SOUTH BOSTON, Mass. — If you’re the type of person who associates lobster with big, celebratory events, then you’re in luck. With prices lower than they’ve been in decades, something as simple as — well, a Tuesday night can be reason to celebrate.
 
It’s 6 a.m. at Medeiros Dock in South Boston. The sun is just coming up as lobsterman Steven Holler gets his boat, the November Gale, ready for a day at sea. He steps into his bright orange bib pants, slips on his galoshes and then effortlessly glides his boat to the bait dock.
 
He loads $700 worth of fish on to the deck. And by 6:15, Holler and his crew of one set off to haul lobster traps in the waters off Boston’s Harbor Islands.
 
Lobsters, lobsters everywhere
 
In 35 years in the business, Holler says he’s never seen a lobster season quite like this one. It all started this spring.
 
“We came out to haul that gear expecting to get 30 or 40 pounds and what we saw was just totally off the charts. Something we’ve never seen before. There were just lobsters everywhere,” he says.
 
Plentiful catches came early, flooding the lobster market up the East Coast. And since it was May, there weren’t enough tourists to eat them up.
 
And if there’s one thing we all learned in economics class: Surpluses make prices plummet.
 
Lobstermen in the Boston area are getting $3 - $3.50 a pound right now. Retail prices are a bit higher at around $5, which means that the price is running pretty equal to a bologna sandwich.
 
“I looked at a slip from last year and it was anywhere between $4.50 - $4.75 per pound,” says Holler. "The price we’re getting is something like you’d get in the '80s — mid-'80s. And we’re paying 2012 fuel prices, bait prices and labor prices.”
 
The problem in a nut lobster shell
 
Lobster is even cheaper further north: The Wall Street Journal reports that some lobstermen in Maine are getting as low as $1.25 a pound. And it doesn’t seem to be going up anytime soon, because now there’s another factor dragging prices down: soft-shells. Those are lobsters that have just shed their shells and are growing into new, bigger ones.
 
The shedding process usually doesn’t start until mid-July, but lobstermen this year have been catching soft-shells since May.
 
“A soft-shell lobster is veal in the lobster world,” says Holler. “It is tender. It is sweet.”
 
Sweet, but fragile — too fragile to ship long distances, which puts even more lobsters in the Northeast supply chain.
 
A solution: Eat up
 
“The public has to know: there’s a lot of lobsters out there,” says Holler. “So the more lobster people buy, hopefully it will be better for the industry and hopefully that trickles down to the fisherman.”
 
There’s one more big factor playing in this perfect storm: Canadian processing plants, which usually buy up any extra lobsters, aren’t. They had strong catches this season too and already have their own backlog of lobsters.
 
Still, Holler says he will keep setting his traps, even if it means catching too much of a good thing.
 

 
Greater Boston has partnered with the Boston Globe to bring you a weekly feature called "From the Archives." Each Wednesday on Greater Boston, we will show one to two photos from the newspaper's archives. This weekly feature offers a glimpse into Boston's past.
 
This week, we look at … a key transportation artery.

In 1934, the Sumner Tunnel opened beneath the harbor, connecting East Boston and eventually Logan International Airport to the rest of the city. In this photo, automobiles enter the Sumner on April 24, 1958. Almost exactly a year after this picture was taken, on April 30, 1959, more than 1,000 people attended a groundbreaking ceremony for construction of a second tunnel to run parallel to the then–25-year-old Sumner. The Lieutenant William F. Callahan Tunnel opened on Nov. 11, 1961. And finally the third harbor tunnel, the Ted Williams Tunnel, opened in 2003, a substantial outcome of Boston’s Big Dig. 

 
BOSTON — When Lisa Li moved in with her sister’s family in Boston 4 years ago, the job prospects were dismal, especially for someone who didn’t speak English. What she did have was 15 years of experience running Chinese restaurants in Colombia.
 
“When we watched the news or read the paper, we saw that so many Americans didn’t have jobs. So we said, ‘Let’s work together to open a restaurant!'” she said.
 
She and her family set out to buy the perfect takeout. One in Somerville was too small; another in Walpole was too far away from the home they share in Malden. In March, they found something promising in the Savin Hill section of Dorchester, called Hong Kong Chef.
 
“We were here scouting the place for a good week and we saw that it does have really good business,” said Li's niece Mei Chen. “So we came and we were training with the owner for about a month, just seeing how things work and his interactions with his customers. And we kind of fell in love with this place because it’s spacious, there’s room to grow. It’s a packed neighborhood, so we figured that, why not? Give it a try.”
 
A neighborhood institution
 
By April the Dorchester takeout was theirs. After 5 years, the previous owner had become tired of the long hours and was moving on to run a laundry.
 
And even before him, Hong Kong Chef had been a neighborhood institution. Crystal Stanish, 28, remembered it well.
 
“It’s been a neighborhood place," she said. "It’s been here since I’ve grown up, since I was a kid. We always have it. I don’t live around here anymore so we make a habit, when we come to visit the parents, we come in and get it and have it for dinner. It’s just good, and it’s home.”
 
What really makes it home is the deliveryman.
 
“He knows my mom, he knows the family, he knows our address and it’s always right there really fast. And he’s so funny and he comes in," Stanish said. "It’s neighborhood, it’s the same people. There’s not a high turnover. You recognize people. I like that about it — and I like the food.”
 
Turning a customer into a regular
 
What the Li family has been finding out is that food quality can sometimes be secondary to the relationships with customers.
 
