Grace by Nia’s fried-green tomato salad, lobster macaroni and cheese, and southern Cobb salad with fried chicken. / Photo by Brian Samuels

Imagine bringing a time-traveling Bostonian from the year 2000 to the Seaport in 2023 to stand in front of the new Grace by Nia, a sleek supper club offering food, drinks, and live music in a glamorous nightclub setting. Picture their shock at how dramatically the neighborhood has changed: once-dead acres of abandoned warehouses and empty parking lots replaced by gleaming office towers and hotels, a modern art museum, a giant convention center! The glitzy nightclubs, the boutiques, the dozens upon dozens of restaurants! Throngs of happy people streaming along the waterfront and the sidewalks most evenings—the former ghost town transformed into one of Boston’s hottest neighborhoods for locals, tourists, and business travelers. Your friend from the Dubya era might faint with surprise, even before you told them that the Big Dig eventually did get finished, and Boston sports teams have collectively won 12 more championships.

Even to modern diners, though, the May 2023 opening of Grace by Nia is an exciting concept, combining the talents of an established Black restaurateur (Nia Grace of Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen and the Underground Café & Lounge) and a savvy Seaport nightlife operator (Big Night, the group behind Empire, Scorpion Bar, and the Grand). And it certainly seems designed to make a big impression: Upon arrival, visitors ride two long, grand escalators to the top floor, where they’re greeted by a crew of elegantly dressed hosts and hostesses. Once you gain admittance (it’s a tough table without a reservation, especially on weekend nights), you’re ushered into an astonishing 5,000-square-foot space with dramatic lighting, towering tropical-themed fixtures (like an enormous brass palm tree), and three seating areas surrounding an intimate live-music stage. The tables directly in front of the stage are the music lovers’ choice. A speakeasy-themed bar area with tables still has decent views, while the third area by the entrance is quieter, with the performers visible only on TV monitors. The ensembles lean toward vocal, pop-inflected jazz, but the different combos we saw over multiple visits alternately embraced soul, R & B, hip-hop, reggae, bossa nova, and spoken-word elements, with first-rate musicianship and slick production values. It’s fantastic dinner-and-a-show entertainment, and not just for hard-core jazz cats. (An entertainment fee is charged based on how close you are to the stage.)

The performance area. / Photo by Brian Samuels

The drinks portion of the evening centers on fancy, very festive cocktails. The Smoke Break ($16), for instance, combines mezcal, gochujang, lime, and raspberry liqueur in a smoky-sweet, tangy-hot concoction topped with literal fire: a lime shell filled with flaming overproof rum. The cheekily named O.P.P. (Other People’s Penicillin, $18) exhibits real cocktail craft with its piquant mix of scotch, Tuaca, lemon, agave, and ginger. The suddenly de rigueur espresso martini gets a swish update in the Black Gold Part II ($18) with a sprinkling of actual 24-karat gold flakes. A modest, decently priced assortment of wines by the glass ($14 to $20) and bottle ($54 to $78) features crowd-pleasers like a perfectly summery French sparkling rosé from Maison Marcel ($15/$58). Befitting the posh ambiance is a list of champagnes and sparklers ($175 to $325); we settled on a very respectable Telmont Réserve Brut Champagne ($175).

The menu echoes the formula of the long-running Darryl’s (which Grace bought in 2018) with a menu of southern, soul, Cajun, and Creole dishes, done here with a bit more ambition and elegance, and prices that reflect the tonier real estate. The most luscious appetizers include a Maryland hot crab dip ($24) of Old Bay, crab, four cheeses, and jalapeños baked in a cast-iron pan, with Ritz crackers for dipping. Hummus and root vegetable ($16) is a clever bit of Middle Eastern/soul food fusion, the southern-favorite legumes lending a lovely earthiness. Spareribs ($18) arrive as a smoky little pile of chargrilled St. Louis–style pork ribs in a sweet, sticky bourbon-peach sauce.

Entrées run hearty and hefty while still feeling sophisticated. Nobody dolled up for a night out wants to wrangle with a whole crustacean—that’s precisely why we enjoyed the luxurious smothered lobster ($48), a big grilled Maine lobster tail over pappardelle. It has since come off the menu but look instead for buttermilk fried lobster over a five-cheese macaroni and cheese. Oxtails and grits ($36) is another standout, the richly fatty tail meat (not far off in flavor and texture from short rib) in a sticky, glossy molasses sauce over creamy coconut grits. Classic southern sides succeed, too, including a fine mess of collards and other greens ($10); a winning macaroni and cheese ($12) topped with Ritz crumbs; and a pretty, towering fried-green tomato salad ($16), layered with fresh mozzarella and displaying fine frying technique.

Some well-intentioned dishes, however, miss the mark with rough execution. Johnny cakes ($15) are an admirable nod to Native cookery spoiled by too much wheat flour, the result more akin to a diner flapjack than a pre-Colonial corncake. Stuffed collards ($15) boast a tasty filling of Cajun rice and black-eyed peas, but the overly tough leafy wrappers make for difficult eating. Lovers of the chili-fierce school of Cajun cooking may be disappointed in the mildness of blackened shrimp and polenta ($32), barely charred shrimp perched on a crisp, cheesy polenta cake in a creamy (and non-canonically tomato-spiked) gravy. The chicken and waffles ($34), meanwhile, feature a juicy bit of fried breast, though the carrot-cake waffle with cream-cheese icing and maple syrup has enough sugar to serve as dessert.

Actual desserts include photogenic, delicious winners like citrus crème brûlée ($15) and the German-chocolate mousse bombe ($18), a half-dome of caramel-sauced, ganache-enrobed chocolate mousse, coconut-pecan filling, and chocolate cake. But despite impressing as a tall, Barbie-pink bit of Instagram bait, the raspberry gâteau ($18) has the chalky leadenness of amateurish vegan baking.

The A Hot Night in Jalisco cocktail. / Photo by Brian Samuels

Steer around those few rough spots, however, and Grace by Nia feels like a very special night out, the kind of place you go with a crowd of your similarly dressed-to-the-nines girlfriends, or take a date you really want to impress, or help Grandma celebrate a big birthday. There are many such celebrations going on every night here, with a notably higher level of dressing up for the occasion than I typically see, even at Boston’s toniest establishments. Then there are the groups of friends or work colleagues who are mainly there for the music, complemented by just a few drinks and small bites. (Some lucky, talented patrons even get invited onstage occasionally to sing a number—not to mention Grace herself.)

While that Seaport time traveler might find a neighborhood much changed over the past 20-odd years, Grace by Nia stands at the crossroads. Thanks to its combination of sophisticated live music with convivial food and drinks in an uncommonly gorgeous space, it’s equal parts a welcome throwback to Boston’s supper-club heyday and a symbol of a shiny new Seaport that’s welcoming to all.

★★★

60 Seaport Blvd., Boston, 617-927-9411, gracebynia.com.

Menu Highlights

Maryland hot crab dip, Hummus and root vegetable, Bourbon-peach spare ribs, Fried-green tomato salad, Oxtails and grits, Cajun jambalaya, Jerk chicken, Cast-iron macaroni and cheese, German-chocolate mousse bombe

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

First published in the print edition of the October 2023 issue with the headline, “Amazing Grace.”

A spread of dishes at Comfort Kitchen, including yassa chicken, jerk jackfruit sliders, and more. / Photo by Brian Samuels

Every restaurant has a story, or at least a website “About Us” section with a founder’s mission statement. Some are more compelling than others. There’s the Plucky Indie First-Timer (“It’s been our lifelong dream to serve Mom’s cooking!”); the Solemn Luddite (“Our food demands intense focus, so no phones allowed!”); and the Food-TV Celebrity Jerk (which, regardless of the marketing spin, should always be read as: “This is my 19th chain outlet; don’t expect to see me here again after the ribbon-cutting.”). Once in a while, a restaurant emerges whose story extends further and deeper, knitting the space, menu, staff, customers, and neighborhood together. Comfort Kitchen, a Black-, immigrant-, and woman-owned restaurant that opened in January 2023 in Upham’s Corner, has just such a story. Its food and drinks are wrapped in history lessons both global and local, relaying the thorny tale of the centuries-long African diaspora; together, they reflect the tangled culinary and cultural influences of a vast, polyglot stream of immigrants, not all of whom came here freely.

To highlight that interconnectedness, the restaurant’s leadership team—development partner Nyacko Pearl Perry, managing partner Biplaw Rai, chef-partner Kwasi Kwaa, and branding partner Rita Ferreira—greet diners with an expansive printed menu that documents their aims, ethos, and inspirations. The food itself draws on strains of South Asian, Middle Eastern, North African, West African, and Caribbean cooking, resulting in a diverse palette of ingredients and techniques united by a few common threads (chilies, legumes, staple grains, and slow cookery). In the hands of gifted professionals, the result can be fascinating and soul-satisfying food, like a dazzlingly spiced chicken stew or a bland wild fruit alchemized into lip-smacking slider filling—two standouts from Comfort Kitchen’s menu.

