The man who recommended Sapporo Ramen to me deserves special mention. Ming Tsai, the star of the Food Network's popular East Meets West and the PBS TV series Simply Ming, is one of the few who can usually be found in the kitchen of their restaurants; Ming's is Blue Ginger, in Wellesley, a suburb of Boston. Wellesley is well worth traveling to for Ming's cooking, which is balanced, delicate, and totally original. Blue Ginger is not so much a fusion restaurant as it is a modern take on Asian cooking, filtered through Ming's sensibility, which is wide ranging and well traveled. His tea-smoked salmon and beef carpaccio with fresh wasabi emulsion is typical: There's nothing flashy about it, but it works perfectly, quietly uniting two or three different traditions in one elegant dish. In general, though, Boston isn't the city for high-end dining. So a better choice seemed to be to go in the exact opposite direction and head to Santarpio's Pizza, in East Boston, a blue-collar institution far from the linen tablecloths of the North End. East Boston, like Revere, is the Boston of run-down old buildings, Irish and Italian immigrant communities, and the kind of East Coast old-time culture that seems to get more rare each year. Santarpio's is essentially a tavern with booths. It's filled with old boxing pictures - and not the kind that someone decorates a bar with in order to give it a sporting motif. Each one looks like it has been up forever, and so, too, does the long strip of blue corrugated plastic that futilely tries to separate the bar from the booths. Everything about the pizza at Santarpio's predates modern pizza conventions - the pies are served in brown paper bags when you get them to go, and they are much smaller, and cheaper, than the pies you could get in another section of town. And while neither the crust nor the cheese is especially earthshaking, the sausage is made in-house, and it is fantastic. It's set beneath the cheese, and you can't really see it at first glance. But each bite has a sweet and meaty undercurrent that goes perfectly with the soul-warming spirit of the place. Although there are no doubt better pizzas in Boston, there's no place you would rather go to have one, assuming your taste goes for this kind of flawed-but-enjoyable dive.