Chen said that since they’ve taken over, the flow of customers has slowed. She suspected it was because people miss the old owner and don’t trust the new owners yet. It couldn’t be the food, since the chefs are the same, as is the menu, for the most part. They’ve even added a few new dishes — like fried plantains, which some customers had asked for — and tweaked the recipe for others like chicken wings and crab Rangoon.
 
Chen had paid attention to the previous owner’s interactions with his customers.
 
“The customers would come in or even call and he would recognize their voice and he would say, ‘Oh do you want a D25 or a D2? Oh, no onion in your fried rice.' Something like that. He would just know from looking at them or just hearing their voice. That’s great. That’s something that we want to accomplish as well, because it seems like it’s one of the things that really brings customers back into the restaurant,” she said.
 
Ted, who declined to give his last name, has lived in the neighborhood his whole life and remembered the old owner fondly. “He was just genuine and kind and the whole family seems to be — the whole group just seemed to work together so well,” he said.
 
For Li, running the takeout has become a family affair too: Her nephew runs the counter several days a week and Chen works there when she’s not working as a nurse at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Her mom helps out after her job at a dollar store. And they both pick up produce by hand several times a week.
 
While Ted isn’t quite sure about the new staff, he said he was willing to give them a chance: “Let’s see how the food is, how the comfortability factor is, and go from there.”
 
When I told regular customer Crystal Stanish that the takeout had changed hands, she said she'd noticed having a harder time ordering on the phone. But she said the food hadn’t changed and most importantly, neither had the deliveryman.
 
“He’s a great, fun guy and he literally has been delivering since I can remember. He’s been here forever, so hopefully they keep him,” she said.
 
Can the takeout evolve?
 
But is it any easier to start a takeout from scratch? I went to Wok N Talk on the border of Mission Hill and Jamaica Plain to find out. It doesn’t look like a traditional takeout: The walls are painted a cheerful lime green and orange, and udon noodles and pad Thai sit alongside lo mein on the menu.
 
Owner Nathan Long and his business partner borrowed $300,000 from relatives 2 years ago to set it up. They didn’t want to open just another run-of-the-mill Chinese takeout.
 
“You go to a traditional one, and you usually see hundreds and hundreds of items. I go to there and I have a headache ordering,” Long said.
 
So Long and his partner stripped down the menu. Only five appetizers. The main dish was stir-fried noodles: Customers could choose their noodle, their sauce and their meat, and it would be cooked up right in front of them.
 
But customers found the menu too sparse and business suffered. So crab Rangoon, chicken wings, boneless spareribs and around 20 other takeout standbys reluctantly went back onto the menu.
 
Still, Long didn't include any "very traditional" dishes like egg foo young. "Because I think the way people are eating, they’re already slowly, slowly changing,” he said.
 
A new generation with old tastes
 
Long hopes Wok N Talk is welcoming to busy young professionals in the neighborhood. He's hired non-Chinese waitstaff and installed a comments box, which overflows with tiny pieces of paper.
 
Some the comments affirm that Wok N Talk is fulfilling one of the basic functions of the traditional Chinese takeout: supplying the neighborhood with greasy food until 3 a.m. One customer wrote, “Late-night food is essential to the functioning of a proper society and you, you provide this — be proud!”
 
Wok N Talk has also found itself part of the gentrification of the neighborhood.
 
“Some people tell us, before, at nighttime, [the neighborhood] was quite scary. So I think that as we come in, as more and more businesses come in, and the community does more work at this, to keep the place clean, it will change the neighborhood. It will change the neighborhood,” said Long.

Where are you a regular?
 
We want to hear your side of the story. What’s your relationship with your local takeout? Do they know your order when you walk in the door? Do you know your deliveryman? Is Chinese food a late-night indulgence for you?
 
To tell your story, call 617-477-8688, or go to the Planet Takeout website to leave a story or upload photos. And stay tuned for the next installment of Planet Takeout, where we’ll explore more deeply the tensions between takeouts and the neighborhoods they’re in.

BOSTON — David D’Alessandro rose from humble roots in upstate New York to become one of Boston’s most respected business leaders. His flair for business battle is highlighted in his three bestselling books: "Brand Warfare," "Career Warfare" and "Executive Warfare."
 
In Greater Boston’s 1 Guest series, the former CEO of John Hancock Financial Services opened up to host Emily Rooney about growing up in Utica, his father’s gambling addiction and run-in with the mob and his early work history.
 
Childhood in Utica
 
D’Alessandro was born in Utica, New York. East Utica, to be precise.
 
“When you’re from Utica, you have to be distinctive about where you’re from,” he said. “Kind of like when you’re from New York, you’re from Brooklyn, not the Bronx.”
 
From an early age, D’Alessandro said, he had an aversion to authority figures. His own mother was no exception. “My mom told me I couldn’t go fishing. I was 4 or 5 years old,” he said. Undeterred by his mother’s orders, he constructed a fishing line out with a piece of string and a nail and proceeded to fish from the family goldfish bowl. Unfortunately for him, the goldfish just weren’t biting.
 
“Perhaps because the nail was bigger than the fish. And there was no bait on it,” he said.
 
D’Alessandro moved on to Plan B and scooped the fish out with a large pasta spoon then left them on the kitchen counter. His mother noticed them immediately when she came home.
 
“It didn’t work out so well,” said D’Alessandro. “I had them for dinner.”
 
Gambling
 
D’Alessandro said his father was the smartest person in the family, boasting an IQ of 165 and speaking five languages, including Japanese. Unfortunately, he also struggled with compulsive gambling, a habit that “put the family through hell.”
 
