Sitting on the Dock of the Boggs

 From the Recordings Vault Dept.: Every so often, while browsing through my files, I find a piece that I wrote on spec, or possible, as I suspect is the case with this one, for Metroland. That publication liked to stockpile a cluster of CD reviews and run them some weeks later. If this one ever ran, I have no idea. But the recording it describes is a foundational set for a collection of true American roots music.

                                                                           

EVERY NOW AND THEN a small, seminal stream of music bubbles up amidst the roar of the pop machinery. Thanks to a recent Smithsonian-Folkways re-release, we can again hear the voice and banjo of Virginia-born Dock Boggs, who recorded a series of LPs for Folkways in the mid-60s after working in obscurity in Kentucky coal mines for 44 years.

His repertory comprised songs learned from relatives and recordings, typically old songs that already had transformed in the re-singing, transformed again by Boggs during his early years of playing and singing, and changed once more when he prepared them for these recordings. Old songs like “John Henry,” “Pretty Polly” and even “Turkey in the Straw,” along with many tunes that Boggs assembled from bits of verse and music.

They’re played in a deceptively simple style – typically, Boggs accompanies himself by playing the melody against a style called up-picking, only rarely using the more boisterous clawhammer style. And his singing voice is reedy and strident, wailing with nasal intensity through one mournful ballad after another.

Caribbean Flavor in the Neighborhood

From the Food Vault Dept.: Here’s a review I wrote 29 years ago about a Jamiacan restaurant in downtown Albany, NY. At the time, it was fairly unique in offering this cuisine, but now you’ll find a number of Jamaican and other Caribbean-cuisine eateries in the area. As for Clayton’s itself, it closed many years ago, but I’m happy to note that the address is now home to Hot Spot Jamaican-American Cuisine.

                                                                                        

MY FIRST PRIORITY when traveling is to find the native cuisine. A couple of years ago I poked around Nassau, in the Bahamas, in search of something other than the crappy tourist fare offered anywhere near the hotels. Finally, we learned that you had to go “over the hill,” to the part of town not recommended by the brochures. My wife and I cabbed to a place called The Three Queens and had the best meal of our stay, not to mention a fun time among friendly people.

Stew beef - borrowed from
another source

That’s sort of the feeling you get in downtown Albany, at least when you’re dining at Clayton’s. Formerly a restaurant called Caribeño, Clayton’s has been open for about a year, maintaining its predecessor’s balance of Spanish and Caribbean cooking. You get good food very inexpensively, and you get it at all hours.

You may also have known the location as Calsolaro’s, its name for many years. Located a little west of where Washington Avenue vees off of Central, the restaurant still has two entrances, one of which leads right to the bar. Unlike its immediate predecessor, Clayton’s sells alcohol--wine and beer--and has a list of wine specials posted on the back wall of the dining room. The front part of the dining room is a single aisle flanked by tables and booths; beyond it is a larger room that wasn’t being used the afternoon we visited.

A Pride of Musical Lions

A BIG CLUE TO UNDERSTANDING THIS BAND lies in the fact that Bob Crosby isn’t on the box set’s cover. It’s the first artist-centered Mosaic set I’ve seen where the named talent isn’t pictured, and there’s an excellent reason. Bob Crosby was taken on only as the nominal leader of this group. He couldn’t read music, couldn’t wield a baton, and couldn’t sing as well as his brother Bing. But he was a radio presence with an easygoing stage presence, and the bandmembers figured he wouldn’t get in their way. They were right. Incredibly, most remained happy with this arrangement.

The well-known backstory bears repeating due to its comic improbability. Ben Pollack led a hugely successful band through the 1920s, launching the careers of players like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. In the early 1930s, Pollack fell in love, and his inamorata was a second-string singer named Doris Robbins. He wanted her name to become famous. It did, but only in the context of this story.

His bandmembers resented the attention he gave her and the awful performances she perpetrated, and late in 1934 they staged a mass walkout. They were dubbed “Pollack’s Orphans” in the music press. Many of them moved to Jackson Heights in Queens, to a building where they were able to commandeer the basement as a rehearsal space. They styled themselves as a coöperative and elected reedman Gil Rodin as their leader.

Hop on the Local!

As my ability to walk and even stand continues to deteriorate, I dreaded the process of putting together this year's Thanksgiving meal. And I didn't have to, because my daughter took over in order to implement her wish to keep as much of the component ingredients local as possible (revisiting a concept I used for our 2006 dinner). The resultant menu is below, and here's a link to the menus from our previous 24 years at this address.

