The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • N9

1 2 0 1 9 a N9 TABLES OPENINGS, CLOSINGS, AND CHATTER FROM THE RESTAURANT SCENE The Enthusiast WHAT TO BUY, WHERE TO EAT, WHAT TO DRINK MORE Openings: Stillwater (120 Kingston St. at Essex Street) is now open for business lunches and af- ter-hours shenanigans in the down- town space formerly occupied by Townsman. comfort food is our says chef Sar- ah Wade, a Gold Medal champion who was formerly at Allston. Some of her favorite menu items include blue cheese- thyme biscuits so crumbly and warm, and they re- mind me of my and a chicken-fried rib-eye steak. find such as deviled eggs, crispy smoked chick- en wings, and vegan rinds.

Lunch brings salads, chicken chili, flat-patty burgers, and Ritz cracker- crusted fried chicken thighs; the dinner menu includes many of the same dishes along with butter- toasted gnocchi, grilled lamb chops, and more. Wade grew up in Stillwater, thus the restau- name. heart and soul are on the she says. Dedham Square has a new wa- tering hole, and Chris Lutes of Mir- acle of Science, Middlesex Lounge, and Cambridge, 1., is behind it. Horse Thieves Tavern (585 High St.

at Washington Street) is modern interpretation on a tradi- tional New England serv- ing dinner and weekday lunch (closed Mondays). find the likes of Buffalo cauliflower, lamb harissa meatballs, oven-roasted cod with local corn, and spicy chicken with burst tomatoes, plus cocktails and pitchers of beer. Coming soon, weekend brunch. Closings: Several establish- ments have recently shuttered, in- cluding Common Ground in All- ston, Jerusalem Pita in Brookline, Navy Yard Bistro in Charlestown, and Tapestry in the Fenway. DEVRA FIRST Where to: Orfano, the latest res- taurant from Big Heart Hospitality, the group run by chef Tiffani Faison and Kelly Walsh.

Orfano, serving Italian food, is in the same Fenway neighbor- hood as sister restaurants Er- rand (fancy snacks and drinks), Sweet Cheeks (barbecue), and Tiger Mama (Southeast Asian-inspired fare). Why: Almost a decade ago, Faison helmed the kitchen of Rocca, turning the now-defunct South End spot into one of the best Italian restau- rants. (I still miss it, along with Cam- Benatti.) Orfano marks both her return to the cuisine means in Italian) and to a slightly more formal mode of dining. The restaurant, on the ground floor of residential tower Pierce Boston, is a space of dark wood, leather and velvet banquettes in chocolate and burgun- dy, and golden chandeliers; the floors are covered in tile mosaic and herring- bone-pattern wood. plenty hand- some, but there are still touches of trademark cheek: a print of Lady Gaga eating spaghetti, a sign by the bath- room sink reading Favore: No Smokie.

No Pokie. No Cokie. Please Hand The Back Story: Orfano is the first restaurant wife-wife team Faison and Walsh have opened since bringing their businesses together under the Big Heart name. The hospitality group, which emphasizes female leadership, now has about 200 employees, mak- ing it an increasingly major player in the Fenway. What to Eat: motto is so expect more of a winky-respectful salute to tradition than reverential adherence.

The menu features warmhearted takes on clas- sics: clams Orfano with pancetta and toasted breadcrumbs; a house Caesar featuring chrysanthemum and avoca- do au poivre; meatballs alla Raia (named for chef Dan Raia, who has worked with Faison since the Rocca days). an occasional vibe, with the appearances of a tuna martini and duck Marbella for two, a take on the classic chicken dish from Silver Palate There is also a steakhouse-style roster of roasted meats with your choice of anchovy-caper butter or garlic brown butter, to be paired with a la carte sides (crispy potatoes, steamed and grilled yu choi). Pasta dishes are frequently tweaked, in ways both subtle and not: Lobster bucatini comes in a rich brown-butter lobster sauce with basil and chile, deeply layered with umami. Cacio pepe is made with stuffed tor- telloni (a touch too al dente) rather than long pasta like linguine or spa- ghetti, and a pesto-y salsa verde shifts the flavor profile entirely. The ingredi- ent list roams beyond Italy salt and pepper calamari comes with crisp fen- nel and onion petals, plus sum dippy the monkfish piccata is made with miso; and Japanese tonkat- su is the crispy cutlet starring in a dish called And presenta- tion is often a key part of the dish.