“He was addicted to horses,” said D’Alessandro about his father. “He played every day. Every day, including the day he died.”
 
His father’s gambling habits also got him into trouble with some of the neighborhood’s more notorious characters. As a child, D’Alessandro remembers witnessing a terrifying encounter between his father and a group of gangsters at the family’s grocery store.
 
“Some henchmen came in and we had a big chopping block,” said D’Alessandro. “They made my dad put his hand down and they kept plunging a knife between his fingers because he owed a few hundred dollars.”
 
On casinos in Massachusetts
 
Given his own family’s troubled history with gambling, it’s not surprising that D’Alessandro was disappointed by the recent legalization of casino gambling in Massachusetts.
 
“Gambling is an addiction,” said D’Alessandro. “For the legislature to push so hard for casino gambling knowing they are going to addict people … it’s anathema to me because I thought the state knew better.”
 
He added, dryly, “Why don’t we just open up crack cocaine parlors and take the tax off of that?”
 
Early jobs
 
It’s hard to believe one of Boston’s most respected businessmen was ever fired from a job. But D’Alessandro admitted his first job at a movie theater was not his biggest success.
 
“I got fired because the owner of the theater insisted I walk around with a flashlight … telling people to stop cuddling and making out with each other,” he said. “I didn't think it was good for my physical health in an Italian American neighborhood to be breaking up young people from cuddling.”
 
 

 
BOSTON — Everyone knows what happens once you’re inside a taxi. You might gaze out the window, check your phone or watch what’s on the little television screen. Every now and then, you lean over to take a peek at the meter to get an idea of what the tally is.

Now think about that taxi ride experience as a blind passenger.

In God we trust; all others pay fare

Jim Denham described the problem: “Finding a cab that knows the route, trusting a cab driver ... You have to really trust them because you can’t read that meter."

Denham is blind. He is also the director of assistive technology at the Perkins School for the Blind. He’s got all sorts of smartphone apps and gadgets that help him get around. But even with all those apps and gadgets, he still needs to rely entirely on the cab driver to know what his fare is.

“Making sure that they are taking you the same route that you think you should take, that they’re not going to drive around the block just to run up their meter a bit — it’s just something to be cautious about," Denham said.

The bigger benefit is that it’s a step closer to independence. Even something as simple as knowing your fare is empowering. And soon, in the City of Boston, blind passengers will get some help. Thanks to new technology, that television screen in the back of the cab will soon be talking to the visually impaired.

The technological solution

A CMT card for blind taxi passengers. (Danielle Dreilinger/WGBH)

“We said let’s take the existing technology and see if we can extend it and come up with a solution for the visually impaired," said Jesse Davis, CEO of Creative Mobile Technologies, a New York–based company that makes those TVs that are in the backseats of taxis in major cities all over the country.

“When you hear the frustration out of the community about something as simple as going to the ATM or how intimidating it can be if you are in a cab to make sure that you really are paying the proper amount — I mean, it’s an extremely unnerving position to be in," said Davis.

In collaboration with advocacy group Lighthouse International, CMT devised a way to turn those televisions into touch screens with audio capability for the blind. Here’s how it works: Lighthouse International issues cards that look like credit cards, with a magnetic strip. Inside the cab, the passenger swipes the card through the credit card slot. That activates the TV screen, turning it into a touch screen, and the audio prompt greets the passenger and tells the rider how to operate the device.

I asked Denham to go for a ride to test out this new technology.
 
The system in action

Once we step inside the cab, Denham feels around and immediately finds the credit card machine. He swipes the card through, and the TV screen suddenly greets us with a wobbly automated voice: “Welcome. You’ve entered Cab B0321.” On the screen, four large squares replace the weather forecast and stock market figures. The voice prompt instructs us on how to control volume settings by tapping certain sections of the screen.

So far, Denham is pleased.

“I like how they’re using the corner of the screen to quickly identify things. And it makes it easy to find the different pieces of information, but the speech is a little difficult to understand. They could use a better speech synthesizer. But still, it’s not horrible. It’s nice getting the fare — it’s nice to be able to quickly identify that," Denham says.

I think the automated voice sounds British, but Denham disagrees, contending, "I don’t know if that’s a British voice. I think that’s just one of the synthesizers that’s out there."

The screen after a passenger has swiped the CMT card. (Cristina Quinn/WGBH)

While Denham and I politely avoid a debate over the dialect of the software, he feels his way around the screen.

“I’m surprised there’s not a headphone jack. But it’s really nice that when I swiped the card, it immediately started talking. That’s a really nice feature. I mean just to know, ‘Hey, the system is working,’" says Denham.

The screen is connected to the meter so as our ride continues, the voice states the fare increases. When we pull into the parking lot at Perkins, it tells us how much we owe and the prompt allows Denham to decide how much he wants to tip and guides us through the payment process.

CMT’s software gets an overall thumbs-up from Denham: “That was some neat technology. I think it is a great thing. It fosters independence. Minor improvements could be made; I think the speech could be a little clearer. But I think it’s a great system, and I’m really happy that it’s going into more cabs.”

With the technology down, the logistics

But the next part is pretty tricky: how to distribute all those cards out to the blind community. This is something Kim Charlson, first vice president of the American Council of the Blind, is concerned about.

“It is a challenge to reach people blind or visually impaired because they don’t use the traditional newspapers and mail and things like that," said Charlson. At her office inside the Talking Book Library at Perkins, her guide dog German Shepherd Dolly rests at her feet, under her desk.

