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About a month or so ago, on March 12, Chipotle finally opened a restaurant in the most brain dead obvious place in the entire city. This, more than a year after opening their first Boston restaurant in what amounts to the middle of no where. It was a Wednesday, and WND can’t go to a (non-local) chain, so we had a pre-dinner at Chipotle to check it out.

The Harvard location holds a lot of promise. Like Davis Square, and just about every where else in Boston there is stiff burrito competition. Of course, Chipotle tops them all, but they pulled out all the stops on the first night. They were ready to go with tons of food and enough people to keep everything on the line fresh, continuously, as people streamed by for hours. I have to say the freshness made a lot of difference; it was the best burrito I’ve had in quite some time. That will hopefully convince everyone who was there of Chipotle superiority.

I say hopefully because I don’t have to stand in line at the Harvard location — I’m going to still be going to Davis because its much closer to me most of the time. Davis, does have some problems, that the Harvard location would do well to solve. Davis lacks room, and they often have just one employee on the line, and at most two, even at peak times. Also, Davis lacks seating, it can seat about 34 people by my rough count, but only 16 of those are in chairs; the rest are stools. The Harvard location is much more equipped to handle lots of people. In fact we didn’t even have trouble finding a seat in the free-for-all. They also have a huge 8 person table, which is a good addition.

After pre-dinner we went to Lizzy’s Ice Cream, my choice. It was small, but kind of alright, sort of. It was better than Herrells, but just goto JP Licks, you’ll be happy you did.

This past week’s Wednesday Night Dinner was at Bartley’s Burger Cottage, a self proclaimed and somewhat accurately so, Harvard Landmark. As you can see from the larger version of the picture, they lay claim to having the best sweet potato fries and onion rings in the country, or at least Boston (it’s somewhat ambiguous). The burgers were, as claimed, scrumptious. Aaron got The George Bush Jr Burger, which was larger than a fist, but not quite as large as a head. They have a whole menu page of politically named burgers, which is quite up to date. I had the Condleeza Rice burger. I’m sorry, but the Obama burger looked awful (had mushrooms); the Hillary Clinton burger looked worse (had mushrooms and sour cream ewww!). The walls were covered with what looked like 50+ years of trickets and junk, like an overdone Applebees, but authentic.

The onion rings, which only Martin got, seemed over breaded and way too oily leading them to become inedible beyond a certain depth. The sweet potato fires tasted exactly like sweet potatoes, and not at all like fires, though, they did appear as fries. That is not exactly what I am looking for in a sweet potato fry, but I can see why they might be considered good. We postured that they would be better with a more traditional sweet potato topping, such as butter and brown sugar, than ketchup. This lead to a rather lengthy discussion of all sorts of food combination, mostly centered around burgers. Notes were even taken, but I don’t have them, lucky for you. The highlight, I think, was severing a bugger, like the huge The George Bush Jr in a bread bowl, so as to reduce mess and maintain taste and size.

The conversation continued to Herrell’s Ice Cream, which has the novelty of being located in a former bank building, and allowing you to eat in the now aquarium themed vault. Herrell’s runs a deal (at least in the winter) that for every ice cream you buy, you get a “Herrell Dollar,” which is as good as cash there. They proceeded to complain, however, when we took the obvious tactic of spending the one “Herrell Dollar” the group had, to get another for the next person to use. If you are going to offer such a deal with such a blatantly obvious optimal strategy, you can not complain when the strategy is used. The ice cream, which had limited flavors to choose from, was the worst I’ve had from an actual ice cream shop in some time, certainly since 2005. I will not bother to go back, despite the rest of the group’s fandom of Herrell’s.