The exterior of the Upham’s Corner restaurant. / Photo by Brian Samuels

What makes this particular story even more remarkable is how this fledgling business is striving to address some of the adverse outcomes of the history behind the food it serves. One example is the transformation of the restaurant’s setting: an abandoned “comfort station” (read: public restroom) built in 1912. The building closed in the 1970s and became a derelict eyesore in this corner of Dorchester. With funding from nonprofit historical preservationists, its Mission Revival exterior has been handsomely restored, its interior completely rebuilt into a softly lit, 30-seat dining room draped in serene shades of ecru, dove, and peach. Five counter seats overlook an open kitchen; the exterior is flanked by two cozy dining patios. Chef Kwaa (a Ghanaian expat) and his team serve a dinner menu of “global comfort food” that attracts diners from all over Greater Boston. (That’s the focus of this review, but by day, the menu shifts to breakfast and lunch pastries, sandwiches, salads, and grain bowls.)

The vast extent of the diaspora is immediately apparent in the “Snacks” (small plates) section of the menu. Beef kafta ($14) carries a whiff of the Levant: meatballs scented with cumin and cinnamon, served with a generous cucumber salad dusted with fresh herbs and dried chili flakes over yogurt tahini. The aforementioned jackfruit sliders ($13) use jerk seasoning to jazz up the flesh of an Indian fruit with the texture of shredded meat: a complex, chili-hot, spice-and-smoke technique that fuses indigenous Caribbean and immigrant African influences. Layered with pickled red onion, coriander aioli, and baby arugula, the sensational pair of little sandwiches evoke spicy pulled pork. Seared okra ($12) likewise trots the globe with an Indian-accented, masala-spiced yogurt and crunchy West African plantain crumbs. Among these starters, only a seasonal salad ($12) seems squarely in the modern-American corner, a riff on the familiar roasted-beets-and-goat-cheese salad that gets lightened up with a fluffy house-made ricotta and a tahini vinaigrette.

The entrée-size plates in the menu’s “Meals” section reveal other geographic inspirations. Potato curry cake ($22) would be right at home in a Bengali restaurant: two crunchy mashed-potato croquettes flecked with peas and spiked with a hot masala spice blend, ably complemented with dollops of tomato jam and lemon yogurt, rounded out with a huge herb salad in a lemon vinaigrette. Yassa chicken ($24), a Senegalese one-pot stew of chicken leg and thigh, combines the smack of chili heat with mustard-seed pungency, adding starchy contrast with delightfully chewy, mild cassava dumplings. Jerk marinade provides mild fire to a tenderly confited and then pan-roasted duck leg ($30). One might complain about the price for the smallish amount of protein, but the accompanying hillock of rice and peas in a fragrant coconut-milk gravy should leave no one hungry, while Haitian-style pikliz (a fiery cabbage-and-carrot pickle) and parsley oil add welcome acidity and bright herbaceousness. By contrast, the magnanimously sized za’atar-brown-butter trout ($28) stuns with a superbly cooked, whole-but-boned specimen over smoky eggplant purée, punched up with tomato and a vivid crown of green-onion chimichurri.

The open kitchen is the heart of the interior. / Photo by Brian Samuels

Meanwhile, beverage director Kyisha Davenport has put together a smashing list of craft cocktails and a tight list of wines, ciders, and beers, all favoring BIPOC producers. Standout drinks (all $17) include the Dream Street, featuring hibiscus and orange liqueurs, coconut, and lime (all beachy tropical vibes), and the Kesar Iced Tea, a refreshing, lower-proof long drink with saffron and elote liqueurs, smoky lapsang souchong, lemon, and honey. “Free spirited” (alcohol-free) cocktails ($10) are likewise pretty, intricate, and delicious. Wines include novelties like the 2021 RAS Wines “Source Decay” ($16 per glass, $42 per bottle), a wild-blueberry sparkler from Portland, Maine, that sharply changed my opinion of non-grape wines, and the 2020 Forlorn Hope Wines “Dragone Ramato” ($17/$38), a California orange pinot gris with the sherry-like edge of skin-contact fermentation. Lacking a standalone bar, Davenport mixes and pours from inside the kitchen, joining back- and front-of-house staffers in a deft ballet to maneuver through the tight space. It’s exciting and edifying to watch this small, exceptionally well-coordinated squad — despite the cramped backstage quarters.

Nepali expat Biplaw Rai often notes how the restaurant industry is a microcosm of the immigrant experience in America. There’s ready kitchen work to be had—many immigrants are already skilled home cooks—but the hours are difficult (especially for working parents), the wages low, and benefits like healthcare distinctly lacking. Further, restaurants that serve immigrant cuisines are often marginalized in the popular imagination as casual, low-service, and located in poorer neighborhoods. Rai and company seek to address many of these issues by paying their staff a living wage (with the help of a 5 percent kitchen appreciation fee) and delivering a fine-dining experience with high-touch service in a location that anchors an ongoing neighborhood revitalization effort. In this way, they create a much more powerful narrative, one that is deeply relevant to a huge swath of the city but has long been muted or ignored. Comfort Kitchen illuminates not only the extent of the African diaspora through food but a path to improve the lives of its descendants and other immigrants here. And with the help of its beautifully executed menu and sweet space, it succeeds in telling a story that Bostonians should finally, gratefully, be able to embrace.

★★★

Comfort Kitchen

611 Columbia Rd., Dorchester, 617-329-6918, comfortkitchenbos.com.

Menu Highlights

Jerk jackfruit sliders, Seasonal salad, Beef kafta, Za’atar-brown-butter trout, Jerk-roasted duck, Yassa chicken, Pistachio-cardamom ice cream

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

First published in the print edition of the June 2023 issue with the headline “Comfort and Joy.” 

Pepperoni is a favorite topping option for Tonino’s rectangular pizzas. / Photo by Adam DeTour

Every dedicated Boston restaurant explorer knows the varied, distinctive character of our neighborhoods—particularly the ones where tourists roam and the cost of parking infuriates. The South End is loaded with sophisticated, eclectic indies. Chinatown spins a tantalizing lazy Susan of regional Asian cuisines. The Seaport has slickness and sizzle, if perhaps too many national chains. The North End serves up a well-worn, overstuffed platter of Italian-American fare. The Back Bay gets dressed up for its higher-end hot spots.

But what characterizes a diverse residential neighborhood like Jamaica Plain? It isn’t a unifying culinary regionality à la Chinatown or the North End—a walk down Centre Street reveals a veritable United Nations of food. Unlike the Back Bay or Seaport, formality and glamour are in short supply: Even the celebrated chefs at Ten Tables and Brassica Kitchen work distinctly unassuming dining rooms. The hard-partying din of Southie restaurants is absent here; family-oriented J.P. goes to bed at a sensible hour. So how could a single place sum up the J.P. ethos? It would have to be a little offbeat, informal, and maybe more waitstaff-friendly than most: something like Tonino, an Italian trattoria that opened in October 2022 with loads of charm and a menu full of delightful little surprises.

Tonino reflects J.P.’s low tolerance for pretentiousness with a menu that eschews florid farm-to-table prose: no name-checking of every cheesemaker or boat captain here. That minimalism can leave some unfamiliar food terms unexplained, so it’s good to ask questions. For instance, cofounder and chef Luke Fetbroth (an alum of Sarma, Giulia, and Moody’s Delicatessen) leads off with “pizza bianca” ($3), which includes upgrade options like “stracciatella, whipped ‘nduja, Calabrian chili, basil” ($10). I took this to mean an ordinary white pizza, i.e., no red sauce, that could be ordered plain or with toppings. So imagine my surprise when I was served slices of bread and a dipping bowl of soft, raggedy cheese topped with a spicy-hot, spreadable salami. As it turns out, pizza bianca is actually a type of bread popular in Rome: long-fermented, stretched to an inch-thick rectangle, and baked to a light char on the oven floor. The combo was a terrific appetizer to share, and I now understand why Romans adore the bread: It’s akin to focaccia but chewier, lighter, far less oily, and much bubblier. Still, not remotely what I’d anticipated.

Rigatoni amatriciana is one of several noteworthy pasta dishes. / Photo by Adam DeTour

There were plenty of other twists and turns on the menu, including “roasted squid, brown butter pickles, gigante beans, chicory” ($18), which came not as the hot dish of squid with sides I was expecting but rather a delicious salad. And although “anchovies, Ronnybrook farm butter, pizza bianca” ($15) was served as described, it still offered swoony, unexpected moments. I had no inkling how thickly that luscious butter would be laid on the bread or how perfectly it would balance the anchovies’ intense brininess. It’s a snack Italians slap together at home when the cupboard is bare—brilliant but not often seen in restaurants. One other showstopper was a rare dish that showed up exactly as its menu description led me to imagine it: a dozen pristine countneck clams ($28) with excellent guanciale in an insistently garlicky white-wine broth, improvable only with some pizza bianca for mop-up.

Your steak-loving dad might get salty upon learning that Tonino offers no slabs of protein, only pizzas and pastas as larger courses. (Try getting away with that downtown.) But the kitchen turns these out with such verve and deft execution that Pops should calm down. The oblong pies (starting at $5 per slice and $20 whole) are built on the pizza bianca base with a bracing tomato sugo. I think more-assertive toppings stand up better to this substantial crust, such as pepperoni with mozzarella, basil, and an unadvertised drizzle of hot honey (surprise!), or a ferocious—and utterly sensational—special of puttanesca topped with chilies, anchovies, capers, basil, and Castelvetrano olives.

