Good Eats, Good People: Highland Kitchen, Somerville, MA

A few years ago my friend Andrew and I played a very small, very empty show at a brand new place on Highland Ave in Somerville called Madison's on the Ave. This show is memorable for a few reasons: one being that it was pretty much completely empty except for our very patient, very kind lady-friends (yet the manager of the place still paid us something like $100), and another reason being that the aforementioned manager was not exactly a nice person. I particularly remember him giving me a ridiculously hard time about needing some kind of rug on which to place my drums or else I was going to tear up his nice new hardwood floor with my drums sliding all over creation. There were several rugs in other areas of the very empty restaurant.

Anyway, Madison's didn't last more than a year at best and I wasn't surprised. Running a restaurant on bad vibes and mediocre food isn't going to get you very far. Fast-forward to the present and Madison's is now the Highland Kitchen and, presumably, under new management. Last week my lady and I walked up and the place was packed. Somehow we stole some seats at the bar while we waited for a table (and didn't wait more than 20 mins) and ordered the Devils on Horseback, which -- just please get up and go there now and eat them, stop reading. If you're not familiar, Devils on Horseback are giant dates, stuffed with some real gnarly (aka great) blue cheese and probably lots of other cool things, wrapped in bacon. See the very dark photo above taken by candlelight at our table . I believe they get baked, though maybe they were grilled? I don't know and I don't think I really care; they were in my belly in a heartbeat. My friends Amy & Bryan made these once filled with goat cheese, which was also incredible.

So for dinner I had the buttermilk friend pork chops with garlic mashed potatoes, a ham hoc gravy, and smoky collards. All delicious and buttermilky (mmm), really my only complaint was that the pork chops were a tiny bit too dry, though honestly it wasn't that big of a deal because they were still delicious. Julie had the special, which was a grilled Sea Bass that was just a tiny bit over-blackened for our tastes, but the inside was lush and perfectly cooked .

But here comes the best part. We're kind of slow eaters, and as our dinner went on several tables on either side of us opened up. We'd just finished up dinner and had ordered a banana bread pudding with vanilla ice cream to split for dessert when the manager gently touched my shoulder and asked, with a pained expression, if we wouldn't mind moving two tables over so they could push a couple other tables together for a bigger party. I said sure thing, no problemo, and then he offered to buy our dessert. "But of course," I said, though he really didn't need to. And so while we were eating the dessert (about which I think I really only need to say man oh man oh man, but I really love banana bread, reminds me of mom's cookin' oh man!) our waitress brought over two glasses of sherry on the house, still apologizing for the table swap thing. The only thing that sort of concerns me about this is whether I was correctly projecting my inner feelings, which were that it was no big deal to have moved tables. Did I scowl or something? I don't think I did.

Anyway, really good people, really good food, everybody wins. Check out the Highland Kitchen.