Cascading into the End of Time

From the Musical Vault Dept.: The Cascade Soloists, as a group, is no more, but clarinetist David Shifrin continues a distinguished career on the faculty of Yale (among other schools) and as a longtime part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Violinist Ik-Hwan Bae was an enthusiastic chamber-music performer as well as concertmaster of South Korea’s Hwaum Chamber Orchestra, while pianist William Doppmann was a composer as well, winning two Guggenheim Fellowships in that capacity; both died over a decade ago. I can find no recent internet trail of cellist Warren Lash. But we’re going back 40 years now (as we did last week) to revisit a wonderful concert performed by the four of them in Schenectady.

                                                                                       

Cascade Soloists is a charming name for a chamber music ensemble, and their performance at Union College’s Memorial Chapel on Friday night was a charming concert. The music was well chosen and received the kind of sensitive ensemble playing that is usually the result of many more years of collaboration than the few the Cascade Soloists have racked up.

The quartet comprises David Shifrin, William Doppmann, Ik-Hwan Bae, and Warren Lash playing, respectively, clarinet, piano, violin, and cello. That makes Olivier Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” a natural selection, and it concluded Friday’s concert.

First performed in 1941 while the composer was held prisoner in Germany, it combines a bleak sense of those surroundings with a bold tribute to the tenth chapter of the Book of Revelation.

There is a pastoral aspect to the piece in two senses of the term: the religious underpinnings are topped with a setting of birdsong, and this awareness of nature informs much of the work.

An Andean Flavor at a Mexican Restaurant

From the Vault Dept.: Tahuantinsuyo, a trio or quartet of musicians specializing in indigenous music of South America, was founded in the 1970s and endured at least until 2012. Their website no longer exists, however, but their recording “Tahuantinsuyo: Music of the Andes” is available at various online music sites. After reading the review below, which I wrote 40 years ago, I just might buy one.

                                                                                                  

BOB PHANEAUF, soon-to-be former chef of El Loco Mexican Café, is offering the Albany area a nightspot with good food and an impressive lineup of musicians, all in a comfortable atmosphere reminiscent of the folk clubs that proliferated in Greenwich Village 25 years ago. The question is: Will the area support such a place?

Based on the performance by Tahuantinsuyo, a quartet of South American musicians which appeared at the club Sunday night, there is an audience that appreciates such fine (if eclectic) music. The house (performances are given at the eba Chapter House at the comer of Lark and Hudson Streets) seats about 200 and most of the seats were taken.

Spokesman for most of the musical numbers was Pepe Santana, from Ecuador. Like the other three (who are from Bolivia and Peru), be plays guitar, mandolin, pan pipes, pennywhistle and drums, and sings. He explained that “Tahuantinsuyo” refers to the area that was once the Inca empire; it literally translates as “four corners of the world,” and refers to an area that now covers most of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, and parts of Colombia, Argentina, and Chile.

The House of Pharoah Heard

YOU’RE PROBABLY NOT GOING TO like this set. But I don’t want to underestimate you. To make the critical balancing act worse, I don’t want to oversell you, either. I do this all the time in my house, praising to the skies a movie or a recording that my family then confesses didn’t at all live up to my encomium. 

Pharoah Sanders took the tenor sax out of the hands of John Coltrane, so to speak, and proved that its previously understood limiting factors could be stretched unimaginably further. He got all manner of sound out of its bell, many of them not immediately pleasing to humans and probably harmful to pets. 

While in his early 20s, Sanders and his horn settled in New York City, where he went from occasional homelessness – often crashing with Sun Ra – to gigs with the likes of Don Cherry. By 1965, he was part of John Coltrane’s ensemble. You’ll hear his early work on the Coltrane albums “Ascension” and “Meditations.” But if Coltrane was playing “anti-jazz,” as downbeat opined in 1961, Sanders had further to go.

Post-Coltrane, he continued releasing albums on the Impulse! label, with a few side-trips to Arista and Strata-East, but in 1980 he signed with the young Theresa label, beginning an eight-album association that lasted through 1986. 

"Good Luck"

Guest Blogger Dept.: Robert Benchley takes a gamble here to write about luck, our conceptions of which we can safely characterize as superstitions. If we’re lucky. Benchley portrait by Gluyas Williams.

