Waypoint is a new showpiece for newly-celebrated
chef Michael Scelfo; it's a mere half mile from
his flagship Alden & Harlow, away from the trendy
part of town, and you'd expect maybe that the food
is comparable and the prices lower. Wrong. The food
may be comparable, but the portions are tiny, and
the prices are higher.

My acompanist Bonnie took me out as a reward for having
survived my adventures this year, and so we got a whole
bottle of wine to celebrate - the Mantlerhof Gruner
Veltliner 15 (Kremstal, Austria) is a lightish but
flavorful and balanced wine that claims to 12% but
tastes like 10, with greenish and citrus notes, rather
like a sauvignon but without the urine part.

It went well with Duxbury oysters, which were briny and
tiny with a sweetness on the finish, quite pleasant
though a bit pricy at $21 for maybe 1 1/2 oz of food.

Most of the following dishes were in the range of $17
each, though I was instructed not to notice the prices.

Next we had the wood grilled octopus plate, also
1 1/2 to 2 oz, nicely done, just a little charred,
with "smoked almond tehina, fried lardo, torched
kumquat" - the tahini substance was a marvel, one
of the best, perhaps the, things I've eaten this
year. The kumquats were of an insignificance; the
lardo was of a nonexistence.

Shrimp-nettle har gow were a stupid idea. The shrimp
were okay, crunched up small, less okay, but the
nettles made the whole taste like compost smells.
This came with a crunchy chili peanut sauce that was
way unhot (you'd have thought they would have spiced
it up to mask the idiocy of the dish) but was the
best part, and I drank the 1 oz serving right down.

Uni & caviar toast, warm crumpet, red miso butter,
shiso had good and bad things. There was one sea urchin
roe tongue, lightly seared on all sides, pretty good;
the crumpet was whole wheat, quite moist though, didn't
do any harm. The butter had been replaced by some kind
of (I though) creme fraiche, a net loss, and the shiso
leaf, very tiny, was exquisite. Caviar? I think the
waitress said "hasselback," and I think she meant
"hackleback" - in any case, it was mushy and tasted
exclusively of salt.

Blue crab & angel hair, garlic breadcrumb, guanciale &
jalapeno was fine, with enough crab of pretty good
quality and reasonable fresh taste (I suspect a can
from the Caribbean, though); the angel hair was way too
soft and had a whole wheat component. Garlic breadcrumb
was in fact hard-fried minced garlic with no crumb to
speak of: this livened the pasta but obscured the crab,
so I ate the parts separately. Virtually no guanciale (an
expensive ingredient) or jalapeno (an overbearing one).

For the crab and dessert I switched to the Doqi Rkatsiteli
15 (Kakheti, Georgia). This is a pretty odd expression of
this grape, which I know primarily from Dr. Frank's fresh
and enticing version (also like a Sauvignon but without
the piss). In Georgia, apparently the young wine is aged
in clay pots buried underground, and the wine oxidizes to
an orangey color and a bittersweet but not sherryline
aroma. It's almost as though someone had sneaked a few
drops of orange bitters in. For all that, it was pleasant
in a thick and lumbering way.

The baked dessert of the day was a blood orange and ricotta
tart with sesame ice cream. Generous in size, as opposed to
the servings of everything else (except the Rkatsiteli,
which was a nice pour) and did well by the both of us. Not
too sweet, excellent pastry. Though not too sweet ricotta
dessert is not sweet enough (say I who grew up on Dom's
pot de creme). The ice cream was way too delicate, though a
sprinkling of seeds and smoked salt helped.

Coffee was pretty good. The bill was sizable.
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