 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.
By Josh Ozersky
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.
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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
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