Balsamic-drizzled cappelletti steal the show. / Photo by Adam DeTour

The house-made pastas range from really good to mind-blowing. Tonino upgrades the sometimes overly simple pleasures of tonnarelli cacio e pepe ($22)—flat-stranded pasta sauced only with pecorino, black pepper, and pasta water—with a dusting of fennel pollen, adding a welcome frisson of sweetness, lemon, and anise. The painstaking labor that goes into snail-shell-shaped lumache ($26) paid off with sublime texture and an elegant sauce of shiitake and maitake mushrooms and crème fraîche. The showstopper, though, was cappelletti ($26), ingeniously built ravioli with a heavenly filling of melted Taleggio cheese and a drizzle of luxurious aged balsamic. Don’t cut them: Eaten whole, these “little caps” burst exquisitely in the mouth like a ripe cherry tomato.

Fetbroth closes his menu with a short, sharp list of classic desserts described in mercifully unambiguous terms. These include a flourless chocolate cake with black-hole density, bits of lemon-marinated Mandarin oranges, whipped cream, and flaky salt ($12), and an ethereal panna cotta given crunch and zing with pomegranate seeds and diced apples ($10).

J.P.’s hipster grooviness shows in Tonino’s beverage options, particularly cofounder and general manager Claire Makley’s inclusion of a sake list (three options, starting at $15 a glass and $55 a bottle), which shouldn’t be surprising given her past work at the Koji Club and Hojoko. What was surprising was the fact that sake served in a wine glass could be such a spectacular match for Italian food. Cocktails are limited to a few gentle long drinks like the Bergamot Blush ($15): Italicus (bergamot orange liqueur), yuzu sake, prosecco, and seltzer. The short list of 10 or so all-Italian wines (starting at around $15 a glass and $50 a bottle) has just enough stylistic breadth to provide happy matches for zippy seafood plates, bitter-green salads, and fierce salumi accents alike. The lemony fizz of a 2022 Adami Bosco di Gica Prosecco Superiore ($15/$55), for instance, was a splendid foil for a starter of house olives ($7) scented with lemon, garlic, rosemary, and fennel.

The cozy dining room features two coveted seats looking into the open kitchen. / Photo by Adam DeTour

Knowing its neighborhood fans have little use for pomp and frippery, Tonino has designed its snug, softly lit shoebox of a space accordingly, with banquette-and-table seating for 24, two counter seats overlooking the open kitchen, and few accents beyond Jazz Age aperitivo posters and an antique mirror painted with daily specials. And clearly, it’s paid off: Open seats are rare, even more so given that the restaurant is closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays to reflect the very up-to-the-moment concept of staff care. Be sure to make reservations in advance if you want to avoid waiting on the sidewalk for a walk-in table.

Even if you do find yourself waiting, it’ll be worth it, especially if you’re ready for a change of pace from the downtown dining scene. After all, it’s hard to imagine a better reflection of J.P.’s inclusive, slightly bohemian, definitely more-chill-than-your-neighborhood vibe than the convivial—and consistently delicious—Tonino.

★★★

669A Centre Street, Jamaica Plain, 617-524-9217, toninojp.com.

Menu Highlights

Pizza bianca, roasted squid, countneck clams, anchovies, pizza with pepperoni, lumache, cappelletti, panna cotta.

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

First published in the print edition of the May 2023 issue with the headline “Meet Me in J.P.”

A selection of Moëca’s seafood-forward dishes, including the whole branzino. / Photo by Brian Samuels

To paraphrase an old saying in the restaurant business: “When life gives you green crabs, make green-crab bisque.” For readers who don’t follow sustainability issues, the green crab—known as moeca in the Venetian dialect—is an invasive species that is a plague on the habitats of New England soft-shell clams, mussels, and lobsters. So it might seem an odd moniker for a restaurant around these parts. Yet that’s exactly what Michael Pagliarini and Pamela Ralston named their new spot just around the corner from Giulia, the husband-and-wife team’s wildly popular original trattoria located between Harvard and Porter squares. Opened in August 2022, Moëca is their optimistic response to a tough break—losing their lease at the Charles Hotel, where they operated fancy Italian spot Benedetto until 2021. But instead of bouncing back with a Benedetto 2.0, they took a big swing, venturing beyond Italian fare to create a menu of vivid seafood dishes drawing from an array of global influences. The good news? They succeed far more often than they miss.

That pesky green crab, a fixture on both the restaurant’s sign and its menu, stands as an emblem of turning a problem into an opportunity. A version of steamed green-crab custard, a fluffy, savory mousse with a delicate whiff of the ocean, has been on the menu since day one. In December, it featured leeks, sunchokes, and a shower of thin-shaved, barely aromatic black truffles ($29)—subtle flavors and ethereal textures that demand concentration to appreciate, whispering rather than shouting.

That quietly witty sensibility informs many of Chef Pagliarini’s dishes from the menu’s raw-bar section, including a hiramasa crudo ($21). Dotted with grape and fresh dill atop cultured cream, it was as though a Ligurian seaside restaurant started dating an Ashkenazi Jewish deli. Yellowfin tuna crudo ($21) with chili vinaigrette, cucumber, and peanuts carried the scent of Thai cookery, while a beef tartare ($17) with smoked oyster and buckwheat wrapped in shiso leaf (a rare use of land animals here) was delectably reminiscent of Lebanese kibbe with a Japanese flair: three dreamy bites.

View of the spacious dining room. / Photo by Brian Samuels

The menu balances these examples of understated sophistication with bolder, more assertive preparations and dishes that evoke homey comfort. Case in point: the Roman semolina gnocchi with scallop “trippa alla romana” ($16). Baked from durum wheat flour dough, the polenta is served here on a scallop shell and topped with a sauce meant to stand in for a popular Roman preparation of tripe in tomato sauce. Likely suspecting actual tripe would put off many American diners, Pagliarini instead uses scallop “skirts,” a trimming typically discarded, saved for stock, or dried for use in XO sauce. The result is a convincing substitute for the slightly chewy texture of tripe, but with the sweetness of scallop and no ick factor for the offal-averse. The tomato sauce is a glorious borrowing from Giulia: a thick, carmine sugo of ravishing, concentrated flavor. That kind of creative brilliance shows again in a novel rendition of mussels ($16): shelled, skewered, charred over a wood flame, and served with a dip of ground cashew and coconut-milk satay and a bowl of zingy, herby ginger broth.

If sunny beach food is more your vibe, there are offerings such as smelts and chips ($18), the clam-shack staple of finger-size, deep-fried whole fish that gets a cheffy upgrade here: Each little fish is trimmed of its head, butterflied, and boned, served with good fries and tartar sauce spiked with green tomato. More great frying technique shows in a fist-size giant shrimp ($35), its head done tempura-style in a light batter and its hefty tail grilled, sliced, and plated with a mildly shrimp-scented mayo.

The kitchen occasionally alights in some lesser-seen corners of Europe, as in a December special from the Basque country: Porrusalda evoked a rustic peasant-food charm with its velvety purée of salt cod, potatoes, and leeks, with a float of root vegetables and a dusting of saffron, though it could have used a hit of acid for balance. Italy’s Piedmont region inspired Moëca’s take on bagna càuda, a garlicky, fondue-like sauce for dipping roasted carrots and sprouting cauliflower. Here, sea urchin replaced the traditional anchovies, and the resulting briny intensity recalled the dizzying umami smack of a strong blue cheese more than seafood: rich and strange.

One can get by with a handful of raw-bar and shared plates per person, but I’d find it hard not to re-order at least one large dish, including a whole branzino ($48) that’s filleted and butterflied but served with the tail and head, nose pointing drolly skyward. This is a simple-looking preparation, flanked by little more than an oily, fragrant salsa verde and a few potatoes and charred onions, but so perfectly seasoned and cooked that it soars. Southern fried monkfish ($36) is yet another example of the kitchen’s precision with deep frying, here a large triangular fillet of the meaty, sweet-fleshed fish balanced with piquant marinated broccoli leaf and pungent mustard vinaigrette. Giulia’s famously adept hand with fresh pasta shows in Maine lobster spaghetti ($32), its abundant small chunks of lobster meat winningly sauced in luscious coral butter, given faint heat via fermented chili and a peppery finish with a halo of chiffonade shiso leaf.

In a menu that covers this much ground in technique, style, and geographic influence, there is room for missteps, and Moëca occasionally stumbles, most egregiously over a big tentacle of grilled octopus ($26) that was beautifully charred but overcooked to toughness. “Unicorn” oysters ($14 for three) were pristine raw specimens dolloped with granita (pretty stripes of rhubarb and lime one night, monochrome celery on another), but unless the idea here was “oysters for people who don’t like the taste of oysters,” the topping was simply too much in volume and flavor. I cannot complain about the delectable accompaniments to a 30-gram jar of Royal Belgian Osetra caviar (market price), which included a big square croquette of flaked salt cod, onion rings, onion butter with sea salt, and toasted Pullman loaf—though except for the bread, most of these elements were oddly chosen bedfellows for costly and delicately salty fish roe.

