A feature of Cambridge which seems to creep up on me is how it's constantly morphing. The street I live on alone has gone through a serious makeover during my four-year tenure to the extent that it feels like I've grown up with it a bit. Sometimes they come back (as in the case of the hardware store with the cheeky t-shirts with taglines like "Got caulk?"), and sometimes they're gone forever (as in the case of the somewhat sadly misplaced-looking Gap that used to grace the corner of Mass Ave and Essex). Others (ahem, Phoenix Landing) just change kitchen staff continuously with the result that the tasteless food might be replaced by amazing $4 happy hour burgers, only to sadly be redacted for a new staff who favors $10 burgers with peanut sauce (ok fine I might love peanut sauce so that wasn't really a good example).Tonight I had a chance to really appreciate this feature as I ended up getting some dinner with friends at Thelonius Monkfish, a new-ish joint just down the road which was the first sushi place to grace the presence of my neck of Mass Ave. What's more, "Prohibition has ended!" there, as the signs outside proudly proclaim - i.e. they finally got a liquor license. We clearly had to celebrate with modified sake bombs (the non-college-kid version in which we didn't quite make everyone else in the restaurant hate us because we were yelling and banging our fists).
Finally, we hopped across the street to the newly opened Brick & Mortar, which used to be the Enormous Room -- or, as pretty much everyone I knew accidentally called it, the "Elephant Room", due to the tiny elephant on the door which was the only cue you were entering the correct place [note its absence now in above picture]. I must say that it was kind of sad to see the place go (first bar our grad school cohort gave a nod to, etc.) -- except that the new version is so much better it's like going into Tu y Yo having expected Taco Bell :).
