Home Destinations USA Massachusetts Boston Restaurants

Boston Restaurants

Read our Boston restaurant reviews. Or post your own.

Boston Restaurant Reviews

When it comes to food, in Boston the Revolution never ended. While Bostonians have proudly clung to their traditional eats (chowders, baked beans, and cream pies can still be found) most diners now choose innovative food without excessive formality. There are still palaces of grand cuisine, but Boston and Cambridge now favor the kind of restaurant overseen by a creative mastermind, often locally born, concocting inspired food served in human surroundings.

Bostonians have caught the passion for artisanal breads, cafés with homemade pastries, and all manner of exquisite and unique specialties. As an example, many high-end restaurants have added uncommon flavors of ice cream—central to Boston living for more than 150 years—to their menus. A young generation of highly trained and well-traveled chefs is reclaiming the regional cuisine. It turns out that the area's wild mushrooms work in a ragout, the cheddar makes a fine quiche, the clambake can be miniaturized, and rabbit fits into a savory ravioli.

A rule of thumb is to seek out what the locals most enjoy—the fish and shellfish abundant from the nearby shores. Although the city has many notable seafood restaurants, almost anyplace you eat will likely have two or three offerings from the sea. Treatments used to be limited to lobsters boiled or baked and fish broiled or fried, but nowadays chefs are more inventive. You may be offered a wood-roasted lobster with vanilla sauce or, in a Chinese restaurant, lobster stir-fried with ginger and scallion. Others are pushing scallops sliced thin and served raw under a dab of olive oil and chickpea puree.

Anything spicy and different has long been popular in the university culture of Cambridge, and the high rate of immigration in recent decades has fueled Bostonians' appetite for foreign cuisines. Variety abounds, evoking the bygone aristocracies of Russia, Persia, Thailand, Ethiopia, or Cambodia, or serving large immigrant communities from Latin America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. In the last few years an influx of Italian restaurants, both traditional and contemporary, have landed on city corners outside the North End.

The dominant trend today, however, is homegrown—both on the plate and in the kitchen. Because most of Boston's talented chefs have worked their way up the ranks in local kitchens, they prefer to sponsor and cultivate their sous-chefs rather than hire anonymous talent. And while a handful of local chefs have garnered celebrity status, the city has yet to draw (some might say invite) big-name, nationally known chefs into its tight-knit circle.

Less »