Word: rialto
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...talking about Rialto, the highly touted restaurant, housed just a few steps behind the Kennedy School in the Charles Hotel. Prospective first-years wouldn't know it from the flood of information they receive before arriving in Cambridge, but one of the Northeast's top restaurants is far closer to the Yard than the nearest McDonald...
...placing Rialto in the elite of the elite isn't a stretch: Zagat's guide rates only one Boston restaurant higher; critic diva Ruth Reichl of the New York Times proclaims, "[Rialto] clearly knows what it is doing.... This is the sort of food that makes eating in Boston so exciting"; chef Jody Adams is a winner of the James Beard award for best chef in New England...
...this adds up to more than a bit of intrigue on my part, so I dial up the restaurant to arrange for a visit. And on Saturday afternoon I make the three-minute walk over to the Charles Hotel to link up with Kate Tazoy, a manager at Rialto who's agreed to let me shadow her for a couple of hours...
...find Kate and she starts to tell me about Rialto's hectic schedule, which keeps the dinner-only restaurant active 20 out of every 24 hours. Making our way into the cramped kitchen, the place is as busy as Kate made it sound. Nearly two dozen people are scaling, chopping, peeling and performing similar tasks. Large cauldron-like pots are steaming and trays full of uncooked food are being shuttled back and forth. No matter where I stand, I seem to get in the way, but everyone is cordial and way too busy to ask questions about the young...
...able to track Kate down again, and I ask her about the decision not to institute a dress-code. "We want people to be as comfortable wearing jeans and a T-shirt as they are in a tuxedo," she explains. At the same time, she acknowledges that Rialto's regulars are more likely to be dressed in the latter than the former. "The average age of the clientele is late forties," Kate estimates. On the other hand, "a lot of guys from the Hasty Pudding" come in from time to time...