Up and coming. Trendy. Hipster. All the rage. For whatever reason in San Francisco, any restaurant that has any of those words associated with it will inevitably be a place I will not enjoy. I need to stop adding these new restaurants to my Yelp bookmark list and just stop going to them. I always leave feeling ripped off and like I paid so much for so little of a truly good experience. Aina, Statebird Provision, and The Progress are just some of the places I’ve been to recently and just think… Did I really pay $60-70 for my share of the bill for that? That’s all I get? My friends and I actually paid $8 each for a spam musubi bao – what the hell were we thinking?!

San Tung, El Farolito, and new hole-in-the-walls I find like House of Pancake seem to be the only places I end up loving and really wanting to come back to. These other places are trying too hard, and I don’t want to pay for them anymore.

In just six years, Boston has changed so much that there are certain parts of the city I barely even recognize. We stayed around the South End, near the water front area, and the entire place is completely unrecognizable to me. So many high rises, likely residences, are going up, and construction is endless. Streets are blocked off because they are being redone, and scaffolding is everywhere.

Other changes have happened, too, since I was last here. As in New York, San Francisco, and likely every other major metropolitan city, the constant catering towards people who are vegan and gluten-free is here in Boston and Cambridge. J.P. Licks, an institution of an ice cream shop, has dairy-free, soy-free, and vegan options. Juice Shop and Sweetgreen seem to be in every neighborhood we walked through. And even in the North End, there were multiple gluten-free handmade pasta options on the menus.

And now, Jamaica Plain is now moving from being semi hipster to being upscale and known for high rent. When I first moved to the Boston area in 2004, JP was considered dangerous and not a place to be at night. Now, everyone wants to move there. Chris’s friend’s ex-girlfriend, who recently moved from New York to Boston, now lives in Jamaica Plain. She and her dog love it there. That says everything about how much has changed here.

While in Boston this weekend, since we’d be stopping by the North End (Boston’s Little Italy), I knew I wanted to make a pit stop at Modern Pastry, my favorite Italian bakery in Boston. It was always a competitor of Mike’s, the tourist-overrun bakery that was always extremely disorganized with the most chaotic lines, but I always preferred Modern because their service was fast and friendly, they filled their cannoli to order (preventing a soggy shell), and their tiramisu was probably my favorite version in the world at that point in my life.

Well, it’s been six years since I’ve been to Boston, and I can’t even remember the last time I even visited the North End. Since the last time I visited Modern, they have expanded and renovated; they are not just a little bakery to grab and go, but they have a large cafe-style sit-down area where you can eat your dessert with your coffee at your leisure with table service. They still have the take-out section, but today, it was like nothing I could remember. It was a long and slow-moving line, and it was clear the cashier didn’t give a crap about any of us. She took a long time to fill orders, and she even wandered around the pastry area doing absolutely nothing while the line just got longer and longer. And when the cash register ran out of paper for receipts, she just stood there and pretended to fiddle  with it (without a refill – so convincing that she was actually doing real work!). This is NOT the Modern Pastry I remember.

The cannoli was just as good as I remember, and so was the tiramisu. But this place really sucks now with service that poor. When you stop caring about your customers and start taking them for granted, that’s when you really don’t deserve my business.