Photo by Brian Samuels

The overall experience does a lot to overcome the occasional kitchen faux pas, including the desserts by gifted pastry chef Renae Connolly. There’s nary a dud on her uniformly Instagrammable slate, but highlights included miso-peanut gelato with dark chocolate crémeux, cinnamon feuilletine, and banana ($10); and lemon bombe with basil meringue, raspberry-hibiscus purée, and pistachio gelato ($13). The bar, meanwhile, turns out inventive, crafty cocktails like the Eucalipto Currency, a fascinating riff on a margarita with cucumber and white port ($13), and the Festeira ($13), like a Manhattan that got dragged through a tiki bar.

Decorated in calming shades of slate and blue, the room is another enormous asset, offering atypically ample spacing between tables. That means that it can feel loud and lively, especially at peak weekend hours, yet still afford easy conversation. Service is uniformly polished, well versed on the wine list, and enthusiastic, no small feat at a moment when no restaurant can seem to find enough quality staffers. Like many of its seafood-focused peers with menus loaded with luxury ingredients and labor-intensive crudos, a meal at Moëca can yield a hefty check, not that that seems to faze the regulars in this corner of Cambridge. For those who are less forgiving of high-dollar bobbles, Pagliarini needs to iron out a couple of wrinkles in concept and execution to complement his wildly clever, eclectic take on global seafood. That might make Moëca not just a hit but a comeback from adversity for the ages.

★★★

One Shepard St., Cambridge, 617-945-0040, moecarestaurant.com.

Menu Highlights

Hiramasa crudo, beef tartare in shiso, steamed green-crab custard, semolina gnocchi, grilled mussels, whole branzino, Maine lobster spaghetti.

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

First published in the print edition of the March 2023 issue, with the headline “Sea and Be Seen.”

Lenox Sophia chef-owner Shi Mei prepares a plate in the restaurant’s tiny open kitchen. / Photo by Joe St. Pierre

I was minding my own business in a restaurant the other night when something punched me in the mouth. I didn’t see it coming: My assailant was pale, drably dressed, and meek-looking. I sat there blinking, dazed. It was a plate of king trumpet mushrooms at Lenox Sophia, a 16-seat New American restaurant in South Boston, and it was one of the most luscious, intensely flavored things I’d eaten in a while. The dish could serve as a metaphor for this place as a whole: tiny, modest, and packing a sneaky wallop. In a word: gobsmacking.

Shi Mei, Lenox Sophia’s chef-owner, faced a mountain of challenges to get his thimble-size spot open last year. Labor, equipment, and real estate costs in Boston were at an all-time high. Inflation was multiplying his food budget. Then Mei went to get a beer-and-wine license, a must to lure investors, and found that not one was available in the entire city. It makes you understand why so many of the indie spots on this magazine’s Top 50 Restaurants list are in Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline, Newton, and beyond, and why Boston neighborhoods like the Seaport are dominated by national chain outlets. Nevertheless, Mei soldiered on, and we’re grateful he did, as his tiny open kitchen consistently produces eye-catching plates with bold flavors.

Mei’s sensibility has clear echoes of his former bosses: the tweezer-precise platings of Thomas Keller (the French Laundry); the wide-ranging flavors of Jason Dady (Bin 555); the complex, fermented Asian flavors of Tim Maslow (Whaling in Oklahoma); the French technique and value-priced prix fixe menus of Alexander Crabb (Asta). Further, his approach offers a glimmer of hope for other ambitious chefs looking to succeed in a city that seems increasingly hostile to them.

Occupying the former home of Australian restaurant KO Catering & Pies, Lenox Sophia—the name comes from an unused entry in Mei’s list of possible baby names—features six two-tops that can be rearranged to accommodate parties of up to six and four counter seats overlooking the wee open kitchen, providing a great show for food geeks. The room is spare and modern: dove-gray walls, concrete floor, blond-wood tables and chairs, soft lighting, and comfortable noise levels (except for the occasional loud-mouthed customer). The one decorative flourish is a gleaming antique silver duck press. A tiny waitstaff provides genteel service to the whole room. In other words, the money’s going toward the food on your plate.

That food arrives in the form of a prix fixe menu, a switch from the restaurant’s earlier months, which featured an à la carte format. Now, diners are offered a five-course menu in two versions: omnivore, mostly focused on seafood with occasional red-meat dishes, and vegetarian. This reflects a major trend among higher-end Boston-area restaurants: offering only a prix fixe menu to control food costs and more consistently execute complex dishes with esoteric ingredients (see Mooncusser, Nightshade Noodle Bar, Cobble, and others in recent years, not to mention older stalwarts such as O Ya). The format requires diners to place a lot of trust in the kitchen. Lenox Sophia consistently holds up its end of the bargain with a series of inspired dishes drawing mainly from French, Italian, and Japanese traditions.

The seasonally changing menu is a gently paced progression of small- to medium-size plates. A September first-course bowl of grape-size peeled heirloom tomatoes with tart gooseberries sat in a limpid pool of cool tomato water, given vivid but subtle accents of lemon verbena and other snipped fresh herbs and bedecked with edible flowers. It was an evocation of late summer that I’m still thinking about months later under gray winter skies: tomatoes caught at their platonic ideal moment of tart-edged sweetness, given just enough cheffy elevation to induce gastronomic bliss.

Then there’s that aforementioned plate of mushrooms, which looked dull by this kitchen’s photogenic standards: wan-looking grilled king trumpets atop an ochre sauce. Yet its concentrated, kaleidoscopic flavors shocked my senses with bursts of umami, sweetness, and tang. The unexpected notes were thanks to garlic long-fermented in honey, a house-made miso with fermented elderflower, and a sauce based on dehydrated umeboshi plum, which shimmered around the meaty flavor and succulent texture of the mushrooms.

The prix fixe menu features dishes like this arroz negro, rich in umami. / Photo by Joe St. Pierre

The magic continues into the third course. On one visit, it was arroz negro, short-grain rice tinted with iron-tangy squid ink and dotted with bits of squid, octopus, and head-on shrimp. Offering a briny punch courtesy of shaved bottarga and an aioli deepened with smoked oyster, the rice was baked in the oven and then finished on the stove to give it a socarrat-like caramelization and crunch. Its vegetarian counterpart at the time was a cacio e pepe–like preparation of house-made tagliatelle, boiled briefly and finished on the stove in butter and EVOO, then showered with shavings of 24-month-aged Parmigiano-Reggiano and a generous blast of summer truffles. It was another dish that embodied delicately restrained technique.

Fourth-course options are bigger and showier, the exclamation point on the savory part of the menu. The hearty, starchy stew that is sancocho de pollo was rendered here as slices of juicy, perfectly seasoned chicken-thigh roulade with beautifully crisp, browned skin—the best bites of chicken I’ve had in recent memory—with the starch presented as a bubbly-textured cassava cracker, plus a few carrots and marble potatoes atop a golden, rich chicken broth. A halibut fillet was wrapped in a cabbage leaf and gently steamed, served with a sauce barigoule that substituted cabbage cores for artichokes to harmonic effect. The finishing touch? A smashing preparation of red potatoes that recalled luxury-steakhouse hash browns.

Vegetarian options are not an afterthought, with stunners like the airy, crispy panisse in a pool of flavor-packed romesco. / Photo by Joe St. Pierre

A rare miss was found in Mei’s take on porchetta, with belly wrapped around tenderloin. While it achieved the right diminutive scale, it produced a slightly dry center. Meanwhile, the vegetarian panisse was a showstopper: a pan-crisped oblong of airy, custardy chickpea mousse that was crowned with edible flowers and a ribbon of zucchini, all placed atop a dollop of intense, garlicky romesco.

Desserts provide a luxurious, Instagrammable finish to any meal at Lenox Sophia. A rich chocolate ganache with hazelnuts and blackberries got a lick of heat from gochugaru sauce. Crunchy oatmeal streusel wrapped in a sheet of thin-sliced Granny Smith apple was like an inverted apple pie, served over a swirl of butterscotch and topped with a dollop of Chantilly cream.

Unable to secure that coveted liquor license, Lenox Sophia instead settled for a rare-in-Boston BYOB license, which is easy to view as an asset. You’ll have to plan ahead to bring 750 milliliters of wine or 64 ounces of beer per person at the proper temperature (no ice buckets here), but that means you can drink in a more lordly fashion while dodging the typical restaurant markup. Pro tip: Grab some bottles at Social Wines a block away; operations director Eileen Elliott always has helpful, affordable pairing suggestions, including terrific natural wines, for this menu.

At $99 per head plus taxes and a 4 percent kitchen appreciation fee, Lenox Sophia isn’t exactly cheap, but it consistently delivers sophisticated, mostly gorgeous, always delicious food, making it a value-priced entry at the higher end of our scene. Its combination of a compact size, small team, and limited menu—with BYOB further improving the math for diners—points to a formula that could help chefs thrive in the city instead of fleeing for friendlier suburbs. Lest Boston slide into the ranks of American cities with the same dull slate of national chain restaurants, in effect becoming “Peoria with oysters,” let’s hope that innovative little indies like Lenox Sophia are encouraged to prosper.

★★★ 1/2

87 A St., South Boston, 617-597-2170, lenoxsophia.com.

Menu Highlights

Tomatoes with gooseberries. King trumpet mushrooms. Arroz negro. Sancocho de pollo. Chickpea panisse.

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

First published in the print edition of the January 2023 issue, with the headline “Queen Sophia of Southie.”

