Explore Boston · Part One
Eat & Drink Like a Bostonian
What to order and why: chowder, cannoli, a roast beef three-way, a regular coffee, and the rest of the city’s edible history.
Boston eats like a port town with a long memory. The ocean supplies the classics, the immigrant neighborhoods supply the arguments, and a few institutions have served the same thing so long that it became the city’s own. This is a field guide to what to order; Where to Eat says where.
From the water
New England clam chowder
Clams, potatoes, onion, salt pork, and cream, and never tomatoes. The feeling runs deep enough that a Maine legislator filed a 1939 bill to ban tomatoes from chowder. Get a cup before committing to a bowl, oyster crackers on the side. The bowl to measure the rest against is at Legal Sea Foods on Long Wharf. ›
Oysters and the raw bar
Raw bars here ice down a mixed dozen from along the New England coast, Duxbury and Wellfleet among the regulars, so you can taste what a few miles of water changes. The best lists are at Row 34 in the Seaport and Neptune Oyster in the North End; Union Oyster House, open since 1826, is the history lesson, taken at its semicircular bar. Ask the shucker what came in today. ›
The lobster roll, hot or cold
Two schools, one toasted split-top bun. Warm meat in melted butter is the Connecticut style, often traced to a Milford restaurant around 1929; chilled meat lightly dressed with mayonnaise is the Maine style. Boston serves both and settles nothing. This book does: hot, at Neptune Oyster, and cold at Saltie Girl in Back Bay if you must. ›
Scrod
Not a fish but a market word: the day’s small cod or haddock, split or filleted, broiled under buttered crumbs. The Parker House kitchen is credited with the name, and the old dining rooms, Parker’s Restaurant first, still print it. Order it once, in a room with a tablecloth, and you have eaten the Boston of 1900.
Fried clams
Whole-belly clams, battered and fried crisp, are a North Shore invention: Woodman’s of Essex says it fried the first one on July 3, 1916. Strips are the milder cousin, minus the belly. They taste best from a paper tray within sight of salt water, which makes them a fine excuse for a day trip north. ›
From the counter
North Shore roast beef
Thin-sliced roast beef piled on a soft roll is the North Shore’s signature sandwich, and Kelly’s on Revere Beach, open since 1951, claims to have started it. Order it three-way: James River barbecue sauce, mayonnaise, and American cheese. It sounds wrong and works anyway, ideally on the seawall. ›
Steak tips
Chunks of sirloin tip marinated overnight and charred on a grill, served with rice or fries and a salad: a dish on every neighborhood pub and Greek-American grill menu in Greater Boston and barely known outside it. Order them where the marinade is the house’s own: the classic tips at Tip Tap Room, a Cambridge Street pub on Beacon Hill built around them.
The spuckie
The Italian sub by its old Boston name, from an Italian word for a split roll (spaccata) or the long spuccadella loaf. The word survives in Dorchester, South Boston and East Boston; the sandwich survives everywhere. Order it cold, with hots, at any North End salumeria. ›
Dim sum
Chinatown’s weekend morning: carts of har gow, siu mai and sticky rice in lotus leaf rolling between big round tables. Hei La Moon, at 83 Essex Street, still runs the carts and is the pick; China Pearl is the other hall. Go before 11 a.m. on a Sunday or wait with everyone else. ›
Pho in Fields Corner
Dorchester Avenue around Fields Corner is the city’s Vietnamese kitchen: pho by the deep bowl at Pho Hoa, a bánh mì for a few dollars at Ba Le on the same avenue. Red Line to Fields Corner, then walk the avenue. ›
Haitian and Cape Verdean
Blue Hill Avenue runs Caribbean from Grove Hall into Mattapan: Haitian plates of griot, rice and beans and pikliz at Gourmet Kreyòl in Mattapan. Dorchester’s Bowdoin Street cooks Cape Verdean: katchupa, the corn and bean stew, at Restaurante Cesaria. Both beat most of what downtown charges three times as much for.
Sweets
The cannoli question
Modern Pastry or Mike’s Pastry, a short walk apart on Hanover Street in the North End, is the city’s longest-running dessert argument: shells filled to order against the famous white box tied with string. The answer is Modern Pastry; Mike’s is where you take visitors, and the line is part of the visit. ›
Boston cream pie
It’s a cake, not a pie: two layers of sponge with pastry cream between them and chocolate on top. The Omni Parker House says its French chef created it there in 1856, shortly after the hotel opened, and Parker’s Restaurant still serves it. Massachusetts named it the official state dessert in 1996.
The Parker House roll
The same hotel kitchen gave America its folded, buttery dinner roll in the 1870s; every telling involves an angry baker throwing unfinished dough into the oven. The hotel is known for the roll as much as the pie, and the dining room still bakes both.
Fluff
Marshmallow Fluff was whipped up by Archibald Query in his Somerville kitchen in 1917 and sold door to door until sugar shortages ended it; he sold the recipe for $500 to two Swampscott men whose company, Durkee-Mower, still makes it in Lynn. Spread with peanut butter on white bread it is a Fluffernutter, the school lunch of record, and Somerville throws it a street festival every year.
The frappe
In old New England usage, a milkshake is milk and flavored syrup shaken together, with no ice cream. Want the thick one? Ask for a frappe, pronounced frap. Most counters now know both words, but ordering a frappe still marks you as someone who did the reading. The counters to order it at are J.P. Licks and Toscanini’s in Central Square.
Something to drink
Dunkin’, and a regular
William Rosenberg opened the first Dunkin’ Donuts in Quincy, just south of Boston, in 1950. The original Southern Artery shop still serves, the company is headquartered in nearby Canton, and the local order is an iced coffee in every season, snow included. Ask for a “regular” and it comes with cream and sugar; say “black” if you mean it.
The Fenway Frank
Kayem, a meat company in nearby Chelsea, has made the ballpark’s hot dog since 2009. It’s boiled, then grilled just enough to mark it, and tucked into a New England split-top roll. Eat it in your seat as “Sweet Caroline” starts in the eighth; at Fenway, tradition beats gourmet. ›
Beer
Jim Koch brewed the first Samuel Adams Boston Lager in his kitchen in 1984 and had it in Boston bars by the spring of 1985; the Jamaica Plain brewery, in part of the old Haffenreffer complex, runs tours and a taproom, and Harpoon, founded in 1986, pours at its Seaport beer hall. The city’s beer has moved on since: Trillium at 50 Thomson Place in Fort Point and its Fenway hall at 401 Park, Night Shift at 1 Lovejoy Wharf beside North Station, Castle Island Brewing at 10 Old Colony Avenue in South Boston, and Lamplighter at 284 Broadway in Cambridge. ›
Baked beans and Beantown
Colonial Boston’s West Indies trade brought molasses for rum, and some of it went into the bean pot with salt pork for a slow, all-day bake. That’s the usual explanation for Beantown, though the nickname’s origin is debated and few locals use it. Molasses left a darker mark in 1919, when a North End tank burst and killed 21 people.