Shortly after arriving in Lawrence, I realized I was in a town (population ~80,000) where, if I tried hard enough, I could feasibly eat in every single restaurant in town. It took me my whole five years of residence there, but I am happy to report back that I succeeded!
The list I made, based on the official Lawrence.com restaurant listing page (plus a few hole-in-the-wall places they missed) came out to a little under 200 restaurants (which, looking back, seems like a whole lot of restaurants.) It was quite a pleasant adventure, teaching me about different nooks and crannies of Lawrence, and exposing me to all sorts of restaurants that ran the gamut from stomach-churning to mind-blowing.
Pleasant surprises included such finds as a tiny Amish deli/bakery near the outskirts of town, a fantastic Italian joint run by local chefs out of a gas station convenience store, a Chipotle-like fast food restaurant specializing in Philly Cheese Steak sandwiches, and two different all-you-can-eat pizza joints for dirt cheap (student prices as low as $3!)
The quality and price of the food in Lawrence varied substantially. At the high end there was a place like this:
A Japanese / sushi restaurant with a total of two tables, and two seatings per night. It was one of the most lovingly prepared and creative restaurant meals I have ever experienced. Also, I'm sure, one of the most expensive (although I do not know exactly, as this was Rafael's birthday gift to me...)
And then there was the low end. My eating adventure certainly brought me to plenty of sub-par eating establishments in Lawrence, but one restaurant easily topped the list of lousy food: Border Bandido, on 23rd street. The tortillas were stale, the ingredients clearly came right out of cans, the cheese was homogenized, the 'beef' (hamburger) was cold, and the 'salsa' was the consistency of a beverage. This was one of the few times in history when I, Adam David Norris, did not finish my meal.
My favorite Lawrence restaurant (when you factor in affordability) would have to be The Burger Stand, a restaurant that we were around to see the beginning of. A local husband-and-wife team who used to be fancy chefs decided to open a joint selling high-end burgers for reasonable prices, and boy have they succeeded. Meg and I agree on this as our favorite Lawrence restaurant, and try as we might (and boy have we tried) we have yet to find a suitable replacement in the entire Greater Boston area.
The final restaurant to cross off on my list was a local burger-and-shake type of restaurant that I put off eating at until my very last day in Lawrence. The reason I had avoided eating there was that it aired these consistently lousy, poorly-produced, incredibly annoying commercials during sporting events. These commercials tended to make the viewer uncomfortable, annoyed, nauseous and mildly depressed. Don't believe me? Try one:
Having accomplished my remarkable ~200 restaurant feat, I now live in the Boston area with my wife. Needless to say, there are a lot more than 200 restaurants to defeat here. In fact, there are over 200 Zagat rated restaurants alone in the region. While it won't be possible to make much of a dent in the local restaurant scene, we sure have been enjoying a delicious range of cuisines here (e.g., Himalayan, Cuban, Ethiopian, Portuguese.) Indeed, we recently ate at a very nice restaurant owned and operated by the brother of Hamid Karzai. But that, alas, is another adventure for another day.
