I went to one of Boston’s best restaurants last night.  A family favorite, never disappointing, not after all these years, and whether it’s from the back or in the main room, Santarpio’s always has the city’s best pizza.

Not just the pizza, of course, but the general vibe of staff and customers having a great time at great value.  In the main room, it starts with the server asking, “Youse need menus?”  In the back, it’s the chubby guy in checkered pants shouting your name after you tell him who you are so he can get your order.

The pizzas are baked in huge ovens that look like Blodgett, and the bottoms have cornmeal.  Toppings are hidden beneath mozzarella and tomato sauce that’s scooped from an old tin.

$45 for three to eat two pies, a half carafe of wine, and a bottle of beer in the dining room, including tax and tip.  (That’s about $40 less for the same items in most Boston restaurants where the food is about 40% as good.)  $30 for two pies to take home.

The 1/2 sausage and 1/2 anchovy are a favorite, and the pepperoni or

mushroom wonderful, too.

This is the kind of food Boston excels at it.  Though might as well be in Jersey, and that’s the highest compliment.

Cash only.

Knausgaard recommended in an interview, “Voices from Chernobyl,” and I read sixty pages before sending it back to Amazon and getting a refund.  Sixty words would have done the same trick.  Page after page of repetitive despair, I’m not knocking it, nothing like someone else’s misery to make your own insignificant.

So now reading Judd Apatow’s book of interviews with stand-up comics.  Each page offers something new.

In between these accounts of pain and laughter, two pieces I wrote were published last week, one about a luxury spa in Flims and another about how to travel in Switzerland as a Swiss.  What other country does so well with other people’s money?

On the broader front, my book proposal on Japanese cognition ought to go out today, and my book about lost children in Japan still seeks a home, which is kind of ironic.

Day to day, I stock up on food for the upcoming apocalypse.  I gave up eating dinners out in Boston awhile back, with one or two exceptions, but I know that the night will come when I crave a $17 cocktail, burgers, fries, poutine, Chinese meals with protein from commercial farms, pizza, and pork.  Then I’ll step out my door and head into town.