“We have to use alternative ways to communicate — through agencies and organizations of the blind, including information in newsletters, audio, Braille, large print so that we can get the word out to people," Charlson said.

The technology is already up and running in New York City and San Francisco. Currently there are 1200 cabs in the city with CMT technology. It will be a few months before it’s launched full-scale in Boston: City officials here want to work out the kinks. When they do, it’ll be a major step toward greater independence for the blind community and a life with fewer boundaries.
 
 

 
Greater Boston has partnered with the Boston Globe to bring you a weekly feature called "From the Archives." Each Wednesday on Greater Boston, we will show one to two photos from the newspaper's archives. This weekly feature offers a glimpse into Boston's past.
 
This week, we look at … a terrifying murder spree.

On June 28, 1978, five bodies were found in the blood-splattered basement of the Blackfriars Pub on Summer Street in Boston. The gangland-style killing would be known as the "Blackfriars Massacre." The Suffolk County District Attorney said he “had never witnessed a more shocking crime.” Among the dead were club manager John (Jack) Kelly, a former radio and investigative television reporter who was known to associate with members of organized crime. Also killed were Charles Magarian, Peter Meroth, Freddie Delavega and Vincent Solmonte, the club’s owner. The victims were found shot in the head with either a .12 gauge shotgun, or a .25 caliber automatic or both — it was believed that there were two shooters. In 1979, Robert J. Italiano and William N. Ierardi were acquitted of the murder. They were the only suspects tried for this unsolved crime.

 
Greater Boston has partnered with the Boston Globe to bring you a weekly feature called "From the Archives." Each Wednesday on Greater Boston, we will show one to two photos from the newspaper's archives. This weekly feature offers a glimpse into Boston's past.
 
This week, we look at … one of Boston's deadliest fires.

On June 17, 1972, a fire broke out during renovations to convert the century-old luxury Hotel Vendome to condominiums. Emergency personnel worked to remove victims from the rubble after part of the building collapsed. Nine firefighters died. It is, to date, the biggest loss of life in Boston Fire Department history. On June 17 of this year, hundreds of family and friends gathered at the site to mark the 40th anniversary of the tragic event.

ROXBURY, Mass. — The quest to rejuvenate Roxbury’s Dudley Square neighborhood just got a major boost. The city has okayed $95 million in new development along Melnea Cass Boulevard, which could transform that stretch from an afterthought to a destination. But while many in Dudley Square welcomed the project — not everyone was on board.
 
Today they’re a couple of scruffy empty lots bracketing Melnea Cass Boulevard, which thousands of commuters use every day to get on and off Interstate 93. But as Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts head Darnell Williams looked around — he saw potential.
 
 “Boston is such a walkable city — right now I’m looking at the shadows of the Prudential, the Hancock Building, Jim Rice Field. Fenway Park is 8 minutes from here. We’re really centrally located and it just makes sense,” Williams said.
 
The city seemed to agree. Boston gave the go-ahead to two developers who plan to transform this area by building a hotel, restaurants and residencesand expanding the popular Tropical Foods supermarket. If all those cars driving past started to stop, the project and the neighborhood could thrive.
 
“Very few of those cars stop to get birthday candles or birthday cards or to have a bite to eat. If we can change that, then that will be a very good thing for Roxbury,” Williams said.
 
The new development was part of a bigger effort to rejuvenate Dudley Square, which used to be a thriving retail hub but has struggled for decades. While there was plenty of local enthusiasm for the current development push, there was also skepticism.
 
Kathy Kim, the daughter of a local business owner, worried that new development won’thelp the average man and woman on the street.
 
“We want developers that understand our community and the struggles we’ve been facing in this community for the last 40 to 50 years ... we need to have CORI-friendly jobs,” Kim said. “We need to have jobs for the residents who’ve been in the community, who have built the foundation of Dudley Square.”
 
Andy Finkel, whose brother owns a local clothing shop, said the new plans might not be ambitious enough.
 
“Anything in the Dudley Station Roxbury community is great given the huge unemployment problem and lack of money and business in the community,” Finkel said. “The BRA needs to have some sort of a master plan that has a hub here in Dudley Station, where it used to be really, really vibrant."
 
But others like Roxbury resident Anjail Mohammed said that on balance — Dudley Square seems to be on the right track.
 
“I think it’s going in a positive direction,” she said. “The only thing I’d like to see removed is the strip club down the street.”
 
For his part Williams was happy to accentuate the positive including the promise of much-needed jobs.
 
“I don’t know if I have definite numbers, I don’t want to speculate,” said Williams. “We’ve got a lot of jobs that should happen on the construction side, post-construction, post-management, that should benefit folks who live here.”
 
Big plans for a neighborhood that could use a boost.
 

 
Going to Betty Ann's at Wood Island, as we did for the MBTA One Stop series, is not just about donuts. But if you sleep late, you might settle for the food half of the equation.
 
Bill Scantlebury's jelly donuts are made with yeast, which gives them a spongy texture cake-style donuts lack. Since WGBH News didn't ask for his recipe, we gave it our own try using sourdough starter we had on hand.
 
Note: Deep-fry at your own risk.
 
Sourdough Jelly Donuts
Adapted from 1, 2, 3, 4
 
Ingredients
1/2 c. sourdough starter
2 c. all-purpose flour
~ 1/3 c. rye flour*
scant 1/4 c. sugar
2 tbsp. melted butter
1 egg
1/3 c. sour milk
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. each fresh grated nutmeg and powdered galangal**
about 2 c. granulated sugar for coating
approx. 1/3 c. jam for filling
 
* Ordinary all-purpose flour is fine.
** Nutmeg is traditional. You can substitute ginger for galangal.