                                                                                   

AND NOW they are trying to take away our superstitions from us. First they tax us until it is cheaper not to earn any money at all, then they force us to drink beer, and now they come along and tell us that we mustn't believe that if your nose itches you are going to have company.

I am not a superstitious man myself, but no Columbia University professor is going to sit there and tell me that if an actor (or anybody) whistles in a dressing room it doesn't mean bad luck for the person nearest the door. That's a scientific fact.

Neither will I be told that I must throw out all the little odds and ends of clothing and currency that I have accumulated during the past quarter of a century, each one of which has been certified by the United States Bureau of Standards as a definite good luck piece. I have proved their worth time after time (chiefly by not having had them with me when I had bad luck). I have an old green tie which I have worn so much that it now looks as if I were being led out to be lynched, and has that ever failed me? Never! I may not have always had good luck with it on, but it was because I forgot to wrap this long end around twice while tying it, or because I didn't have the ends even. The tie itself is sure-fire good luck, and I'll let no crack-brained theorist tell me different.

Backing Up, No Beeping

From the Tech Vault Dept.: Another of those mystery pieces that leap into my lap from time to time, in this case as I searched for something else in the depths of my computer archives. I would say this dates from about 2002, but I’m not going to go nuts finding out if it ever was published or not and if so, where. It’s about a technology that had its day, and caused a bunch of those oddball backup tapes to accumulate until the hardware went bad and orphaned my data.

                                                                                     

THE CENTURY TURNED, the lights stayed on. Your computer shrugged off the date change and you’re going to be sipping bottled water for a long, long time. How about backing up your data now?

What an unsexy subject! With all the inventive, colorful and just plain silly stuff out there competing for our time and money, backing up computer data is boredom itself. Unless you thought to shell out for the proper hardware when you bought your system (and it’s not a popular option), you have to pony up extra bucks for equipment that takes up space, requires costly media, gets in your way when you’re up late finishing a project, and then does nothing.

Until you lose a hard drive.

The question, as one backup software developer once put it, isn’t if your hard drive is going to fail – it’s when. You don’t get much warning, if any. And when it happens, you’ll enjoy an unbelievably sickening feeling as you realize just how much data – data you need! – was sitting on that hard drive. 

The Music Comes Round and Round

YOU WILL COME AWAY from this book with no doubt about Alex M. Stein’s love for his favored music. In fact, no matter how fervent a music-lover you may think yourself, the 40 essays contained herein may cause you to question your own depth of passion.

Stein’s talent has been realized and honed through years of professional writing and theater-making. He often performs his stories before an audience, and I’m guessing it’s this that gives his prose appealing contours of rhythm and an engaging mellifluousness. He uses judicious repetition of words and phrases which, along with such tools as assonance and alliteration, reveal the poetry lurking within these pieces.

There’s a commonality among those who obsess early on about music. At least those of, as we say, a certain age. Physical possession was important. If your obsession began in the LP days, you stockpiled records, both latest releases and elusive antiques. Your ears, ever-alert to nuance, treasured the differences a single song could display across a number of performances, even (or especially) by the same ensemble.

But most profound are the emotional associations created by the confluence of song and event. Stein’s musical universe, inadequately defined as “rock ‘n’ roll,” is far enough away from mine that I feared I’d have no commonality with his book. Until I read, in the Introduction, “If you’ve ever been dumped by someone and found you can no longer stand the music you associate with them, you’re definitely my people,” and realized that, no matter the music, we have grounds for bonding.

Speaking in Tongues

AS A LIFELONG CAT PERSON, I am most comfortable when my beast of the moment is snoozing on the nearby chair or prowling the house and yard for snacks, or just sitting nearby, staring into the middle distance. Whenever I catch her at that (and my cats, over the sixty-some years I’ve had them, almost always were female), she doesn’t even acknowledge my gaze by meeting my eye but busily commences grooming, often comically sitting on her haunches and bending into positions that cause my back to ache merely through looking. A few swipes of tongue over fur and then she glances my way, asking, “And what’s the big deal, Sparky?”

We fare well together, these cats and I. I make no big deal of this pet preference, having long believed it speaks for itself. Evidently, however, it hasn’t spoken to my daughter. 

Two years ago, Lily decided she needed a dog. Another dog, to put it correctly. The one that had been in residence for several year, a black Lab, had health-declined so badly so quickly that we had to pull the plug. A process I hate, yet one in which I’ve participated at the end of the life of nearly every pet I’ve had for the past forty-or-so years. 

