Alden and Harlow – No.11

Our visit to the US has ended earlier than anticipated and we are now back in the UK.  However, before we left Boston, we did manage to get down to number one (Albeit having to skip numbers 2 and 3).  So, although we’re writing from England, we’d like to finish our tour of Boston’s top 50 restaurants.  Next is No.11 – Alden and Harlow.

We went to Alden and Harlow twice; once for brunch and once with a group in the evening.  On both occasions we were told that everything is designed for sharing. However, during our brunch, Clark heard the words ‘secret burger’ and I knew the sharing option was not going to happen for us on this occasion.  I mean really, who shares a burger?  Another factor is that a lot of the brunches involve a poached or fried egg – not the easiest thing to share.  I like to dunk things in my yolk before devouring and you can’t do that if it’s been sliced in two.

To placate for the lack of share-ability, we did agree to try some smaller plates to start (for sharing), so we had the Potata Bravas and Latkes served with chilli honey…totally delicious (if you’re not sure what a latke is, check out the Mamaleh post).  My main was a much better version of the very trendy right now avocado on toast – the Torched avocado toast with Peekytoe crab and a poached egg (and yes I did dip my bread in the gorgeously runny yolk – share?  I don’t think so).  Er, what’s Peekytoe crab?  I discovered it’s basically a rock crab from the East coast, so called because it has a ‘picked’ claw (pronounced with two syllables – “pick-ayed” and means curved).  Apparently it’s a bit of a delicacy as it’s on the smaller side and has very sweet meat. I concur.

We have to finish with the ‘secret burger’.  What’s so secret?  They use a Creekstone grind (grind is the name of the ground meat – in this case from Creekstone farm which specialises in Black Angus) and instead of the regular floppy slice of processed cheese topping your 8oz burger, Alden and Harlow have substituted it for the Cabot cheese tuile, so you get a crunchy and more intense hit of cheesy loveliness.  What did Clark think?  

It was a strange sensation to start with, a crunchy disk of cheese on what is normally a soft patty with soft cheese, but it was utterly delicious.  Very novel and if they had any left on our dinner visit I would have ordered it again.