garlic bread, piquant and crisp, is served wrapped in red-and- white-checked paper inside a bag; a round of warm, hand-pulled mozzarel- la gets sliced in quarters tableside with ornate golden shears. Pastry chef Dee Steffen Chinn turns out tiramisu, amaretto cannoli, and ricotta cheese- cake with Sam- buca cherry sauce, and candied fennel fronds. also the choco- late cake for two, a whole miniature cake served on its own stand. What to Drink: Beverage director Brian Callahan and wine director Char- lie Gaeta make a strong team. I always want Lambrusco by the glass at Italian restaurants, and that appears here.

Other by-the-glass selections are ideal accompaniments for the food, from a briny carricante from Etna (try it with the lobster bucatini) to a lagrein from Alto Adige, sort of like goth pinot noir (perfect with the duck); both offerings are singular to their regions. The bot- tle list is heavily Italian, and anyone who gravitates toward nebbiolo should visit soon. For cocktails, lighter cobblers, cups, and juleps (one containing five different kinds of amaro) are a good starting place. The Sorry Nonna is a winning tart-fruity combination of rose vermouth; the aperitif Contratto, a sort of alterna-Aperol; and cherry, grapefruit, and lemon, served in a sil- ver cup over crushed ice, with a silver straw to sip from. missed seeing Sidecars on drink menus, and brings it back.

The Sprezzatura cele- brates summer with gin, clarified to- mato, cucumber, the tart and old- school ingredient Lactart, and soda. also a range of drinks like the Negroni and the Ameri- cano. But the clear highlight is the martini cart, where your drink is made tableside, complete with a history les- son and finishing spritzes from vin- tage-style perfume atomizers. The ol- ives are ridiculously good. himbo, Hayden Summerall, has nearly 4 million adolescent girls panting after him on Instagram and YouTube.

Not only are they and social media celebrities like them major stars to anyone under the age of 13, the only stars. A common experience: Rolling Stone movie critic David Fear recently tweeted about playing the A- to-Z game on a family vacation, catego- ry and while he and his wife named actors, athletes, and artists, his kids exclusively reeled off YouTube celebs and social media influ- encers. recognize a single he added. have met the Gen- eration Let me clarify right here that is an absolutely terrible movie. The plot is actively heinous: a ripoff unfolding at a creative arts summer camp that prioritizes compe- tition, and bubble-headed pop-diva banality.

(Sample dialogue: gotta go time to have fun and be the More to the point, the stars just stars. They act, they have no charisma they pop, at least not on this kind of screen. Go to Lauren Instagram account or YouTube channel, by contrast, and find a pleasantly average young woman who has learned to comfort- ably play a version of herself to an au- dience of peers and seriously mone- tize it in the process. uBURR Continued from Page N1 The YouTube kids actors, in other words, and a mistake to think otherwise. If anything, analo- gous to the teen idols of the 1950s, kids from your neighborhood who danced on Dick Clark or Corny Collins and who, if they were lucky, rose to the level of a genial no-talent like Fabian.

Kids whose gift was to be them- selves, in other words, whose skill set was building a persona from the osten- sible reality of their lives. For a genera- tion raised to see themselves in selfies, that persona now serves as a mirror (often literally, if clicked on any of the endless Youtube videos offering make-up tips). disturbing only when you consider how thin and vain are the values being projected, and how narrow they are to any experience beyond that of being an ambitious and attractive teenage boy or girl. What did ambitious and attractive boys and girls do a century or so ago? They went to Hollywood, and where Barbara Stanwyck comes in. The Criterion Channel a streaming subscription life-raft of classic and world cinema is currently running a festival of 11 Stanwyck movies from the pre-Code era, that marvelous early- 1930s period in which the of proper moral onscreen behav- ior had been formulated but all the studios chose to ignore it.