Directions
1. Mix the dough in a stand mixer (or knead it) to develop the gluten, about 3 minutes on second speed. Add more flour if the dough looks too wet.
 
2. Place the dough in a greased container, cover and let rise in a warm place. It does not have to double.
 
3. Pinch the dough into pieces and roll them into balls, golf-ball-sized or smaller. (They expand in the oil.) Cover with a cloth or plastic wrap and let proof until they look puffed and soft. It won't take long.
 
4. Set up:
- A deep-frying station — either a plug-in electric fryer or a pot on the stove
- A draining station — a plate covered with paper towels or a cookie rack over a rimmed baking sheet
- A sugaring station — sugar in a deep bowl
- A jelly station — a cake decorating kit with a wide metal tip works
 
5. For maximum inflation, tug the donuts gently around the equator until they're halfway between a ball and a disk. Carefully lower the donuts into the oil with a slotted metal spoon. Fry only a couple at a time so the oil stays hot. Flip after about 4 minutes if they don't flip over on their own. Let the donuts brown. Don't jump the gun.
 
6. Drain. Roll in sugar while still warm. Wait a few minutes, then inject the donut with jelly (or dulce de leche, or Nutella, etc.). You may need to start the hole in the donuts with a chopstick or skewer. Sugar the hand that holds the donut so you don't knock the sugar off.
 
If this is all too much work, Betty Ann's is open from 7 a.m. to 10 or 10:30 a.m. every day but Monday.

To a visitor, "Wood Island" doesn't mean much. To the locals …
 
"That was a wonderful park," Scantlebury says. "Three beaches — it even had a cinder track. It was designed by Olmstead … and the airport just took it all over."
 
He lives upstairs. L. lives down the block.
 
"East Bostonians are provincial, we are. There's nothing wrong with that" she says, slicing, rolling and placing. "And if you live here you're more a North Shore shopper than you are a Boston shopper because it's easy to get to in your car."
 
The room smells of lemon, sugar, nutmeg, oil and Luyo's perfume. Scantlebury rolls out a rectangle of dough on a thick blanket of flour and starts cutting out rings. The front door slams and Luyo goes out to the ancient cash register.
 
--
 
At 60 cents per donut, how does Betty Ann's stay in business?
 
"Well, I own the building," Scantlebury says. "What people don't realize is when you're paying for donuts from a chain you're paying for the number of people who handle them." He places the rings on a wire tray that looks like it went through Korea. "I stay ahead of the bill collectors and I'm single so I only have to worry about myself."
 
When the tray is full, he lowers it into a wide pot of oil. "We've gotten quite a bit of press for being fairly unknown," he says, flipping the donuts over. No gloves protect his bony forearms — "I'm living proof donuts aren't fattening!" he cracks.
 
He shows off the real coal-fired oven built into the wall. But really, the room shows itself off: the bricks, tongue-and-groove walls and tongue-and-groove ceiling are all painted glam-rock silver. Scantlebury shrugs: "My father did that before I got here … and he's not around to ask."
 
Good and brown, the donuts come out to drain.
 
L. says, "Don't put my name in this article, please! I'm a retired schoolteacher. I don't want the kids to find me." Cut, roll, place.
 
Before she was a schoolteacher, she was a kid back when the women stayed home. Walking home on a warm night with all the windows open, "Oh, the aromas and the smells, they were overpowering," she says.
 
--
 
The screen door slams. Today is unusually quiet, Scantlebury says, going out to the front room: "Fridays are usually pretty busy — ever since 'Chronicle.'"
 
But it's 8 a.m. and people are starting to arrive. Though they come alone, no one orders for one. One woman is taking donuts to the courthouse; another, to the kids she babysits. Bob Impemba, 59, obligingly stops for a brief interview. He visits from Winthrop every month or so. "Not as often as I like," he says. "It's a dietary thing."
 
Has the place changed? "Never changed," he says, and with a grin, "Owner's pleasant."
 
"I'm still crazy!" Scantlebury responds, cheerfully. He explains, "His older brother went through St. Mary's with my older brother."
 
L. steps behind the counter for a minute. "I've been coming here since I was a little kid," she says. "And truly we survive on repeat customers. Not internet people."
 
Like JoAnn Rick of Winthrop. "I'm 75. I was 11 when I first started coming here. They used to have the bread, you'd get the hot bread after school," she says. Now $12.85 buys her "a dozen jelly" (no plural) in a box, two jelly and a cruller in a bag, and four jelly and two plain in another bag. "My husband owned a Dunkin' Donuts for years but you know what? These taste better," Rick says.
 
A woman in a red shirt comes in. She doesn't say a word. Luyo fills her order.
 
--
 
Back in the kitchen, Scantlebury tosses donuts in sugar. "The closest I've come to our jelly donuts is in Cornwall," he says. That's where he vacations. But something's missing in those.
 
L. is back at her counter. "In this country I really feel we've done a real disservice to people who do hand work or manual labor," she says. Slice, roll, place. "If you don't have a suit and tie your work has no value."
 
When she was a kid the priest had to warn people from the altar that the donuts would still be there when Mass was done. Times have, of course, changed. "There's a bagel place over in Chelsea — Katz's," Scantlebury says, pronouncing the word "kates." But, the owner told him, "'People don't want to schlep all the way over to Katz's every day to get their bagels.'"
 