Grilled lobster, from the quaint coastal village of Scituate, with chili-butter-spiked brodo and clams. / Photo by Adam Detour

At Boston, we do stars, but in my dream job, we’d size up restaurants using only Randy Jackson–isms, which I’ve admired since American Idol’s heyday for their sneaky precision and sweep. Bistro with shaky recipes? “A little pitchy for me, dawg.” Half-baked Scampo rip-off? “If you sing Lydia, you gotta bring Lydia.” Meanwhile, you’d keep a hedgy “You could sing the phone book!” handy for a place like Faccia Brutta, Ken Oringer and Jamie Bissonnette’s thrumming patioed brownstone on Newbury. Five meals in, I’m still not certain the shore-hugging barge of tricks they’ve got floating in under the “coastal Italian” ensign is my favorite showcase for this duo’s singular culinary stylings. But if it yields this much showstopping bounty, why quibble over material? You follow the good food where the good food goes.

Faccia Brutta (Italian for “ugly face”) is actually Boston’s second coastal-Italian spot. When Bar Mezzana opened in 2016 with that same tagline, most of us glossed over the “coastal” part, taking it as some breezy declaration of atmospherical intent—come for the pasta, stay for those sweet coast-of-Italy vibes. Now that Faccia Brutta has arrived, doing a similarly sprawling Italian-ish menu with even more Mediterranean flair (harissa, saffron, etc.), it’s all making more sense. Oringer and Bissonnette, with executive chef Brian Rae, bounce around the boot with ecumenical abandon, deftly weaving in pantry staples and dishes culled along the 4,700-mile stretch of coastline from Croatia to Naples to the French Riviera, plus the islands closer to Tunis than Rome—with detours to Phuket and Jalisco—plus a subset of snacky dishes of even murkier provenance. There’s a large-format tossed salad you can buy into for $16 a person dressed with what I can only assume is authentic “creamy Italian”…it’s tasty! There’s a $38 crudité platter that would make Mehmet Oz blanch. There’s a lot of a lot of things.

Happily, when Faccia Brutta nails it, which is usually, the food is terrific—not just the execution but the polish of the recipes. There’s hardly ever a false note or extraneous flourish: not easy to pull off when you’re covering this much comestible ground. Your best opening move is to order a drink—the Negroni and spritz menus are particularly strong—plus a few grazeable snacks to tide you over while you hammer out a game plan. Perhaps hot, crispy Castelvetrano olives ($12) stuffed with pork sausage, anchovy, and red bell pepper, coated with gluten-free breadcrumbs, and dropped onto a cooling shmear of sundried-pepper aioli? Or maybe handkerchief-thin swaths of mortadella ($12), the color of pink-and-white marble, tricked out with toasted pistachios and a splat of gleamy-green basil pesto? The only items I might skip are lukewarm fried mozzarella sticks ($24) crowned with a blob of Ossetra caviar but robbed of their stretchy raison d’être, and potato chips ($22) with a green goddess dressing that pretty much obliterated the caviar that topped it, and, anyway…this concludes my TED Talk on first-world problems.

I don’t know who you like for crudo these days, and Boston has plenty of worthy exemplars, but my fantasy league a few years going has been Lynch (Bar Mezzana), Serpa (Select), Maslow (wherever he’s playing), and Oringer/Bissonnette (equally good at Little Donkey, Coppa, and Toro). Faccia Brutta gamely upholds the duo’s raw-ficionado cred. My favorite was the ruby red prawns ($24): Dressed with minimalist flair—a drizzle of licoricey Thai basil oil, a scattering of diced pickled rhubarb—they had a luxuriously supple texture and a quivering freshness shrimp-head heads will thrill to. That’s called ruthless ingredient management, folks, and I am here for it. The richness and velvety texture of live local scallop ($23) paired gorgeously with shaved black truffle and endive, and black bass crudo dressed in tomato-water aguachile ($18) was a balanced blast of fiery freshness from the shores of…somewhere delicious.

Not your nonna’s veggie-dip platter. / Photo by Adam Detour

Likewise, I don’t know where on Italy’s wind-swept coast they have a tradition of slathering fistfuls of rust-orange “crab butter,” made from pulverized roasted crab innards, onto half-shell razor clams ($22) and hitting them hard on a hot grill until burnished and sizzling like they do at Faccia Brutta. But if I figure it out, I’m hopping on a plane. It was extraordinarily good. The sludgy butter kicked up the bivalves’ ocean intensity, while beefy baby morels took the tune an octave lower. A tangle of spring onion rode the sizzle to the table, adding crisp green crunch. Speaking of butter, another winner is the grilled Scituate lobster ($56), which gets a nice kick of heat thanks to a fiery splat of house-made chili-garlic crunch that spikes the butter-mounted lobster brodo coating the accompanying steamed clams and fregola pasta in a delicious way.

The chefs’ finesse with fish cookery is even more evident in the perfect brochette of local swordfish spiedini ($15), which gets painted with bright-green salsa verde, then removed from the grill at just the right moment. Pulled apart with the tines of your fork, it collapses into tender, still-moist swaths—not the chalky denseness you get when you go even seconds past. Laced with fennel pollen and fiery harissa, smoky grilled bluefin tuna ($39) was like North African shawarma in a pescatarian key, with an appealing charry crust that typically requires sacrificing a centimeter-plus of overcooked-ness right near the surface. This one was flawless.

The pastas I tried were hit-or-miss. On the hit side were sensational Gulf-shrimp-and-crab paccheri ($34), tossed in a bright but complexly layered tomato sauce with bouillabaisse-strength intensity, and orecchiette ($33) in a rich, tomatoey beef sugo punched up with spicy ’nduja sausage. The rest struck me as a little basic, or maybe just crowd-pleasing—either of which would be a departure from the chefs’ JK Food Group brand. I probably should check my omnivore privilege, but I’ve always admired the eff-your-feelings ruthlessness of the dietary-hang-up-agnostic menu at Little Donkey, which comes off as “director’s cut” in an exhilarating way. A cut I wouldn’t expect to include a yawner like Faccia Brutta’s rigatoni cacio e pepe ($27—there were some peas!) or pansotti ($29), a ravioli-like specialty from the Ligurian coast that started off nice but ended up slumping down into a low-note walnut-brown-butter-ricotta haze. For me, it was just all right.

Front-row seats to the Newbury Street bustle. / Photo by Adam Detour

I can’t tell if the kitchen’s been so mired in tweaking the suite of expertly made gluten-free pastas (available retail) that they need more time to perfect these recipes, or if they simply haven’t had the heart to send home any contestants yet. But it would seem that one big advantage of making up a genre as you go along is not being compelled to offer seven pasta choices. Maybe “coastal Italian” has, I dunno, four.

Service overall was smooth as a balmy Elban breeze, and every staffer I interacted with knew their stuff—though I’ve never speed-ordered as fast as the night a server gave our table a three-minute warning before the kitchen’s 10 p.m. close: intel you should probably disclose right when you seat a 9:15 pm table, especially if they’re lollygagging over drinks with menus still in laps.

Speaking of which, it was a nice surprise to see the beautifully curated vino offerings—a grape geek’s playground where quirky natural wines intermingle with cru-level splurges and not a bottle reads like a grudging space-filler. Especially for a block of Newbury where a stylish patio restaurant like Faccia Brutta could easily phone it in and, you know, sing the Rhône book (sorry…), it feels like an in-it-to-win-it flex, indeed. Seacoast, out.

★★ 1/2

278 Newbury St., Boston, 857-991-1080, facciabruttaboston.com.

Menu Highlights

Ruby red prawn crudo ($24), razor clams with crab butter ($22), fennel-crusted bluefin tuna ($39)

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

From left: Gorgeously marbled A5 Japanese Wagyu with potato confit; Wagyu dumplings with (wait for it…) Wagyu chili crisp; wild ika nigiri with salted cherry blossom; and kombu-cured spring mackerel nigiri with ramp kosho. / Photo by Linda Campos

There’s a scene in Pretty Woman where Richard Gere whisks Julia Roberts to her first opera and, as the lights dim, ratchets up the stakes. “[First-timers] either love it, or they hate it,” he mansplains grimly. “If they don’t, they may learn to appreciate it. But it will never become part of their soul.” Roberts’s quivering lips, leaky eyelids, and gasps of niece-like joy, choreographed to strains of a La Traviata highlights reel, give us all the answer we need.

Which is pretty much how it’s gone down every time I’ve brought someone in for their first meal at O Ya, Tim and Nancy Cushman’s sliver of a Japanese-luxe tavern that opened in the Leather District in 2007. I can’t think of a restaurant in town with more individual dishes possessed of the power to elicit visceral reactions in the eater that border on sensual: involuntary gasps, conspicuous goosebumps, sotto voce holy-shits. My friend Susan, a genteel southerner, once became so…taken by a bite of tuna-belly nigiri that she draped a cloth napkin over her head, ortolan-style, to ride the waves of deliciousness in civilized solitude. I’ll have, as they say, what she’s having.

The 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke called this temporary unsettled feeling aroused by a work of art the Sublime. And I think there’s something to that at O Ya, where the best dishes have always touched the pleasure center with the immediacy of a Rothko.

