“Sex and the City’s” big screen return has us craving some shopping-spa-ing-n-sipping. So we click-clack to Southie. Start a Me-day with some repair work at Spa Christine. Lovely folks that they are, having tortured you with a Brazilian they reward your curses with a lollipop.
Time for brunch at Playwright, where a full-on Irish breakfast ($6.95) includes black pudding (a sausage containing otherwise unusable animal body parts) and is guaranteed to put hair on your chest. Feeling the Brazilian’s sting, we instead choose eggs Benedict ($6.95), which does the morning-after trick. After the night, that is, at the Boston Beer Garden, where a few particularly well-made (i.e., not swamped in simple syrup) Blood Orange Crushes (orange-y vodka embittered with Campari, $9) almost got the better of us.
There’s no better place to spend-spend-spend an afternoon than at cute clothing boutique Ku de Ta, which instills as bad a shopping habit as nearby, um, Habit, a stylish store that nods to Terence Conran’s swinging Habitat.
Alongside the swankier-by-the-minute South Boston Waterfront’s increasingly well-heeled dining options — Barbara Lynch’s haute Francais, Menton; Esti Parsons (Radius) headed Sam’s Place at Louis — is the less sceney and equally dreamy 606 Congress. Consulting chef Michael Schlow (Radius, Alta Strada) switched up the menu with clean, lively flavored dishes that involve words like organic and sustainable without ratcheting up the prices (too much). Tiny, wonderfully tasty (preservative-free) Laughing House shrimp with avocado, cress, and tagarashi spiced tempura crispies ($11); line-caught halibut with roasted artichoke and blanched asparagus salad, all washed down with unoaked Inox chardonnay ($39) from Oregon’s certified sustainable Chehalem winery: Slainte!