“I’ve had enough of it,” I declared. “I’ve played Charon to too many of our four-legged friends.” Undermining my cause a little, I fear, because my daughter interprets any flowery language to mean that I’m out of my mind (or more so than usual) and not to be taken seriously. Seeing her skeptical moue, I reiterated: “No more dogs!”

Dinner at the Family Manse

From the Food Vault Dept.: It’s the 25th anniversary of the review posted below, a review of a restaurant in Amsterdam, NY, that had been in business in its current incarnation for 17 years, and has surpassed that by remaining in business today. I’m sad to report that Vittorio Valentino died in August, but the family continues to operate the restaurant, and re-reading the review has me excited to visit the place again. The hours given are the current ones; as always, don’t expect current pricing to be anywhere near what’s reported below.

                                                                                      

VITTORIO AND ESTER VALENTINO struck me as about the sweetest couple I’ve ever come across in this business. When we dined at their restaurant on a recent Friday night, they and one of their sons were running the whole show, as far as I could see, and Ester seemed to know everybody else who was dining there. By the time we were through, she knew all about us, too, and we’d had a tour of the place from Vittorio.

In many respects, this could typify your friendly neighborhood Italian restaurant. But there are a couple of major differences. First is the location: It’s in a mansion, with a striking-looking tower that gave earlier restaurants their names. Second is Vittorio’s training, which includes a stint at the Cordon Bleu in Paris, which he attended while working for a diplomat’s family. 

Difference number two is more subtle in the context of the menu, which is classically Italian-American. A few French specials once graced the menu but, as Vittorio explains, his wife was still learning English at the time and the task of explaining them was too daunting. Now they have a following solidly grounded in the Italian food that’s featured, so I suspect they won’t be straying much from that menu. But I may ask for something French the next time I visit.

A Gamut of the Emotions

EUGENE YSAŸE was one of last of the virtuoso violinist-composers who dominated the late 19th century, but unlike Wieniawski and Vieuxtemps, he didn’t produce much in the way of the tuneful, show-offish morceaux that typically ended the concert recitals of the era. His works were thornier, more in keeping with the changes in the compositional atmosphere wrought by post-Wagnerians. Ysaÿe lived from 1858 to 1931 and began his concert career at the age of 27. A year later, César Franck wrote for him, as a wedding present, his renowned Violin Sonata. 

A recital by Joseph Szigeti that featured Bach’s Sonata No. 1 in G Minor for solo violin (one of six such pieces by Bach) inspired Ysaÿe to write his own set of six solo sonatas, which he finished in July 1923. They are comparatively short works, each of them dedicated to a different violinist of Ysaÿe’s acquaintance. While they aren’t aggressively tuneful, they reveal masterful writing, using the violin’s technical resources to the fullest. They probably are best appreciated by violinists, especially those courageous enough to take on the virtuosic demands. 

The sonatas usually are recorded as a set, which only makes sense, and there are over fifty such recordings. One of the latest features Roman Simovic, a visiting professor of violin at the Royal Academy of Music in London whose resume includes appearances with all the top orchestras in Europe as well as distinguished festivals galore. He directed the London Symphony String Orchestra on four albums for the LSO Live label, for which he also recorded Paganini’s 24 Caprices.

Have Another Look

Art Isn’t Easy Dept.: Just when you thought that the late John Updike had once and for all dropped his pen, along comes yet another weighty tome – this time a collection of Updike letters. But don’t be fooled by my glib nonsense: I’m looking forward to reading it, confident I’ll enjoy it, just as I’ve enjoyed every one of his previous books, all of which are on a nearby shelf in my house. Meanwhile, let’s revisit my review of one of his more unexpected literary ventures, that of art critic. The piece below explains the rest.

                                                                             

THE RANKS OF WELL-KNOWN cartoonist-writers include James Thurber and Lou Myers, but unlike Robert Hughes, who moved from cartooning to art criticism, or Ad Reinhardt, whose cartoons were criticism, John Updike never professionally pursued his own drawing ability. In that regard, he’s like the early-20th-century writer Booth Tarkington, whose sketches livened the horrible penmanship of his letters.