In case you’re wondering why I’m reviewing a 15-year-old place, let me assure you that it definitely wasn’t some self-serving ploy to dine at Boston’s priciest restaurant on the magazine’s dime. That was simply a collateral perk. But the vertiginous cost of a meal—the 20-course omakase will set you back a cool quarter-grand before you’ve even cracked open the beverage list—did figure in. You see, I can’t go a week without getting hit up for advice on where to go in town for not just a meal but a celebration. With the bulk of my standard five-deep shortlist either closed or on the injured list, limping from pandemic-related woes, it finally dawned on me: Maybe I should be sure about the one still standing? So I went. Now I’m sure.

O Ya’s slender 24-seat former-firehouse dining room. / Photo by Linda Campos

Starting with Tim Cushman’s signature hamachi nigiri with banana-pepper mousse, an item that has been on the menu since day one. A velvety swath of raw yellowtail gets marinated in housemade soy to bump up the umami quotient, then draped over a quenelle of rice. A dollop of neon-yellow-green purée made from banana peppers, butter, and good old-fashioned truffle oil is placed in the center seconds before the whole mess gets hit with the business end of a blowtorch that sizzles every surface in its path, conjuring a heady Maillard-related alchemy of smoke and charry capsaicin and savory, toasted marshmallow notes without compromising the classical raw-meets-rice interplay of the interior layers. File under: still magical.

Even polished masterpieces can benefit from a jolt of new energy, which in O Ya’s case was the hiring of Nathan Gould, a chef de cuisine brought on in 2015 to oversee the day-to-day at the flagship, as the Cushmans turned their attention to spinoffs in New York and eventually Mexico City. During my first few meals under Gould’s watch, his creative impact seemed…subtle. O Ya had always been about the core dishes, many of which hadn’t changed since the beginning. Gradually, however, Gould became more collaborator than delegate, bringing more vegetable-driven dishes to the menu, more local ingredients, more seasonal spins. Gould tells me adding something to the lineup is sometimes a multiweek affair that requires tire-kicking by the entire team (Tim and Nancy included), and by the time you’ve cleared the hurdles, bluefish could be up and gone. The dishes that do make it through that gauntlet aren’t just a testament to persistence in the face of curatorial rigor—they are also usually the best bites on any given night.

In May, a kombu-cured spring mackerel nigiri made an appearance, dressed with broken bright-green-oniony ramp oil and a citrusy splat of fiery Meyer lemon kosho made with fresh green chilies and more ramps. Wild ika, meanwhile—fished in the Atlantic, not flown in from Japan—was scored in a crisscross pattern not just for tenderness but also for the way the lacerated edges become charry-crisp grooves when hit with a torch. Brushed with a sticky-sweet soy-mirin-dashi glaze, torched to create beguiling burnt-sugar notes, then brightened with lime juice and salted cherry blossoms, it danced an elegant textural pas de deux with the delicate boule of sushi rice beneath it, and anyway…it’s the teriyaki calamari of your dreams, so keep an eye out.

If I seem to be focusing a lot on the nigiri, it’s because, as a category, it made more of an impact than the sashimi dishes I tried. My guess is the difference has more to do with the dawn of the Great Crudo Era of the mid-2010s—which saw a flurry of new creative energy on the riceless raw-fish front—than with relative technical merits. All were excellent. But also, the bold flavors Gould and Cushman like to play with tend to benefit from a modicum of neutral-ish white space. Meanwhile, the cooked side of the menu was as tight as it’s ever been, featuring char-crusted slabs of A5 Wagyu beef and the silkiest chawanmushi egg custard—studded with pillowy blobs of uni, briny caviar, and thick, salty rivulets of dashi ankake—ever served in Boston.

A few minor quibbles: The restaurant has suspended à la carte for COVID reasons; for repeat diners, the choose-your-own-exorbitant-adventure option offered appealing flexibility. I feel a few tried-and-trues might be nearing retirement age: (Kumamoto oyster with watermelon pearls, I’m looking at you.) And there was a hirame usuzukuri with ponzu one night that tasted disjointed and harsh, the one outright dud. But I’ve parted with four stars for joints with far more serious flaws.

Sushi chef Hiro Konishi, mid-Rothko. / Photo by Linda Campos

Of course, the Cushmans’ brilliance isn’t only in the edible-Rothko making. It’s also in their prescience. The year 2007 was only 15 years ago but also ages ago. The city’s dining-scape was going through tectonic shifts. Small plates hadn’t broken the hegemony of the starter-entrée dinner structure. That exceptional food could be had in a cool, casual setting, not a hushed formal dining room, was still a radical idea—as was the notion of eating raw fish without your own personal trough of soy and wasabi paste. Then O Ya came along, with its B-side rock soundtrack, exposed brick, and disruptor-style audacity. The audacity of charging $17 for two bites of sushi. The audacity of excellence.

The audacity, too, of prioritizing a supportive and nurturing work environment in an era when, especially for restaurants, that was a fairly novel idea. The first time I met the Cushmans was in O Ya’s narrow dining room a couple of weeks before opening night. I was interviewing them for a tiny blip of a magazine write-up…or, rather, trying to. They kept cutting me off mid-sentence to greet every newly arrived employee individually. “Konnichiwa, Hiro-san!” they’d say in chipper unison, bowing their heads. I remember thinking it was goofy, even a little performative, coming from white owners of a Japanese joint. Not to mention I was sitting there in my official capacity as a part-time blurb writer for the Improper. Didn’t they know who I was?

Fast-forward 15 years, and there’s Hiro Konishi, the head sushi chef, still behind the counter cutting fish. Tim (no relation), a server who dropped off my first hamachi-banana-pepper back in 2007, dropped off the one I just devoured in May. Meanwhile, five O Ya alums made our 2022 Best of Boston roster for projects they’ve since moved on to—the type of pursue-your-dreams magic the Cushmans have a reputation for championing. In retrospect, I can see that, back then, I may have been a little quick to judge.

For this round, on the other hand, I took all the time I needed.

★★★★

9 East St., Boston, 617-654-9900, o-ya.restaurant.

Menu Highlights

Hamachi nigiri with banana pepper, mackerel nigiri with ramp kosho, chawanmushi with sea urchin (all components of the $250 omakase tasting menu)

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

Adorably shaped pork bao and crab rangoon from the highly curated menu of American-Chinese cuisine at Wuson Road. / Photo by Linda Rose Campos

Honestly, the biggest bummer about Wusong Road, chef-owner Jason Doo’s thrumming, tiki-themed ode to the sweet (also: sour) comfort-food pleasures of throwback Chinese-Americana, is that on paper the thing just sizzles.

Check it: a double-decker lounge slinging craft-caliber scorpion bowls and beloved classics from the golden age of the pupu platter—crab rangoons, sticky spareribs, pick-your-protein lo mein—remastered for modern palates by a guy who used to cook at Menton. The restaurant’s fantastical interior looks like a million bucks, and you’d never know it was mostly a DIY affair that cost a tiny fraction of that. You enter the second floor through a sculpted dragon’s mouth, for Pete’s sake. Vibe-wise, I think it adds just the right jolt of energy (youth-spirited, gently edgy) to Harvard Square’s dining ecosystem, which has been tacking hard in the visiting lecturers-who-lunch direction lately. Nothing against chamomile beurre blanc, but the course correction is nice to see.

Something else diners love to see in 2022 is an honest-to-goodness personal narrative from a storyteller whose story it is to tell. Doo grew up in the ’90s in and around his parents’ American-Chinese restaurant in Malden, and his is a thoughtful take on tiki-cocktail culture, something other bars have come under fire for commodifying and exoticizing in more recent, appropriation-conscious years.

Photo by Linda Rose Campos

The menu is well considered, too. Revivalist nostalgia projects tend to err on the side of more-is-more, especially when there’s a Kowloon-size garden of fading delights ripe for the resurrecting, making it a nice surprise to encounter curatorial rigor: On any given night Wusong Road offers just 16-ish dishes total—which makes a ton of sense. Doo says his kitchen line is typically a scrappy four-deep skeleton crew of true believers. Better to focus on a tight roster they can hit out of the park every time. Or, you know, so the theory goes.

The problem is, the more you eat at Wusong Road, the clearer it becomes that this kitchen is chronically in the weeds. On busy nights, the likelihood runs high that at some point during your visit the kitchen will lurch off its game and into the thistly, vortex-strength underbrush of in-the-weeds-ness, and for an unpredictable stretch—will it be one wave of dishes, or the rest?—you’re in wobbly-world. And you don’t have to take my word for it: The restaurant’s avidly tended Instagram account doubles as a near-daily photo diary captioned with heartfelt confessionals, imploring feedback, and contrite apologies big and small. But my point is, Doo and crew’s endemic struggles are fairly settled consensus at this point and, not to pile on, but yeah, you feel it sometimes.

The pea stems ($11.88) you crushed on last week—the ones tricked out with crispy garlic and feathery haystacks of crispy shallot—may show up with filigree intact but not a lick of detectable sodium. Did someone forget a pinch of salt? An entire sauce? A plate of veggie lo mein ($11.88) might come to the table watery, the sign of a rush job or an overcrowded wok. Pork spareribs ($12.88) could be jazzed up with spicy cheongyang chili pepper sauce but devoid of exterior char. Salt-shunning salmon crudo (no longer on the menu), meanwhile, may arrive desperate for seasoning but, going by strict triage hierarchy, require acid, stat. More yuzu in the yuzu soy, perhaps; more pickle in the pickled daikon…the lime wedges nestled in your well-balanced mai tai ($9.88), in a pinch.

