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☀️Sunny and chilly, with highs in the 40s. Sunset is at 4:18 p.m.
Boston has its first Michelin star restaurant: Three 1 One omakase in the South End, led by Chef Wei Fa Chen.
“The chef’s omakase features impressive nigiri, showcasing high quality products, much imported from Japan with a range of fish,” host Java Ingram said in a ceremony last night.
Six other Boston-area restaurants got bib gourmand distinctions: Italian eateries Bar Volpe and Fox & the Knife in South Boston; Uyghur restaurant Jahunger, Sumiao Hunan Kitchen and the Japanese, Spanish and Taiwanese-inspired restaurant Pagu in Cambridge; and the Thai restaurant and cocktail bar Mahaniyom in Brookline. Cheers to the staff and the customers lucky enough to eat and drink there.
Last year GBH’s Edgar B. Herwick III explored the pay-to-play system behind the Michelin Guide. In short: tourism boards have to pay the organization to get their restaurants up for consideration. “It’s not a well-kept secret, and I think that’s because tourism boards do have to release what they’re spending money on,” food writer and New York Times contributor Korsha Wilson told him then. “It’s definitely not some organic thing. It’s very, very calculated when Michelin Guide comes to a new city.”
Four Things to Know
1. A proposed ballot question to allow rent control in Massachusetts — which would cap annual rent increases at 5% for many properties — is gaining momentum. But Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, who previously proposed her own rent control policy, said she’d like to see a different version of the plan.
“I wish that the ballot initiative had been just a pure local option. Repeal the ban on cities taking action and let each city do what they need to do,” Wu said on GBH’s Boston Public Radio. “Because conditions can be quite different in each municipality depending on your local economy, and the mix of commercial, residential and all that.”
2. Former Harvard president Larry Summers will continue teaching economics at the university, even as he steps back from other public commitments following the release of emails between him and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by the House Oversight Committee.
“His association with Epstein and his interactions are disgusting,” said senior Eunice Chon, co-founder of the Harvard Feminist Coalition. His emails about trying to lure a woman he described as a mentee into sex should disqualify Summers from teaching, she said: “He was joking with Epstein about the probability of sleeping with her.”
3. A 50-foot sperm whale that washed up on Nantucket’s north shore over the weekend is too large to move for a necropsy (animal autopsy), but scientists are still working to determine what caused the 104,000-pound animal’s death.
“The whale has a large gash on one side and damage to his head,” Marine Mammal Alliance Nantucket (MMAN) Executive Director Pam Murphy explained. At this point, researchers don’t believe he was entangled. “We will do as thorough an examination in place that we can, taking as many samples as we possibly can,” Murphy said.
4. The Lowell Spinners, the Mill City’s former minor league baseball team, will return in 2026 in a new league. The team, which played its last game in 2019 — before COVID canceled a season and the Red Sox dropped their minor league affiliation — will now join the Futures Collegiate Baseball League. Former Red Sox player Johnny Damon is part of the new ownership group.
“Being able to play baseball at LeLacheur [Park] and have that part of our league is really, really exciting. It’s something we’ve been working on for a really long time,” League commissioner Joe Paolucci said. “To see it finally come to fruition is great.”
Boston City Council aims to tackle local food waste
What would it take to get more Bostonians to put their food scraps, coffee grounds and egg shells in a compost bin instead of the trash can? There’s no lack of interest, City Councilor Sharon Durkan told GBH’s Saraya Wintersmith. In fact, Boston’s curbside composting pickup program for residents in buildings with six units or fewer currently serves 27,000 people — and has a waiting list of about 400.
“We’re treading water in a way,” Durkan said. “More people want to access this program, but the contractors that we’re working with to deliver this for our Boston families are at their limits in terms of how much waste they can accept.”
Durkan will preside over a hearing tomorrow to discuss whether the city should expand its $3.3 million curbside composting program.
“If people are paying out of pocket to do something that serves our environment and diverts waste from landfills, we should be encouraging that and making it easy,” Durkan told Wintersmith. “And, right now, I don’t think we’re making it easy enough.”
While Boston’s councilors are looking at expanding composting for households, the state’s Department of Environmental Protection is interested in the organic waste that comes from places like restaurants, senior care facilities, universities and prisons. These places are already banned from tossing more than half a ton per week of organic material (think food, but also pizza boxes, paper towels and paper napkins) into the trash, and the state is considering expanding that policy in the coming years. You can read more about that here.
Dig deeper:
-Moving in Boston? Plan ahead to recycle your mattress
-What happens to the food you put down your garbage disposal?
From 2022: Boston’s new curbside composting program is here. The demand’s been there for a long time
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