Both of them wrote about art late in their respective careers. Tarkington’s Some Old Portraits (1939) paid gossipy but insightful tribute to a selection of 18th-century works; the 23 essays in Updike’s first collection, Just Looking (1989), introduced us to a novelist unafraid to summon beautiful language to examine his relationship with the pre-Abstractionist world. From Vermeer in the 17th century to the still-living Richard Estes, the collection also gave a nod to cartoonists like Ralph Barton and fellow writer-cartoonists like Goethe, Poe, Oscar Wilde and Flannery O’Connor.

Another collection, Still Looking, followed in 2005, focusing on American art and covering such painters as Copley, Homer, Whistler, Hopper, Pollock and Warhol as well as photographer Alfred Stieglitz. After Updike died in 2009, enough uncollected essays remained for a final celebration. As a title, Always Looking tops the first two with its comforting, if Olympian, declaration of continuity; as an essay collection, it’s broader-based, but also solidifies the range of Updike’s favorites.

That Was the Tech That Was

From the Tech Archives Dept.: I found this pair of pieces in my archives and had a terrific laugh at the enthusiasm with which I celebrated what’s now obsolete in the first piece. The second is slightly less dated, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any of those mom-and-pop mail-order computer stores any more. 

                                                                                 

Format Wars

SMALL USUALLY WINS when you talk home electronics. Just as the cassette conquered reel-to-reel, so has the half-inch videocassette triumphed over the bulky open-reel jobs. Surprisingly, though, the tiny 8-millimeter format never caught on—or has yet to. It wasn't impressive enough its first time out to sway the market; whether any refinement lurks is as yet unpromised.

Navigating the shoals of videotape formats is a confusing proposition, especially for the novice. There are five or six of them to consider, depending how you wish to count, and each has its share of enthusiasts.

To get the abbreviations straight, a VCR is a video cassette recorder: it can record from and playback through a television. They start at about $200, discounted, although you can save a few bucks by buying a video cassette player, which has no record capability. You’re then at the mercy of your local video rental store.

The Stokowski Nobody Knew

HAVING TOILED IN THE TRENCHES of journalism for over forty years (albeit the more rarefied trenches of classical music, theater, and other cultural events), I like to think that I can manage sufficient objectivity to deal with anything I’m asked to cover. I may have strong opinions, sure, but I try to position myself as an open-minded audience representative. 

But I can promise no such objectivity in dealing with Nancy Shear’s new book I Knew a Man who Knew Brahms, and I’ll explain why after some introductory matter.

Nancy Shear Arts Services, founded in 1978, provides career consulting and public-relations services to musicians, and have worked and continue to work with a very distinguished roster. Shear herself has taught at New York University and The New School, been orchestra librarian with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Curtis Institute, and has worked with a number of publishing companies in different capacities. She’s also a broadcaster who has been heard on WNYC, WHYY, and NPR, in the course of which she has conducted hundreds of interviews with star musicians.

Her memoir, however, chronicles her life in the years before she founded her agency, and it’s a fascinating, superbly written coming-of-age saga. It pulled me along not just through her skill at telling a good story but also because of the compelling commonality I discovered.

In 1960, Leopold Stokowski led a Philadelphia Orchestra concert at the Robin Hood Dell, an outdoor amphitheater in Philadelphia (now known as the Mann Center for the Performing Arts). Fourteen-year-old Nancy Shear, a resident of suburban Philadelphia, attended the event. She was enthralled by every aspect of it, from the orchestra tuning, to the sight of Stokowski waiting in the wings, to the program itself, which featured major works by Berlioz, Ravel, Debussy, and Shostakovich, among others.

Just Some Songs at Twilight

THE MAVERICK CHAMBER ORCHESTRA CONCERT is an annual event that recently welcomed the Caroga Arts Ensemble as its resident ensemble, a fitting acknowledgment of the quality of music-making going on in New York’s Fulton County each summer. The Maverick Concert Hall itself is in Woodstock (or Hurley, depending on your geographic preference), about a hundred miles south of Caroga Lake. The rustic hall in which the concerts take place was built in 1916, from an era in the area’s history when music and art and love were celebrated with no inkling  that another type of music festival, decades later, would put Woodstock on the map.

Photo courtesy Maverick Concerts

Saturday, August 23 was as perfect a day as you could desire in the middle of summer, which added to the fairy-tale aspect of this event. With its vaulted ceiling and decorative windows, the concert hall is a chapel where the faithful assemble to worship good music, a reasonable object of veneration. 