You’re desperately hoping that the tide will turn before the arrival of the signature lacquered roast duck ($88.88), reserved 24 hours in advance as requested. Next time I may go with 25. The first time we sprang for one, the leg meat was nearly inedible: tough, sinewy, and undercooked. Accompanying bao, marshmallow-y on the outside, were splotched inside with powdery raw flour. The second time I got the whole setup, it was much improved: a solid B-plus. But when there’s just one large-format dish on offer, it should be a reliable stunner—or at least not the menu’s big dice roll.

Then suddenly. When you’re least expecting it. The clouds above you part. The luck of the lucky 8s the menu is packed with finally kicks into gear, and you’re like: Hallelujah. You’re reminded of the potential. That the guy behind this passion project worked at Menton not just back in the day, but the year it got four stars from the Globe. There is craft and there is nuance and there is precision.

Crab rangoons ($8.88) are hand-folded daily, and you can tell by the lightness—delicate pillows of sweet held in abeyance by house-made cream cheese. The accompanying duck sauce, a pineapple-y sambal with a sneaky kick, painted the crisp pleats of the hot fried wrapper with just the right protective layer of viscosity. A pair of fluffy bao ($9.88), one chicken, one pork, arrived in buns shaped like the animals themselves: pigtails, snouts, eyeballs, beaks…the works. They were adorably gruesome, just right for the place. Of the two, I preferred the chicken’s perfect fry job, juicy interior, and abundant sriracha and mala heat over the char-siu-style pulled pork. Fried rice ($11.88), with optional shrimp ($2) and chili-crunch oil ($0.50), was a surprise standout for its pleasing glutinous chewiness and the subtle hit of smokiness (a.k.a. wok hei, “the breath of the wok”) that would have sent the lo mein soaring higher. Were jaunty roll-ups made with hot, flaky scallion pancakes and fall-apart swaths of five-spice-braised beef brisket ($10.88) a little greasy? Maybe so. But also maybe just the greasy you want for a night out drinking.

Tiki cocktails are poured with a deft hand in the two-floor Harvard Square space. / Photo by Linda Rose Campos

Speaking of which: The cocktail program was solid across the board. Tiki drinks done right require an absurd amount of fresh-pressed juice and the space to produce it, so by day Wusong Road staffers run a juice bar in the lobby of the neighboring Charles Hotel. There they can make a few extra bucks while prepping for the night’s onslaught using commercial-grade equipment they could never afford or accommodate in their restaurant. That’s called ingenuity, folks. And the balanced, thirst-quenching excellence of Wusong Road’s Painkiller ($10), a blend of light and dark rum, house-squeezed orange juice, and freshly pressed pineapple, was a testament to the team’s hard-won perfectionism.

Of course, one person’s glazed-ceramic mug of perfection can be another’s glass-half-empty. One of the best things I ate at Wusong Road was a vibrant riff on American chop suey (translation for transplants: basic beefaroni), a standard offering at New England’s suburban Chinese restaurants—and a dish that the chef says he remembers fondly from childhood. In Doo’s hands, this utilitarian dish became something magical. I’m using past tense because the item has been unceremoniously dumped—too many harsh comments, Doo tells me, from customers confused by its Italian-ish flavor. In 2022 we like a good story, for sure. But not as much, perhaps, as we like to weigh in.

Which at the end of the day may be the real bummer about Wusong Road: It’s got the vision, the baller space, the meaningful origin story. It’s even got a conscientious chef with the chops to pull it off. If I had to guess, adding three or four line cooks to the dugout would help immeasurably. But honestly, what I think chef-owner-raconteur Jason Doo could use more than anything is to log off from the Instagram feedback loop and tighten his grip on the mike. Fist bump. Heart emoji. He’s got this.

★★

112 Mount Auburn St., Cambridge, 617-528-9125, wusongroad.com

Menu Highlights

Crab rangoons ($8.88), spicy chicken bao ($9.88), shrimp fried rice ($13.88)

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair | (No Stars) Poor

Chef Mark Ladner’s famous lasagna. / Photo by Linda Campos

Look, I don’t know who’s calling the shots at the Charles Hotel, and frankly it’s none of my damned business. I’m just a simple food guy. On matters of intra-hospitality backroom intrigue, I stay as neutral as Switzerland, you know, used to. What I can tell you is last April, after a five-year run, Benedetto, Michael Pagliarini’s acclaimed ristorante (we liked it, too: three stars in 2017), was out. A few months later, Bar Enza, a “neo-trattoria” by the Lyons Group—the folks behind Scampo, Rochambeau, Sonsie, and several popular Fenway haunts—was in, rocking a menu of spruced-up Italian crowd-pleasers.

Before we go on, it’s probably worth pausing to unpack “crowd-pleaser,” a loaded term, for sure. There’s no hard-and-fast way to determine, for instance, whether the late Benedetto’s strascinati with Ossabaw pork sausage and treviso was any more or less likely to please the proverbial crowd than, say, the new spot’s hulking “meatball gigante” ($29), made with beef, pork, veal, and barbecue brisket purchased from the Smoke Shop, on a plate of mashed potatoes. It’s subjective. You know it when you see it. Bar Enza’s hit-parade-stocked menu? I see it.

So where were we? Right. So the Charles Hotel replaces Benedetto with a crowd-pleasing Italian spot. Fair enough. They’ve got a business to run. But here’s the twist: The guy they get to do the calamari, Caesar, and prime rib is none other than legendary chef Mark Ladner, the Belmont native who cut his teeth at Olives back in its wow years, moved to New York, and spent the next 25 years becoming one of the biggest names on the emergent Modern Italian scene—first as Mario Batali’s deputy at Babbo and Lupa, then as head chef of Del Posto, where the New York Times found his cooking so refined, inventive, and of-the-moment that it awarded four stars to an Italian restaurant (gasp!) for the first time in three decades.

The good news about Ladner’s newest stomping ground: It turns out that hotel-friendly Italian food can hit above its pay grade when a rock-star chef is running the show. In fact, once I got over the shock of seeing a culinary hero apply his cooking chops to, well, cooking chops, it got a little more interesting, or at least more satisfying, to watch Ladner craft comestible poetry within the constraints.

Your best move is to start off with an aperitivo or a cocktail, plus a few antipasti to get the night rolling. The curated drink list is short and sweet, an advantage of which was that my “Il Affumicato” ($15)—a bracing potion fueled by smoky mezcal, sweetened with almond-y orgeat, and rounded out with fresh ginger and the saffron-violet florality of Meletti amaro—arrived as precisely calibrated on a sleepy Monday as the time the bar manager mixed it himself. Mile-high ciabatta sticks ($6 for two), sourced from Cambridge’s Hi-Rise, came with a plate of good mascarpone spruced up with intensely floral Sorrento lemon oil, peppery olive oil, and black lava salt. Also strong was the shrimp cocktail ($30): six plump U-12 beauties gently poached in a rich fumet made from shells and tails, then chilled and plated with a Russian-dolled stack of iceberg leaves; a horseradish-y cocktail sauce dialed back in intensity the right number of notches in the marinara direction to enjoy by the forkful (or lettuce-cup-ful) once your shellfish allotment runs out; and, oddly enough, a kiddie-size portion of piping-hot fries in a paper cone. That’s right. You get a few bonus frites. It’s…quirky. And I liked it enough to put it in that little “Menu Highlights” box you’ll see on this page.

At Del Posto, Ladner’s pastas were considered not just good but, in the words of one smitten Times critic, “insanely good.” They’re strong at Bar Enza, too, if a little simpler conceptually. The best one I tried was the angry lobster ravioli (market price), which featured a tomato-based sauce spiked with Calabrian chili paste and generous chunks of sweet, tender decapod crustacean. Shrimp scampi ($29) over linguine reinvented no wheels, but it’s the best version I’ve had in town. I like it when the sauce isn’t so wet it falls off the noodles, which is the problem I usually encounter. Garlic bread crumbs, a hit of Aleppo pepper: classic but flawless. Meat-and-cheese
ravioli ($28)—no, I swear I’m not exaggerating the aggressive everyman description; it’s literally the dish’s name as written—was filled, as billed, with beef stracotto (pot roast) and robiolina (cream cheese, basically), then sauced with browned butter. If you’re here with a crowd, this one’ll please it.

Hake with a twist. / Photo by Linda Campos

Another dish I’ll bet flies off the menu: the “Shake & Bake Hake” ($28). It looks gorgeous on the plate, with a bright-green swirl of rich broccoli purée that filled half the surface area, crowned with a generous pile of dark-brown buttered bread crumbs. At the table, the server fills the other half of the plate with a pale-yellow lemon-butter sauce that looks and pours like eggnog-hued semi-gloss. You drag the moist, shingled swaths of butter-poached fish through the green sauce, then the pale-yellow sauce, and back again. It’s so elegantly presented that it takes a beat to dawn on you that this is good old-fashioned New England baked scrod dressed up for a night on the town.

