Pettiness and precision are co-morbid afflictions. 

Great poets are petty assholes. So there. 

In manner of introduction, I am an aspiring petty asshole who can think of no better place to kick-start my no-doubt insipid and short-lived literary career than the canonical criterion classic genre of writing rambling and incoherent one-star reviews for singular institutions just as a spite for some minor inconvenience caused likely by some tangential coincidence or sophomoric misattribution of causation and correlation — I had The Oyster last Friday and it went through me. So there. 

The institution in question is Claudine. A fine dining destination located in downtown Providence, Rhode Island that manages to walk that Post-Modern tightrope of elevated-but-not-showy with constructed French insouciance. 

Chore-coats; A welcoming cavernous interior; And an astonishingly generative œuvre that transforms each time you walk through its gestural vestibule — Et voilà, you have the component parts of what is very likely the best restaurant in the Northeast. 

The food is immaculate; Generative; And much of it locally sourced: dried herbs from their grandma’s farm line the fenêtre of their open kitchen. 

For clarification’s sake, I have opted to pen a mock-scathing review simply because it would be a major snooze to read a laundry list of glowing affirmations for the technical mastery, ingenuity and immaculate professionalism of the team at this establishment. Apologies for being a talentless hack but alas. 

For context, I visited this restaurant weekly (and often bi-weekly) for the past month or so, clocking in over half a dozen two-and-a-half hour culinary extravaganzas alone and with friends. Why I did so at such an incessant pace I could only guess 

It has been a whirlwind of visceral emotion, mid-meal eureka(!) moments and even a classic Proustian recall situation incited by some peppers.