Seating is on padded benches arrayed in rows, flanked by lines of similar benches along the side walls. The large rear doors open onto a contained area with several more padded benches and, as I learned from arriving early enough to witness some rehearsal, there’s no compromise of the sound and the view. 

The hall was sold out for this concert, and that included the outdoor seating. While the second-half feature, Philip Glass’s Piano Concerto No. 3, performed by Simone Dinnerstein, was the draw, let’s wait to assess it. There’s a remarkable first half to consider.

A Fable

Mark Twain Dept.: Twain tinkered with storytelling techniques throughout his life as he transitioned from scrappy journalist to grand old moralist. Here; a trifle in the latter mode. The illustration is by Thomas Landseer.

                                                                                               

ONCE UPON A TIME an artist who had painted a small and very beautiful picture placed it so that he could see it in the mirror. He said, “This doubles the distance and softens it, and it is twice as lovely as it was before.”

The animals out in the woods heard of this through the housecat, who was greatly admired by them because he was so learned, and so refined and civilized, and so polite and high-bred, and could tell them so much which they didn't know before, and were not certain about afterward. They were much excited about this new piece of gossip, and they asked questions, so as to get at a full understanding of it. They asked what a picture was, and the cat explained.

“It is a flat thing,” he said; “wonderfully flat, marvelously flat, enchantingly flat and elegant. And, oh, so beautiful!”

That excited them almost to a frenzy, and they said they would give the world to see it. Then the bear asked:

“What is it that makes it so beautiful?”

“It is the looks of it,” said the cat.

Martinů: Magical and Mysterious

THE PORTRAIT OF BOHUSLAV MARTINŮ that emerged during a day of Martinů-related events at Bard College was uniquely unusual. He was a Czech-born composer who spent more time in France and America than in his native country. He lived from 1890 to 1959, thus placing his productive years in the midst of a time of great musical unrest. Yet he remained apart from it, absorbing much and transmuting it into a variety of forms. The portrait, therefore, eludes canvas and words: his music is the portrait.

“Martinů and His World” is the title of Bard’s 35th annual music festival. Each of the festivals has been dedicated to examining a composer not only through significant and lesser-known works but also alongside works by others of influence. I attended the three events presented on Saturday, August 9, 2025.

To truly explore the breadth of Martinů’s influences probably would demand many weeks of effort. As scholar-in-residence Michael Beckerman wrote, “Martinů provides us with an almost inexhaustible collection of works, approaches, and ideas. His fascinations, with such things as madrigals, Stravinsky, the Virgin Mary, jazz, Baroque music, Bartók, surrealism, neoclassicism, Byzantine chant, medieval miracle plays, and the folk cultures of Czechoslovakia, give his works shadings both subtle and powerful.” 

Longtime NYU prof Beckerman is about to become dean of the Herb Alpert School of Music at UCLA. A Czech-music specialist, he also was scholar-in-residence for Bard’s festivals centering on Dvořák (1993) and Janáček (2003).

Toothsome Haven

From the Food Vault Dept.: It’s the time of year when I should be schlepping to the Berkshires to frolic amongst the theaters and eateries that strew the landscape, but it’s not about to happen this summer. I may get a visit to Mass MoCA on the autumn calendar, but for now, let’s revisit a piece I wrote in 2013, a review of a restaurant that’s still thriving in Lenox. And, after re-reading this, I have to go back there sooner than later. Remember: All quoted pricing has changed in the intervening years. But you knew that. (Photos by B. A. Nilsson)

                                                                                                 

BECAUSE OUR EXOTIC VACATIONS are annoyingly few, my teenaged daughter and I play a game in which we imagine ourselves, at various moments, to be somewhere overseas. We typically end up in a European locale that combines Tuscany’s rural beauty with the urban indifference of Paris, where we just might have to bully through an inscrutable menu in order to tame our appetites at a picture-book café. 

The menu at Lenox’s Haven Café is in English, of course, and the downtown environment is unmistakably affluent New England. But, once seated at one of the polished wooden tables in the sun-warmed dining area, we decided that, with the addition of a thatched roof or two, we as easily could be in Cockington Village in Devon.

Not that any Cockington eatery would be offering grilled polenta topped with pesto ($14.50) or a $10 beet, apple and almond salad over arugula. Faced with the offerings for a Haven lunch, we were whisked back to Lenox and still found ourselves in a relaxing place.