On the other end of the spectrum are dishes such as the medallions of lamb ($44), which were delicious but possessed all the visual appeal of sensible shoes. Five brownish-gray oblong rectangles of good Colorado saddle, seared to medium-rare, then painted with a translucent golden-amber grainy-mustard sauce that resembles…let’s go with “broken butterscotch.” The choice of boneless medallion here is sort of a head-scratcher. Maybe someone thinks lamb orderers at the Charles Hotel don’t want to contend with bones? Or. And this is only conjecture. Perhaps Ladner thinks, like I do, that no restaurant has ever done lamb chops better than the agnello scottadito at his former gig, Babbo, and chose the path of a little distance from the past.

Angry lobster ravioli gets a kick from Calabrian hili paste. / Photo by Linda Campos

Sometimes, of course, ditching your previous life isn’t in the cards. The only dish on the menu I actively didn’t like (other than the barbecue-meatball thing) was a weirdly mannerist rendition of Ladner’s most celebrated dish: the 100-layer lasagna he created for Del Posto’s menu in 2009. Unlike the worthy original, this one ($35) skips the meat sauce in favor of alternating layers of tomato marmellata and mozzarella besciamella, a vegetarian flex that tasted like some sort of savory layered cheesecake to me without the (wait for it…) ladleful of optional meat sauce you can get for an extra five bucks. It felt like a stilted Vegas act from another era.

I wonder if any of this bugs him. But I also wonder if he had little say in the matter. Hooking your wagon to a restaurant from the Lyons Group comes with a lot of advantages. You get a beautiful space to cook in, good promotion, a real budget for ingredients, but one thing’s for sure: You have to play your hits.

Which brings me to the guy with a laptop and outdoor-voice issues holding court a few seats down the bar from me at Bar Enza. He really likes the lasagna and is jonesing to pass along the good news to the kitchen. But he isn’t convinced the bartender fully grasps the superlativity of the situation. “No, no, listen…I’m serious. Go in and tell your chef there’s a guy out here who’s eaten lasagna all around the world, and this lasagna,” he says, pausing to brandish a forkful and let the stakes sink in, “is the best lasagna I have ever had.”

Eh. Fair enough. Maybe whoever’s calling the shots over at the Charles Hotel knows what’s up.

★★ 1/2

Charles Hotel, One Bennett St., Cambridge, 617-661-5050, bar-enza.com.

Menu Highlights

Shrimp cocktail with fries ($30), “Shake & Bake Hake” ($28), Angry lobster ravioli (market price)

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair |  (No Stars) Poor

The Banks’s signature lobster bake. / Photo by Brian Samuels

The photographs on the website and the walls of the Banks Fish House—salt-bleached boats, dark islands, fishermen proud and weather-worn—wordlessly signal home to many folks who live and work on New England’s coast. As I hunker down in a corner booth for my first dinner out in Boston in months, they remind me of the sailors, fishers, and lobstermen in my own family who can tell the temperature of the water by the way the wind is blowing. “Saltiness is next to godliness” proclaims the cream-colored menu printed on thick, sturdy cardstock, and this exaltation of deep-sea hardiness to grand, divine stature would seem, at least at first, to offer a good lens for viewing the Banks Fish House, which opened in July 2021: It appears to be an ode to the coastal Northeast fishing community in stylish Back Bay trappings. As it turns out, the place does excel in many arenas, namely the kind that opulent ocean liners are known for: hospitality, design, comfort. In others, though, it lacks a little seasoning—some element, beyond a single clever quip, that clearly conveys a distinct perspective through food and drink. Himmel Hospitality Group, which owns the Banks Fish House, is behind some of the city’s more iconic local restaurants—Grill 23, Harvest, Bistro du Midi—and, excitingly, their latest eatery is their first seafood-focused venture. But you can toss a cod and hit a seafood restaurant in Boston. What sets this one apart?

The place certainly looks lovely. Where “fish house” typically calls to mind humble clapboard quarters, the Banks simply gleams. Towering ceilings and tall windows allow natural light to spill over an inviting color palette of browns, blues, and grays that evokes the insides of oyster shells and moody ocean skies. Nautical light fixtures illumine two floors of seating in high-backed leather chairs, and while the ambiance is formal enough to keep the music soft and subtle in the dining room, it is also fun enough to bump Kaytranada songs in the bathroom.

A look inside the Back Bay’s new seafood spot from a major Boston restaurant group. / Photo by Brian Samuels

Ever-present in the space is Himmel’s experience-honed hospitality. It is of the warm, elegant ilk: Servers are unobtrusively supportive when you’re engrossed in conversation with dining mates, and still highly alert to eye contact when you wish to order oysters served on thrones of crushed ice, a glass of a briny, coastal white wine, or a well-made cocktail. On one late-summer visit, for instance, the Beach Rose Fizz ($13)—beach rose and cardamom-gin cordial with lime, egg white, and soda—went down as enjoyably as a beach read, as did the restaurant’s herbaceous white sangria ($13). On the other hand, while I’m excited by the thoughtfulness increasingly dedicated to nonalcoholic drinks in Boston, here the Cherry Lime Tonic ($7) with rainier cherry and peppercorn shrub was distractingly vinegary and overly sweet when I opted for a lunchtime mocktail.

Speaking of distractions: Food-wise, the menu feels unfocused as it aims to please everyone—a recipe, usually, for leaving everyone a little wanting. It covers pricey cuts of meat and seafood-topped flatbreads (with the option to add caviar). At a single moment, there might be newspaper-lined fried-seafood baskets, humble po’ boys, and a short-rib burger with jalapeño jack cheese. There is also salmon crudo with yuzu kosho vinaigrette, crispy fish tacos with kimchi slaw, and cuttlefish spaghetti with uni and mussels. It all clearly comes from a place of affection: Restaurateur Chris Himmel grew up fishing for tuna off the coast of Cape Ann, while chef Robert Sisca has plied his passion for seafood at Bistro du Midi and Garde East on the Vineyard. The desire to do it all, though, yields a scattershot selection. That Sisca can maneuver hard-a-port—then hard-a-starboard, then hard-a-port again—on a dime is quite a feat. It also makes it hard to tell where the Banks is going.

Chef Robert Sisca’s Faroe Island salmon is a winner during dinner service. / Photo by Brian Samuels

While the identity of the restaurant seems rather unsettled, Sisca cooks with confidence and conviction. A luxurious salmon ($38), for one, really hit the mark with its crackling skin shellacked over velvety meat, which intermingled with sliced pork belly, melted Swiss chard, and a satiny carbonara sauce. The Banks lobster bake (market) was a showstopper the moment it landed on the table in a double-handled crock brimming with tiny potatoes, corn, yawning clams, and lobster, the tail split and dressed in herb butter, the head and body peering over the rest of the dish. And unsurprisingly, given that Grill 23 is one of the most laureled steakhouses in Boston, the filet with béarnaise ($55), a generous cut with juicy, rubied insides, was an elegant paragon of a proper chop. The sides aren’t an afterthought, either: Golden dinner rolls ($6), flecked with salt and perfumed with butter, were among the highlights of each meal, as was the cast-iron jalapeño cornbread ($6) with its deeply browned edges.

Other dishes on the menu don’t pull their weight. The Little Gems Caesar ($14) lacked the umami-packed depth you’d want from the iconic salad, and a fried Fisherman’s Platter ($42) was without the bright saltiness and symphonic crackle found in the Boston area’s litany of fried seafood haunts. The cuttlefish spaghetti ($27), an inky, buttery tangle strewn with mussels and draped with uni, meanwhile, needed a note of acid to slice through the rich urchin brine. And although the Chowda flatbread ($19)—a clam-, bacon-, and crème fraîche–topped white pizza finished with a scatter of oyster crackers—was under-seasoned, the actual clam chowder ($9) was over-salted to the degree that a small mug went unfinished.

Desserts, when we get there, are joyful and gratifying—like returning home to solid ground after riding bumpy ocean waves. Pastry chef Alyx Abreu’s creations are unified by a sense of purpose: to take potentially rote classics (think crème brûlée or bananas foster) in celebratory directions. One night’s seasonal strawberry cheesecake ($15) is still rooted in my memory months later: Between the buttery lemon shortbread crust and the Basque-style burnished top were feather-light, rose-colored, custardy layers as gently sweet as summer itself. On another evening, Abreu’s flight of ice cream and sorbet ($12)—cold-brew coconut, mint–chocolate chip, mango ginger, wild berry—cast my table into blissed-out silence.

If only the Banks itself had a stronger voice. It is a perfectly good restaurant, but I’m still stumped as to who it is for. Out-of-towners looking for lobster rolls? Suits seeking a lunch spot? Hungry friends who are all on very different pages? Fine food alone doesn’t lodge a restaurant in a diner’s mind. There needs to be a through line, personality-wise, that is tangible and taste-able. This is what causes someone to recall a restaurant when they ask themselves, “Of all the spots in town, where should I eat tonight?” The Banks may end up finding where it fits in Boston’s seafood scene. Right now, though, I think it’s still wondering where to drop anchor.

★★ 1/2

406 Stuart St., Boston, 617-399-0015, thebanksboston.com.

Menu Highlights

Faroe Island salmon ($38), Banks lobster bake (market), Seasonal cheesecake ($15), Dinner rolls ($6)

★★★★ Extraordinary | ★★★ Generally Excellent | ★★ Good | ★ Fair |  (No Stars) Poor