He slides a tray of donuts into the unlit oven to proof. There is a long discussion of the Euro and why it's not working.
 
L. insists once more: no name. "Once I went to try on ladies' undergarments" and guess who was working at the store?
 
But you should come back on Sundays, Scantlebury says, when the shop showcase is full with pies and cakes, lemon squares, coffee rolls, brownies. And "it's like a social club sometimes," he says. "They come here, run into someone they went to school with."
 
Which may be more important than the donut.
 
Where should WGBH stop next? Leave a comment here, email the reporter or let us know on Facebook or Twitter. Subway, commuter rail, light rail, major bus depots — all are eligible.

 
BOSTON — Food trucks have come to Paris and they've come to Boston. Next up? If Paris wasn't unexpected enough, the food world's hottest phenomenon is moving into the suburbs.

A trend in the city

Stroll through the Financial District, Kendall Square or Cleveland Circle at lunchtime and you will see long lines forming around trucks pulled up to the curbs. The queue of people reflects the diverse, multi-ethnic menus scrawled on the chalkboards. Suits stand behind foreign students in well-worn T-shirts and moms balance their takeout containers on the hoods of strollers while fishing for change.

“I love them," said one customer. "There used to be the fear of the 'roach coach' but these places are really high-quality and they’re also generally cheaper than any of the offerings around here.”

On any given day food trucks line up on city streets, offering a bold variety that competes with brick-and-mortar counterparts. At one truck, for $5, you can get Sichuan asparagus with a slow-poached egg. At another truck, for $3, you can chow down on a taco filled with Chinese sausage, fried rice and black bean mayo.

Yes, gourmet cuisine has gone mobile — and now other cities and towns in Massachusetts want a bite. The Town of Brookline just launched a pilot program for food trucks offering more lunchtime options for workers and residents, and if all goes well, food trucks will shift into park permanently.

“I think the public is fascinated by food trucks,” said Anne-Marie Aigner. So fascinated that it’s going above and beyond the city limits.

Truckin' past the city line

Aigner is the founder of the Food Truck Festivals of New England. A couple of years ago, she saw how the food truck phenomenon was barreling its way over from Los Angeles and thought: Why not make a destination event out of it? Instead of having food trucks pulled up at events like the Head of the Charles or outdoor concerts, you could flip that around and make the food trucks the main event. That means a caravan of food trucks will amble their way to towns like Framingham, Falmouth, Salem, N.H., and Newport, R.I.

“People are interested in the fact that you don’t have to go into a restaurant and sit down to have a good bite," said Aigner.

People like Rick Rushton.
 
A plan in central Mass.

“I look at what’s happened over the past 4 to 5 years with urban cuisine on the go — to the desktop, to the laptop and now to the iPad. And people’s accessibility to food, and to good food, has really transformed itself,” he said.

Rushton is a Worcester city councilor. In this city, food trucks were banned a few years ago, after a heated battle between the brick-and-mortar restaurant and food truck industries resulted in a 6-5 City Council vote that left food trucks packing. Rushton is hoping that by bringing the Food Truck Festival to Worcester on July 14, fellow councilors will warm up to the idea of getting rid of the ban.

“I’m hoping that most of the city councilors are going to head down to the festival, see where the food truck revolution has gone," he said.

If you can't beat them …

Tension between food trucks and brick-and-mortar restaurants is nothing new. Some restaurants see food trucks as a threat, especially if they’re parked a little too close by for comfort. But one Somerville restaurant saw the competition as an opportunity.

“My initial take was hey, we want to get in on that action," said Rob Gregory, co-owner of the landmark barbecue restaurant Redbones in Davis Square. Redbones wheeled out its own truck when Gregory saw that this was not just a flash in the pan.

“Competition is good," Gregory said. "It keeps us all on our toes and keeps the quality of food up and quality of service for the customer. It’s all about trying to have something that people want. This is one of the most exciting times for experiments in the food service business. You can innovate and if it doesn’t work, you can try something else.”

Other restaurants are hitting the pavement as well. Even fast food chains like Burger King have launched their own fleets of trucks across the country.

“The word is getting out," Aigner said. "It’s becoming increasingly popular with existing brick-and-mortar restaurants, and the flip of that is it’s a great entry point for somebody who’s interested in getting into the restaurant business, but can’t afford $300,000 – $400,000 to build a restaurant." It takes more like $25,000 – $50,000 to start a restaurant on wheels.

Starting from the street up

Mei Li of Mei Mei Street Kitchen agreed. "The idea is to start small with the food truck and experiment with the different ingredients and have a rotating menu so we try lots of new things and let our customers try new food," she said.

Mei and her siblings Andy and Irene bought their truck this spring as their first entrepreneurial step into the food service business. The Mei Mei Street Kitchen menu exemplifies the diverse palate of second-generation Asian Americans with items like a scallion pancake sandwich with braised beef and blue cheese. She even joked about their food being Chinese food with cheese.

“We think that it’s a unique opportunity to be able to bring real food to areas that sometimes don’t often offer that for people who work everyday and are faced with the same choices," Li said. "If you’ve got a different food truck every day in front of your office, you get to try new things and have real food brought to your doorstep. We think that’s really cool.”

Next stop?

Other cities and towns think it’s cool, too. And they’ll get a taste of the food truck experience en masse throughout the summer in various towns and cities in the New England area. For a $30 entry ticket, people will be able to eat from over 20 trucks.

