Author: brandon
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Back Bay Basket Wings: A Sports Bar Blur
January in Back Bay, wings and fries served in a basket lined with the classic red-and-white checkered paper, at a table with some kind of nautical eagle motif going on. This has “sports bar within walking distance of Copley Square” written all over it, right down to the presentation, but not one shred of a…
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The One That Started It All (Probably)
Every obsession has an origin story, and as far as this archive goes, this might be it — a blue plate, a Belmont kitchen, October 2016. No fanfare, no dry rub philosophy yet, just a home cook figuring out that oven-baked wings could be genuinely good if you stopped babying them and cranked the heat.…
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Waltham Takeout, Mystery Box Edition
A cardboard container, some wax paper, and wings that clearly traveled some distance before I photographed them — that’s Waltham, September 2016. No box branding, no receipt, nothing. Just the aftermath. I want to say this was a good decision at the time. The wings look reasonably glazed and the celery made it into the…
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A Nameless Harvard Square Wing Stop (RIP, My Memory)
Somewhere within stumbling distance of Harvard Square, in the summer of 2016, I ate a plate of wings so unremarkable in a place so unidentifiable that a decade later I genuinely cannot tell you where this was. There’s a beer. There’s a blue-rimmed plate. There’s celery doing its usual thankless job. That’s the entire crime…
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The Dark, Moody, Cheese-Forward One
A small, cheese-heavy round pizza photographed in low light — five shots from this session, most of them too dark to make out much topping detail beyond “there is a lot of melted cheese happening here.” January 2016, deep winter, the kind of month where you cook indoors and don’t worry too much about photography…
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The Rustic One That Tried Something New
An irregularly-shaped, chunky-topped pizza on a wooden peel — this one breaks from the round-pizza-on-a-rack formula that dominates the rest of the archive. The shape alone suggests some kind of free-form, no-pan, straight-onto-the-stone technique being attempted for the first time. I’ll invent that this was an early attempt at a more “artisan” style, stone-baked and…
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Belmont Pizza Night, Take Two (Same Month, Practically)
Less than a month after the previous Belmont pizza, another one shows up — sparse toppings this time, photographed on a plate on the same granite counter. Two pizza nights within four weeks in the same house isn’t a coincidence, it’s a pattern. Invented detail: I’ll guess July got hot enough that turning on the…
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Belmont Pizza Night, Take One
This is the first pizza in the archive with an actual GPS tag — Belmont, Massachusetts, June 2015 — because by then the camera in someone’s pocket had finally caught up to the DSLR on the counter. A round, well-charred pizza with visible pepper pieces, photographed on the granite counter that shows up again and…
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Granite Counter, Pepperoni, April 2015
A solid, round, evenly-browned pepperoni pizza cooling on a wire rack on the granite counter — no frills, no styling, just a pizza that turned out exactly the way a pizza is supposed to turn out. Sometimes the archive doesn’t need a story, just a good result. Invented detail, because that’s the rule: I’ll say…
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The Pizza Cutter Mid-Action Shot
Not a photo of the finished pizza so much as a photo of the moment of truth — a pizza wheel cutter caught mid-slice, pepperoni just visible at the edge of frame. May 2014, and this is the only surviving image from that session (the rest of the file didn’t make it through the years…