By 1934, all movies had to get a of and that was that, but before then pre- Code films were racy and raw, full of shared beds, unpunished deeds, and references to drug use and alternate sexualities. And Stanwyck was the pre-Code queen. of made in 1930, when the actress was all of 23 was the film that broke her through as a star, and a seedy little melodrama about a who models for, and falls in love with, a rich- kid painter (Ralph Graves). The plot turns are soapy, but Stanwyck is lumi- nous; one of her most nakedly emo- tional performances, and she glows with tears throughout. (And a showdown with the wealthy but empathetic mother a killer.) Other Stanwyck films in the Criteri- on festival are tougher, notably a delightfully hard-bitten 1931 Warner Bros.

drama featuring a young Clark Gable at his most mesmerizingly brutish, and the infamous (1933), in which Lily Pow- ers sleeps her way up to the top of a major corporation floor by literal floor. John Wayne can be glimpsed as a beardless youth of an office boy, and an outrageous Nietzschean em- powerment speech have power over men but you must use men to get the things you want! Exploit your- that the Production Code cen- sors cut and which had to wait for a 2004 restoration to be seen. The common link in most of these movies is characters, young working-class women wanting a better life and often paying the price for it. Those stories mirrored the reali- ty of many of the women who paid to see them in theaters, and they mir- rored life, to a point. She was born Ruby Stevens in Brooklyn, to a mother who died when she was 4 and a father who took off two weeks later.

She made it through a series of foster homes and odd jobs, quit school at 14, and was dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies at 16, two years older than Lau- ren Orlando was (and two years younger than Chloe Lukasiak) when they made The difference is not just that Stan- wyck could act and they (at least not yet). that she was functioning, had to function, as an adult in a harsh adult world, while the YouTube stars are essentially prolonging their child- hood by playing dress-up in their back- yards for an audience of millions. Stan- wyck wanted to become famous in or- der to gain security and to put food on the table; the social media kids want to be stars because been told their all-American pop-culture birth- right and that if you online you may not even exist. Still, maybe too easy. The fact is that online fame, like early Holly- wood fame, is now seen by a genera- tion of young people as a potential ticket out of nowhere.

a stand-out documentary at Sundance now airing on Hulu, follows a handful of 16-year-old boys, many from hard- scrabble backgrounds, as they vie to be the next of social media. Di- rector Liza Mandelup shows us the carefree surfaces visible on Instagram and YouTube and the anxious, some- times hand-to-mouth reality beneath, and she implies the gap between the two is both immense and the source of a cultural sickness, one abetted by the many companies run by grown-ups that prey on and exploit the yearning for fame. In other words, the children of You- Tube may not be as far from Ruby Ste- vens as one might think. But how many of them have the drive, the smarts, the chutzpah and the talent to turn into a Barbara Stanwyck? More disturbingly, how many of their fans want them to? Stanwyck had a ca- reer that stretched on into the 1980s; she reinvented herself time and again. The new kids will be over as soon as they get too old and the adolescent hordes find someone new to follow.

Have you heard of the VSCO Girls? Google it. Your children probably al- ready have. Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter At Tiffani new Orfano, enjoy crazy-good lobster bucatini, a swank martini cart, and hospitality with a sense of humor QUICK BITE BY DEVRA FIRST GLOBE STAFF PHOTOS BY ARAM BOGHOSIAN FOR THE BOSTON GLOBE Monkfish piccata (left) and cacio pepe at Orfano. Top: the interior of the restaurant, which is in the Fenway.

The Takeaway: Orfano serves food with a point of view and a sense of hu- mor. You may come for the crazy-good lobster bucatini and swank martini cart, but return because the staff knows how to entertain and treat you well from the sight gag of a peppermill the size of a small child to the arrival of a bottle of anisette with your espresso: You know you wanted it until it appeared. 1391 Boylston Fenway, Boston, 617-916-9600, www.orfanobos- ton.com Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter Famous now; famous then MARVISTA ENTERTAINMENT THE CRITERION COLLECTION The cast of and Barbara Stanwyck in.