“Somebody out west of Worcester called and yelled at us," Aigner said. "We get calls every day. Why did you stop in Worcester? How come you didn’t come to Springfield? What about the Berkshires? How about West Hartford?”

The downside of success is that everyone wants a piece of it … or a plate.

There are 10 food truck festivals scheduled for this year, starting with an event at the UMass Boston campus on Sunday, June 10. Get the complete list. 

June 5, 2012

EAST BOSTON — A large crowd of town officials, developers and residents gathered in East Boston on June 5 as the owners of Suffolk Downs unveiled plans for a $1 billion, 163-acre gambling resort casino at the site of the racetrack. The plans include 200,000 square feet of gambling space, a hotel, restaurants and retail shops. 
 
The owners showed a slick 3-minute promotional DVD while horses trotted outside on the track. Principal owner Richard Fields said the location was ideal.
 
"Suffolk Downs is 5 minutes from our airport, is 10 minutes from downtown," he said. "When the project is completed, it will be a great partner to enhance the convention center and stimulate tourism for all of Boston, for Revere and for the entire region."
 
David Manfredi, the lead architect of the project, displayed the first architectural renderings of the proposed facility. "We envision an urban oasis — a mecca of entertainment of hospitality, gaming, restaurants, shops. It is that mix that will make it very special and will make it very urban,” Manfredi said. The plans call for a hotel, spa, restaurants, shops and a casino all to be built around the 77-year-old racetrack.
 
Suffolk Downs and its partner, Caesars Entertainment of Las Vegas, plan to bid for one of the three resort casino licenses under the state's new gambling law. Officials of the track said they would spend millions of dollars to tackle traffic concerns in the congested neighborhood, and would pursue host community agreements with Boston and neighboring Revere. They also said the resort would generate about 4,000 jobs — something on the minds of many residents in the area.

Only East Boston and Revere would get to vote on the proposal, not residents from all of Boston, thanks to a provision in the casino gambling bill which critics said at the time was rigged to help Suffolk Downs. Now that Wynn Resorts and Las Vegas Sands have pulled out of the game, Suffolk Downs appears to be the leading contender for the single casino license that state law will allow in Greater Boston. The lack of competition means the racetrack won't have to bid as much for a license — which could mean that taxpayers lose.

 
STATE HOUSE, BOSTON — The steps of the Massachusetts State House turned into a political combat zone Thursday. Supporters of President Barack Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney were picketing, shouting at each other and holding up traffic on Beacon Street.
 
David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, was in Boston to criticize Romney’s record as governor. Romney's supporters tried to drown out his speech; Axelrod responded by saying, “You can shout down speakers, my friends, but it’s hard to Etch-a-Sketch the truth away.”
 
When Obama supporters chanted, "Hey, ho, Romney's got to go," Romney supporters tacked on, "— to the White House!"
 
About 100 people participated in the protest, split roughly evenly between the two sides. The Obama group included elected officials such as state representatives, state senators and mayors.
 
Romney supporters also shouted “Solyndra.” That’s the name of the green energy company that went bankrupt after receiving support from the Obama administration and federal loan guarantees.
 

May 31, 2012
 
BOSTON — A video from the Future Boston Alliance takes shots at Boston's reputation for stodgy government and sleepy nightlife. The video has prompted support and skepticism, and It's put the city's entertainment options — everything from food trucks to T-accessible live music and art events — back under the microscope.

It's not a frivolous matter. Every year around this time, Boston undergoes a mass student exodus following college graduation. Young, talented students come here for school, but many leave afterwards.
 
Jessica Martin, a researcher for the Boston Indicators Project, said the reasons for this are easy to determine.
 
"Boston is a very expensive city, particularly in housing," she said. "Many young people, many households in general are spending upwards of 35 percent to 50 percent of their income on rental prices." And relatively high wages, she said, don't offset it. Martin said affordable housing geared specifically to new grads might help provide a better chance for young professionals to establish themselves in Boston.
 

The Greater Boston Housing Report Card for 2011 found that Greater Boston had the third-highest rents in the country, after New York and San Francisco. However, given the enduring popularity of those expensive cities, the vibrancy of city life may mean the difference in retaining the newly educated generation.
 
Does Boston deserve its reputation as a sleepy city, or has it gotten a bad rap? What can be changed? Tell us in the comments or vote on Facebook. Some responses so far ...

Julia Carpenter: "Interesting — but the devil's in the details."

Allan Danley: "With over 55,000 people who took a Segway tour in 2011 Boston should be supporting new and innovative ways to see the city of Boston. Not only carbon-free and green but fun and exciting."

Doreen Iudica Vigue: "It is not stodgy. It's like Paris. If you don't respect the culture coming in, you are not going to get a kiss on both cheeks or a hot baguette. Simple as that."

 
BOSTON — Sometimes the best way to find the flavor of where we live is … through a restaurant.
 
Not the fancy places people cross the region to see. The humble spots where people stop and get something to go — and in the process, have conversations across the counter that make life a little bit more human.

WGBH News' Val Wang is spending the next 6 months documenting these for her project "Planet Takeout": a look at Chinese food, our neighborhoods and ourselves.
 
Wherever you go, there they are
 
Every neighborhood in Boston has at least one. In the heart of Roxbury there’s Peking House in an old Church’s Chicken building. In Dorchester, Yum Yum stands shoulder-to-shoulder with nail salons and Irish bars. Jamaica Plain has Food Wall and Charlie Chan’s. They are among the almost 10,000 Chinese takeouts that dot the country, preparing more than 2 million meals every day.
 
