28 Degrees

28 Degrees is located in Boston's trendy South End. They offer valet parking ($16) and a pretty good menu and wine list. The restaurant is a great people watching space with comfortable booths that surround a pretty "cool" bar area where the hip young beatiful people hang out (I am neither young, hip, nor beautiful, so I don't know what I was doing at the bar, but I was there). Although the restaurant offers a great drink menu (the frozen peach bellini martini was really good), the menu is fairly deceptive. It looks like a regular menu, but is really intended to be eaten by groups, family style. The waiter described that the restaurant is self-described as a tapas style restaurant and suggested that we order accordingly. That information in hand, the menu made more sense.

Being a tapas restaurant, we ordered Rioja and the sommelier did what many restaurants now do (which I find really annoying), they brought out a different year (More in a later post). The rioja we ordered was a 2000 Riserva, but were given a 2001. Now, frankly, I don't know if we were being given the deal of the century or getting screwed, but I want to read a wine list, make a choice and get what I ordered or be informed that they don't have year "x" but can still offer the wine in year "y". Instead, as so many other restaurants now do, they try to pawn off the bottle like its the same thing and look at us crazily if we mention the fact that the listed wine if for a different year. That said the wine and food was reasonably priced and pretty good.