Eating Boston
You think Boston can't satisfy
the foodie in you? Maybe you don't know
where to look. We'll help you out.
Boston is a lot of things to America: the Cradle of Liberty, Boston
Brahmins and
Harvard Yard, Cheers, and the Curse of the Bambino.
But one thing it isn't is a restaurant mecca. Except for its uneven
cluster of Italian restaurants in the North End, Boston is
surprisingly thin as a restaurant city. At least, that's how it
seems at first glance.
Look a little closer, though, and you'll find hidden gems, the
city's secret treasures. Boston doesn't have a very pronounced food
culture; people there don't spend as much time talking about food
as do citizens of
New Orleans,
New York, and even
Philadelphia. But
get to know the city, and you can eat here as well as you can
anywhere in
America.
First, you'll have to leave the North End. (But before you do that,
indulge at Neptune Oyster, the city's best raw bar and easily the
best place for oysters.) Boston is a spread-out city of
working-class neighborhoods, and while you can and will eat well in
its tourist sections, a truly special feed requires getting out and
about. It's rare that tourists visit Revere Beach, for instance,
but when they do, they're rewarded with the Floating Rock, one of
the country's best Cambodian restaurants. It's a tiny place, with a
kitchen approximately the size of a
Honda Civic's interior. But the
food is eye-openingly vivid and fresh and extraordinary. Tiger
Tears - a salad of tender beef strips, fresh basil and mint, thinly
sliced lemongrass, and a fragrantly dressed mix of chiles, red
peppers, and onion - is a blast of summer from the street markets
of
Southeast Asia. The pork with hot chiles is likewise
transporting. A whole fried fish with pork-and-ginger sauce is
completely brown and crispy outside, so much so that even the rich
sauce can't soften it; the utter white moistness of the fish
beneath, then, is equally surprising. There are a few
disappointments on the Floating Rock menu - dishes that are
resolutely authentic but no more likable for it. That said, the
place is so affordable, and the rewards are so great, it's worth
ordering more than you would normally eat.
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.
One of the best clusters of no-frills finds in Cambridge is in the
Porter Exchange Building's Japanese-themed mini-mall, which has its
own Tokyo-style food court. The highlight here is
Sapporo Ramen. We
were sent there for the monster bowls of miso-butter ramen.
Japanese servings of ramen-noodle soups are typically enormous;
students often eat one as their daily meal in
Japan. Sapporo's
ramen is available with several different broths and with your
choice of various Chinese vegetables and/or thick slices of
succulent roast pork. These last ingredients add extra dimension to
the mild, savory miso broth, which is further enriched with a big
pat of butter. As the butter melts, it coats your palate and the
noodles. On a cold day in Cambridge, and there are more than a few
of them, there's no place you'd rather be, despite the bright
lighting and the Tokyo-subway tightness of the seating. Upstairs,
there is more to find, including the Japonaise Bakery, which
produces some of the most perfect croissants and scones in New
England as well as a red-bean-paste-filled doughnut that is like a
Japanese version of a Krispy Kreme.
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.
Not quite so divey is one of the Boston area's least expected
treasures: Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q, in
Arlington. Given how hard it is
to get first-rate barbecue in the northern states, this is hardly
the place you would look for it. But, surprisingly,
New England has
a major barbecue tradition, albeit one that doesn't show itself
often in commercial establishments. The New England Barbecue
Society routinely sends barbecue teams to the Jack Daniels World
Championship, which is the
Super Bowl of barbecue, and in 2006,
Dirty Dick and the Legless Wonders, a team from the nearby town of
Norwell, won the award for the best barbecued chicken in the world.
So Blue Ribbon is not serving to an uneducated public. The
spareribs are meaty and yielding but still have enough firmness to
allow for something being left on the bone after you take a bite.
The
Kansas City burnt ends, a rare treat on the
East Coast, consist
of rich, succulent pieces of beef brisket that have been cut away
and cooked an extra-long time in a bath of fragrant smoke. They're
dark, soft, and intense, and they don't need any sauce at all
(which is how you should order them). Blue Ribbon's other meats -
chicken, pulled pork, and sausage - are also ideally barbecued:
smoky but not stinky, and cooked through but not dried out. And
they taste like meat rather than like spices and dry rubs.
In a way, Blue Ribbon could be said to represent Boston's best
restaurants as a whole: If you didn't know about it, you wouldn't
suspect that it actually exists. But once you find it, it will make
you happy every time you roll back into Boston, secure in the
knowledge of your secret pleasures.
If You Go
Blue Ginger, 583
Washington Street, (781) 283-5790, www.ming.com/blueginger
Blue Ribbon Bar-B-Q, 908 Massachusetts Avenue, (781) 648-7427, www.blueribbonbbq.com
The Floating Rock, 144 Shirley Avenue, (781) 286-2554
Forest Café, 1682 Massachusetts Avenue, (617) 661-7810, www.theforestcafe.com
Japonaise Bakery and Café, 1815 Massachusetts Avenue, (617) 547-5531
Lucky House Seafood Restaurant, 10 Tyler Street, (617) 338-9038
Neptune Oyster, 63 Salem Street, (617) 742-3474, www.neptuneoyster.com
No-Name Restaurant, 15½ Boston Fish Pier, (617) 338-7539
Santarpio’s Pizza, 111 Chelsea Street, (617) 567-9871, www.santarpiospizza.com
Sapporo Ramen, 1815 Massachusetts Avenue, (617) 876-4805