Boston for foodies

Best restaurants

Boston eats well, but it eats unevenly. The city's restaurant geography clusters tightly: the cobblestones around Faneuil Hall and South Market Street draw the visitors, the North End keeps its grip on red-sauce Italian, Cambridge Street runs a quieter spine of neighborhood rooms behind Mass General, Chinatown still cooks at its own tempo, and a handful of newer rooms downtown push the cooking somewhere harder to label. The twelve places below are picked from that working geography — seafood by the waterfront, sushi and bistro cooking on Cambridge Street, Italian on Salem and Commercial, a dim-sum hall in Chinatown, a Peruvian-Japanese-Chinese counter on Washington — every one mapped to a real address and a real phone line, every claim traceable. This is a list for people who want to plan an evening from a map: who serves at 17:00 and who waits until 19:30, who closes at 20:00 and who runs until 02:00, who answers the phone and who has a website you can read before you go. No mood pieces, no rumours. The addresses are the point.