Ever since I’ve lived in big American cities, first New York and now Boston, no place has fascinated me as much as the local Chinese takeout. Each is deeply a part of their neighborhood but also somewhat separate. The people who work there come from halfway around the world to serve Americanized Chinese food to people of every color. Those on both sides of the counter have to meet each other halfway, often at a bulletproof window.
 
This cultural crossroad teems with stories. I think of the humble takeout as a lens through which we can see both the tightly knit local neighborhoods of Boston and global immigration patterns to the city. And most importantly, we can see how the two fit together.
 
One restaurateur's journey
 
Tom Chen was born in Hong Kong. After a decade of working in Chinese restaurants he bought his own takeout in Chelsea, Mass., called Dragon Kitchen. He ran it for a decade.
 
Most of his customers were Latino. He said they tended to order three dishes: lobster sauce, shrimp fried rice and chicken wings. Every week, he sold 400 pounds of chicken wings. And because he had to adapt to his customers, he learned basic Spanish. Shrimp fried rice became arroz con camarones. Chicken wings, alas de pollo. And lobster sauce was salsa langosta.
 
Chen said he didn't know much Spanish beyond what he needed for the job, “but I try to make a living. So everybody will adjust yourself.”
 
It wasn’t easy running a takeout: mastering simple Spanish, learning the names of his regular customers and, on two life-threatening occasions, getting held up at gunpoint. But it was a big step up from bartending, his previous job. 
While most restaurant profits hover around 40 percent, Chen said Dragon Kitchen cleared 60 percent.
 
“The takeout restaurant basically is work hard, long hours. You can make a better income. Buy materials by myself, then we cook it, we prepare. Just four people, work close together. I see co-workers more than my wife. The kids, I never saw my kids. The kids go to school at 7 o’clock, get back at 9, we’re still working,” said Chen.

He sold his takeout 10 years ago and bought a more upscale sit-down restaurant in Needham called Mandarin Cuisine.
 
A tight-knit world
 
Talking to Chen may seem easy, but in my experience, it’s difficult to walk in the front door of a takeout asking to interview workers and customers. He only opened up because I met him through Helen Chin Schlichte — or "Auntie Helen," as everyone in the Chinese immigrant community calls her. A native of Charlestown, she is very active both in Chinatown and in the city at large. Auntie Helen immediately understood my predicament.
 
“Even though you’re very Chinese and you can speak fluent Mandarin, they’re not quite sure if you’re from the IRS, or from Homeland Security," she said. "There are all kinds of reasons that they might be a little wary until somebody comes along to say, ‘Okay, this is a great project. This is one that would be terrific for you to participate in and for you to be a part of this larger community of takeout restaurants, and it’s okay to talk to her."
 
I asked Chen what he would have said if I’d come in the door of his old Chelsea takeout asking to interview him. “No,” he responded simply. “I say, ‘Nope, you kidding me?’ Eighty percent, or 90 percent, close the door for you. I already know that. First thing, they don’t know you" — and if they don't know you, they don't know why they'd do you a favor.
 
Furthermore, Chen said, "Most Chinese people don’t like [to] talk in public. They need to close everything in their mind. They’re not open. Even your father, your mother, won’t open anything for you, right?"
 
When asked for his explanation of that dynamic, Chen responded, "That’s the way we brought up. Like, why we eat rice?”
 
I started to wonder about the underlying social structures that hold the community together — and keep outsiders at a distance. So I called Baruch College professor Ken Guest, an anthropologist who studies Chinese immigrant communities living in New York.
 
“The Chinese restaurants are deeply embedded in an ethnic economy. And there is a sense of ethnic solidarity that people draw on to make a go of it. There’s a way in which that economic framework also shapes some of their notions of how they are in American culture, where they fit. It frames a lot of their business and social networks,” he said.
 
Getting connected
 
Networks were the key word here.
 
“Get somebody know somebody," Chen summarized. "From the back, not from the front. You walk in the front, you don’t get any answer. They will tell you they’re busy. No. Thank you. That’s it. Get somebody behind the owner. If you not Helen Chin introduce you, you won’t be sitting here. I tell the truth.”
 
It’s good advice. I found I had to work through existing networks — social service agencies, civic groups, food suppliers, menu printers, academics, filmmakers, hoping someone could introduce me to someone else who could get me in that proverbial back door.

But the project also needs the other half of the story: your half.
 
I found Philip Lodge, 17, at Yum Yum in Dorchester after school, waiting for his takeout order.
 
“Well, I got hungry after I left school, so I just had to eat a little meal before I go home," he explained. "A $2 plate of rice and ribs and I added crab Rangoon, fried shrimp and chicken teriyaki."
 
And it's not a rare visit. "I come like three times a week. My mom told me that their food was good so I started ordering my own plates, and I liked it," he said.
 
I bet you’ve probably been to a Chinese takeout before — you might even be a regular at one. Or maybe you went to one with your family growing up. If so, I want to hear your story.
 
If you have a story about a Chinese takeout, give Val and Planet Takeout a call at 617 477-8688. It's a free call in the Boston area, and the recording will explain what to do. You can also leave a story, upload photos or listen to others' stories at planettakeout.org.

BOSTON — Thursday is the first installment of Planet Takeout, Val Wang's exploration into Boston Chinese takeout joints as a nexus of community. She talks to Bob Seay about how she got the idea for the project. To share your experiences with Chinese takeout, visit planettakeout.org.

Planet Takeout is produced by Val Wang and brought to you by WGBH 89.7 and Localore, a national initiative of the Association for Independents in Radio.