Boston
Clio located in the Eliot Hotel, Boston If you want an upscale dinner environment you will find it here. Harkens back to the old days when you had to put on a coat and tie to go to the gourmet restaurants.
Legal Sea Foods (not the shack we used to get fish and chips from in college any more but consistent, fresh fish)
Fifty-seven Steak House on Stuart St, Boston
Maggiano’s Little Italy, 4 Columbus Ave, Boston Lots of Italian food — if you need a fresh pasta fix this is a good place to go and don’t eat a big lunch or a late one. You won’t finish our entree and you will feel a little guilty about ordering dessert (but you should still do it.)
Omonia Greek cuisine — Just the right spot if you want some garlic and olive oil from the appetizers to the entrees and maybe a glass of retsina.
Red Fez, 1222 Washington Street Boston Middle Eastern restaurant with great appetizers (hummus, tabbouleh, spicy lamb meatballs, spinach and cheese sanbusak. Kefte skewers of minced lamb and beef served with a cumin-yoghurt sauce and grilled vidalia onions; chicken and vegetables skewered served with a tahina sauce. Try a little Turkish coffee or Moroccan Mint tea.
Pho Pasteur, 137 Brighton Ave, Boston Here is a dump that serves excellent Vietnamese cuisine. They use lots of lemongrass and chili in their soups and entrees.
East Coast Grill, 1271 Cambridge St, Cambridge, Mass I’ve been collecting cookbooks from these chefs for many years and visiting their restaurant since they opened in 1985. Calling it a BBQ wouldn’t begin to do it justice. For appetizers they usually have three or four different types of oysters (Island Creek, Asian) or clams as well as shrimp and cracked jonah crab claws. They always have a chowder and maybe ginger tuna and pork sausage dumplings, crispy chicken liver with a tomato bacon maramalde, garlic spinach and griddled cornbread or maybe phuket style wings of mass destruction with ghost chile jelly, noc cham and aromatic herbs with roasted onions. They serve grilled white pepper tuna with house picklend ginger, aged soy sauce, wasabi and curried vegetable pickle; grilled spice crusted mahi mani in the style of the Yucatan; local fish with damn good fries and tidewater coleslaw; seared large shrimp and new bedford scallops with ginger-garlic noodles and seasam chile spinach; sweetbreads, jerk chicken, pasta from hell and a varitey of different BBQ preparations like Memphis style dry rubbed pork platter, texas style sliced beef brisket, Eastern North Carolina Shredded pork platter. Sometimes they have a tamale from hell that Bluebelly and I split as an appetizer with four beers. Most of their wines are in the 30 to 50 dollar range. you could even try thier martini from hell with scotch bonnet peppered vodka or their erupting, flaming volcano with 5 different kinds of rums, gin, brandy, cremed’noya with passion fruit mano apricot and guava juices served in the “traditional scorpion bowl”. Try out their cookbooks — Thrill of the Grill, Lettuce to your Table, How to Cook Meat, etc. (Schlesinger & Willoughby)
La Campania, Waltham Old time Italian food, heavy wood tables and duck fig pizza. Read about it in my OTR Boston journal.
Red Fez — Mediterranean food with lots of small plates and shish kebabs.
Les Espalier is the place to go for that special meal. They have a $60 pre-fixe lunnch or if you don’t want the small lunch you could get the Chef’s tasting menu for $100.00. for dinner the three course dinner starts at $90.00 and the Chef’s tasting menu is $200.00. The chef’s tasting dinner includes sitting in the middle of the kitchen as you watch them prepare the evenings meals. One reservation per night (up to four people). This is the place to go for drinks and caviar (five selections $60 to $240 an ounce, did someone say Osetra), five cheese flights or maybe a chilled soup of juiced asparagus with crouton, goat milkand caraway. You could get a Casco Bay lobster with white aspargus, brown butter emulsion and April almond.Roasted Hudson valley foie gras with cepes, black sesame feuille de brick, black trumpet cake and aged balsamic or a tasting of spring lamb with asparagus, fiddleheads, fennel puree, goat cheese croquette. Slow poached Nova Scotia halibut with pea ragout, warm lemon curd, anise hyssop and chamomile. I tried a creme fraiche mousse with mango and matcha green tea, hibiscus gel, guava tuile and mango woodruff sorbet. Every dish is a work of art and who doesn’t want to eat a good piece of art?
September 2012 Trip — 40th Reunion
Craigie on Main
Area Four
Peach Farm\
Mistral
Lucca
Eliot Dining Hall
Upstairs at the Square
Oleana
Clio
Upscale dining in the Eliot Hotel 370 Commonwealth Ave Boston MA 617-536-7200
Legal Sea Foods
Good, fresh sea food for thirty years
255 State St, Boston
Fifty-Seven
Looks like just another steakhouse but I think it is a touch above the rest.
200 Stuart St, Boston, MA 617-423-5700
The Red Fez
Guest Reviewer, Chef Argold, Brookline.
The hot new spot is the Red Fez located on bombed-out Washington Street about
a block and a half from Holy Cross Cathedral. The decor is quite attractive
and comfy. Architecurally they did well, leaving the warm sand-blasted brick
walls with new hardwood and marble floors ang soft lighting. The Red Fez is a
fun place. Take your No.1 and a few friends and you’ll have a great time. It
is not where you go to celebrate the grand promotion or your in-laws 50th
Anniversary. It’s for good food and fun. Focus on an assortment of their
Middle Eastern appetizers with their wonderful flat-bread dipped in herbed
olive oil. The hummus, tabbouleh, spicy lamb meatballs, spinach and cheese
Sanbusak, and the red mullet-all great and fun to share. For entrees we liked
Kefta skewers of minced lamb and beef served with a cumin-yogurt sauce and
grilled vidalia onions; also char-grilled skewers of chicken served wiith a
stack of grilled vegetables and a tahina sauce. Save room for dessert. We
shared a delightfully fruity Strawberry Napoleon in a fresh citrus-sauce and
a rich but deiciously chilled Chocolate tart. Their coffee is Turkish and the
Maroccan Mint tea is worth lingering over. Moderately priced, comfortably
rehabbed- a fun place with good food.
The Red Fez
1222 Washington St, Boston
617 338 6060
Pho Pasteur – MapIt!
137 Brighton Ave.
Boston, Massachusetts
Phone: 617/783-2340
With all due respect, Pho Pasteur looks for all the world like a sprawling dive on a dumpy street, but it presents some of the best Vietnamese cuisine you’ll find anywhere. It’s a great destination for the adventurous, and the specialty soups are exotic and flavorful, sparked with tangy lemongrass and other rare spices. If you play it cool you can BYOB, and Blanchard’s (right across the street) is the place to pick up some wine for dinner.
East Coast Grill – MapIt!
1271 Cambridge St.
Boston, Massachusetts
Phone: 617/491-6568
The chef calls his food “equatorial cuisine,” and rightly so: Ethnic dishes such as grilled tuna with black bean sauce, grilled sweetbreads, jerk chicken, and “pasta from Hell”–a pasta enlivened with hot sauce–share the menu with such Southern regional specialties as North Carolina barbecue. The dining room is small, bright, and very busy. Next door is Jake & Earl’s Dixie Barbecue, the take-out branch of the East Coast Grill and home of the Inner Beauty sauces.
Davio’s
Maggiano’s Little Italy
Omonia Greek Restaurant
Pho Bolsa