy than with Shire’s. That’s not a bad thing — Lynch is a superlative chef and restaurateur. But if you’re a Bostonian and you haven’t been to Locke-Ober under Lydia Shire, you should. The editors at Gourmet are on to something: Locke-Ober is one of the few fine restaurants in Boston that could only be in Boston. The look, the classic menu, the chef, the history — as Shire says, “Locke-Ober oozes Boston.”
She’d already been nationally renowned for years for her luxurious, extravagant food, but when Shire bought Locke-Ober in 2001, she bought in to Boston’s history. For more than 100 years, Locke-Ober was the place where aspiring gentlemen learned how to eat like gentlemen. Until the 1970s, the Locke-Ober main dining room, with its ornate carved bar, was off-limits to women. When Shire bought it, some regulars who’d come in for lunch every day of their adult lives worried that it would become just another nice restaurant. That wasn’t Shire’s plan. She was as passionate about Locke-Ober’s tradition as her diners were.
