Rita's Place

From 1973 to 1975 I lived in a house in Sudbury, Massachusetts with four roommates, two of whom have remained life long friends and, when one of the others moved out in 1975, the replacement roommate eventually became, a few years later, Mrs THC.  It wasn't cheap by the standards of the day, but remarkably inexpensive by the standards of even the 1980s - we each paid $90 a month plus utilities for our own bedrooms with fireplaces for a house on 90 acres of land in the Boston suburbs.  Most of the property was wooded and in the fall we would cut our firewood for the winter.  We also built a large garden to grow vegetables.  One day I was working on expanding the garden with one of my roommates when we came upon a large rock.  The sensible thing to do would have been to simply leave it in place but we weren't sensible, instead deciding to remove it.  We spent 6-8 hours digging and ever so slowly using two logs to lever it until we got the thing out of that hole.  Mission accomplished!  Utterly exhausted by the end but it sure felt fulfilling.  We'd done something concrete, something tangible.  I was in law school at the time which was anything but concrete and tangible.

We did a lot of things together, including going out to eat, and one of my fondest memories is of twice venturing to Rita's Place, a restaurant in Chelsea, a Boston area town on the other side of the Mystic River from Charlestown. In those days, Chelsea was like Charlestown (the setting for so many crime-centered Boston films in the 90s and 2000s, though Chelsea itself was the setting for scenes in Mystic River, Black Mass, The Departed and The Equalizer) except more dangerous, and Rita's Place was on an isolated block surrounded by not much of anything substantial. 

During the week, Rita's operated as a little sub shop but on weekend evenings it offered 12 course dinners for a fixed price of $15 (that was a lot in those days).  You made reservations well in advance, entered through the darkened sub shop, went up a few steps and past the kitchen into a dining room with maybe two large tables and a couple of smaller ones (I can close my eyes and still picture it). We'd go with everyone in the house and an assortment of friends, usually 10 to 12 people in all.

I can't remember details of what was served but what I still remember is the sensation of reveling in how extraordinarily delicious each course was along with the joyous companionship of being among friends.   None of the courses, from appetizers to entrees to desserts were large, but they were all perfect.  The serving pace was leisurely giving us time to enjoy each course and our conversation.  The entire meal took about three hours and we would take a break in the middle to walk around the block to aid our digestion (we knew better than to stray outside that block).  I've no doubt everyone who was there still remembers Rita's.

When I did some research for this post, I discovered Rita's Place stopped its restaurant business a few years later to focus exclusively on catering (and is now known simply as Rita's) and it apparently has continued to thrive in that niche.  You can find its website here.  It says it served nine-course meals back in those days, but we definitely had twelve!