The cold truth about buying hot goods by Sandra Miller
Pssst. Buying hot goods not only hurts local business and the economy, it can get you arrested.
Boston Police Sgt. Tom Lema needs to remind businesses and residents in the area to stay away from people selling cheap goods out of the trunk of a car or bag.
“Basically we have some local folk who have been walking around with shopping bags trying to sell things like razor blades, shirts, and jackets,” says Sgt. Lema, who is stepping up patrols to watch for this illegal activity. “We want to remind restaurant employees and store employees and the neighborhood folk that buying or receiving stolen goods is against the law.”
In fact, if you buy anything from some hoodlum that’s worth more than $250, the police will arrest you on site and take you to court.
“We’re not only going after those trying to sell the stolen property, we’re also out to target the ones who are buying it. If people aren’t buying it there wouldn’t be a business for it.”
We’re also pretty sure that area businesses would prefer that you spend your cash in their stores. Every dollar invested locally means fewer store closings, which in turn creates a higher quality of life for the neighborhood. It’s worth the extra dollar or two, so shop locally.
Sgt. Lema also wanted to remind locals that portable GPS units continue to attract car break-ins. Not only should you always remember to put them away in a glove compartment or elsewhere hidden in the car, you should also remember to remove the plastic ring from your windshield, which is a beacon for GPS hunters. The more eagle-eyed thieves also look for the tell-tale ring left on a windshield when you remove the suction cup, so be sure to wipe that away each time, too.
“It just takes a few moments to break into your car,” says Sgt. Lema. “That is the number one item taken from cars, across the city.” He reported that 26 units were stolen from cars within the Financial District this year, up from 21 last year, and that car breaks are up “significantly” in the North End and Beacon Hill.
On the bright side, however, he did notice a drop in the area’s aggravated assault and robberies.
Mooo…'s wine director, Sarah DiBari, is an energetic 27-year-old whose sense of adventure and relative inexperience apparently has worked well as a transition from the Federalist's more serious attitude toward wine. "Wine directors are getting younger, and more approachable," she says. "The days of stuffiness about wine is over. It's different than the Federalist. We're fine dining without pretension."
DiBari started out at Tufts, where she was studying to be a doctor, and then, she said, "I got distracted by wine." Her family wasn't big into wine, and recalls an uncle who imported grapes from Italy to make a wine whose most important feature was that it had three times the amount of alcohol found in a store-bought bottle.
"Today you see college kids getting into wine, but that wasn't me and my friends. I ended up hanging around older people in this industry."
She studied wine for years, and was an assistant for the wine director at Excelsior, where she said she lifted a lot of boxes while patiently learning the trade. "We did wines together on his days off. He was interested in me, and did a lot of work educating me."
After taking the wine director's job, she modeled a lot of her cellar after that restaurant's binning system and wine list, and has since also built up her Australian, South American and Spanish selections.
DiBari keeps up with trends by reading and surfing the Internet, ever mindful of certain price points.
To go with the popular Kobe beef dumpling appetizer, she paired the ginger and soy flavors with an Australian Kangarilla Road shiraz. It was a bottle that wasn't sold locally, but she had read about it and she just had to have it. She hunted down the distributor to get some bottles, and decided to pour it by the glass. "We do have a lot of buying power. It's really exciting. I taste things I wouldn't otherwise be able to taste." She favors smaller distributors, and likes to buy in small batches. "The menu doesn't need to be consistent," she says. "If I taste something great, I just buy six bottles. I'm always tasting and I'm always changing. It makes it fun for the staff, too."
"I try to find the stuff people haven't heard of, but we're a steakhouse, so we also have to have the bigger names," she says. "It's about reading the customer. They say, 'This is what I drink.' Then I can tell that some guests want a big name that's popular, or if they'd say, I'd like to try something different.' If they like Bordeaux blends, I might steer them toward a malbec."
If a customer is getting the Kobe beef, she'd recommend a richer cabernet, such as her current favorites, the 2000 Andrew Will Sorella from Washington, which she said has a lot of age on it, with integrated tannins and "a pencil lead, an earthy structure." Or the 2003 Chateau Durfort-Vivens Margaux, or a 2004 Shirvington cab from McLaren of Vale.
For the beef carpaccio, she loves a 2003 Chateau De Malle sauterne, "which lets you taste the beef over the blue cheese." The lemony wiener schnitzel could call for a chardonnay, a 2006 Ramey from Russian River Valley, which she called a burgundian chardonnay with lemon rind flavors.
