[food] recent food impressions

+++ Zing! Pizza in Porter Square. These people are completely amazing-- the sort of nouveau pizza that I've wished for years would arrive closer to me than Emma's.* Don't bother with the plain, which is only okay; I don't think I've had a bad special yet. They just opened, so it's not clear if things like the smoked pumpkin & sage pizza will be seasonal or what. Latest great slice: Blushing Billy (beets, goat cheese, spinach). And supposedly they deliver in evenings.

++ New chef at Cambridge Brewing Company. I've had two amazing-but-overpriced comfort meals there; looking at other people's plates has made me think I might in part just be lucky, though. At any rate, the pumpkin ravioli and crab cakes both made me really happy.

+ White chocolate cranberry cheesecake ice cream at JP Licks. Note that the 'cheesecake' aspect includes both crust and filling. I guess this is no more components than a lot of Ben & Jerry's flavors, but it still felt awfully eventful for ice cream. It was like eating anime. I need to have this at least once more before it rotates out; does anyone know if the JP Licks "flavors of the month" actually go by calendar months?

-- Blue Shirt Cafe. How and why did they expand, given that most of their food is bad and usually nobody is inside? And why do I feel the need to go there one or twice a year to verify that it still is as bad as I think? The curried tuna I had last week was actually okay, which led to me recklessly getting a breakfast sandwich there this morning. It was awful. I never thought I would be this sad about a three-day suspension of Dunkin' Donuts service.

* Four places that are basically interesting, tasty and reliable but not quite good enough to have made me stop wishing: Cambridge 1 (ingredient list takes itself much too seriously, menu unchanged since opening six+ years ago), City Slicker (too oily, awful service, pizzas not actually that inventive), Za (WAY too oily, occasional calamities like the mac-&-cheese pizza or the wads of over-roasted garlic), and Veggie Planet (no alchemy-- it's just a pile of good ingredients on flatbread, which is very nice but not perfect). I've had Stone Hearth twice now and both times it was sadly a soggy mess with slightly weird flavors that seemed wrong instead of novel.