Boston | Lucky House Seafood Restaurant | Cambridge | No-Name Restaurant

Authenticity is less prominent in Chinatown's Lucky House Seafood Restaurant. The owners' intention was to create a ­Cantonese restaurant that serves the best seafood dishes anywhere, from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. They've done this, and when looking for lobster, you can hardly do better than to go with their specialty: two ­medium-size fresh lobsters, stir-fried with ginger and scallion (but just enough to highlight the flavor of the delicate meat within).

Good fish in Boston isn't something you can always take for granted; far more fish come out of freezers here than come out of the harbor. But when it's really fresh, the fish in Boston trumps almost every other city's. At the No-Name Restaurant on the harbor, the decor leans toward life preservers and anchors, and the menu consists entirely of fried and broiled seafood. The view, such as it is, is that of obese seagulls wandering listlessly around on a gray concrete dock. But this is the restaurant where I ate what was far and away the best piece of swordfish I've ever had - a thick steak from a catch brought in from the North Atlantic that day. It had all the weight and flavor of swordfish, but, miraculously, it was as soft and flaky as a fillet of sole.

Just across the Charles River from Boston is Cambridge, home to MIT, Harvard, and some of the area's best food. Ethnic eats are the name of the game here, although usually they have a certain urbane twist. The Forest Café, for example, is basically a Mexican bar and grill. But imaginative, intense dishes like smoked pork chops in chorizo gravy and chicken served with the mole sauce of the week make a trip there far more worthwhile than one to most of Cambridge's upscale restaurants.