Aside from her personal conversations with customers, she'll host private wine pairing events in the cellar. Starting in January, she'll be offering quarterly wine dinners in the wine cellar, with top wine producers from around the country. One customer liked her ideas so much, he flew her out to Florida for a company event.
"The wine people are very open minded and willing to go to all different places," she says. "A person who is eating at a restaurant called Mooo… is ready to enjoy themselves."
So she didn't become a doctor, but today, she practices a different sort of medicine, which upsets her parents a little. "I solve that by bringing wine home for the holidays."
Suffolk says it will meet enrollment figure by Dan Salerno
When Suffolk University reached its accord with the Beacon Hill Civic Association (BHCA), one of the major conditions of the pact was a pledge that Suffolk would cap student enrollment at 5,000, with promises to correct overages.
Yesterday, Suffolk released its first enrollment figures since the signing of that agreement, and university spokesmen say the results are promising, despite exceeding the promised 5,000 figure for the first semester.
For Fall 2008, full-time equivalent (FTE) undergraduate enrollment for the Boston campus was 5,239, according to numbers Suffolk provided. While this represents a 239 student overage, university representatives believe lower spring enrollment figures will bring the yearly average to 5,000, as required by the university’s master plan and neighborhood agreement.
“Suffolk generally experiences a significant reduction in enrollment from the fall to the spring semesters,” Suffolk Public Affairs Director Greg Gatlin wrote in an e-mail. “That’s a result of natural attrition, study abroad, transfers and other factors. We’re confident that when taken as an average, FTE undergraduate enrollment for the 2008-09 academic year will be 5,000 FTEs in Boston.”
Thus, to meet the 5,000 average, spring enrollment must be at 4,761 or less. If the university doesn’t meet the 5,000 enrollment figure for the year, Gatlin said it will compensate for the overage with future enrollment reductions.
Also, in good news for the neighborhood’s private housing sector, Suffolk is reporting that fewer students than ever are living in off-campus housing in Beacon Hill. Likely due to an increase in on-campus housing with the opening of the 10 West dorm, off-campus students living in Beacon Hill fell 24 percent, from 283 students to 222.
As part of its agreement with the BHCA, Suffolk has pledged to add enough housing to serve at least 50 percent of its student body within the next decade. At the same time, Suffolk has agreed not to add any new housing to Beacon Hill, and is also working to close classrooms in the Temple-Derne Street area as it shifts more students to less residential areas, such as Somerset Street. Suffolk is currently working on the design of a new art school and general academic building at 20 Somerset Street. Also, the Modern Theater performance and dormitory complex is scheduled to open in the coming year.
News that the T is nearly broke and may reach a point of bankruptcy or insolvency does little to calm our nerves during this holiday season. Most of us who live in the city have come to rely upon rapid transit, not to mention the positive effects rapid transit has on turning this city green.
T executives are saying that services may be cut in order to correct the imbalance.
About the last thing we need in our neighborhoods are more automobiles, more exhaust fumes, more parking woes and more street traffic.
Governor Deval Patrick is apparently preparing a transit bill that will correct the money imbalances at the T and at the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, another agency preparing to go broke because it is unable to meet the interest requirements of the money it has borrowed or for which it is responsible.
We urge the State Senate and House to work closely with the governor to correct the problems at the T and the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.
And this just might be the right moment to scrap the $1 billion Silver Line initiative.
Cutbacks of rapid transit service and $7 tunnel tolls and higher roadway tolls are not the way to go – not when the economy is heading south.
The state should renegotiate its debt the way everyone else in the financial meltdown is managing to do.
Billie Lawrence
The city has lost one of its quintessentially caring residents with the death at 74 of Beacon Hill resident and activist Billie Lawrence.
Since she came to Boston and fell in love with the city 27 years ago, and with Beacon Hill especially, she has been a leading activist for historic preservation.
She was a fighter of the first order for the limited income people being pushed out of the Hill, and most recently, she opposed a restaurant on Boston Common. Her fights against the proliferation of liquor licenses in the neighborhood were well known.
She was a child prodigy pianist, an anti-war activist, a faculty assistant at Harvard Business School.
She was also the founder of the Upper Beacon Hill Civic Association and led the fight to have Suffolk University scale back the university’s 20 Somerset Street project.
Ms. Lawrence made her mark in Boston on Beacon Hill.
It is a mark that won’t shortly be forgotten by those who knew her and who respected what she stood for.
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