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Guides
A free Oktoberfest in Southie, then Halloweentown
Castle Island Brewing pours a free Oktoberfest in Southie on the 17th. Friday is a scare in the Seaport, with pumpkin painting on Newbury later in the month. Play It By Fear is the night for a costume without a ticketed maze. It is Friday, October 16, from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. at The Rocks at Harbor Way, 111 Harbor Way. The Seaport’s own listing has candlelight caricatures, a tarot table, and a photo booth. DJ Brian Halligan starts at 6:00 p.m. JAM’N 94.5 host Ashlee Feldman is the host. At 7:00 the Glass Artists string quartet plays Halloween classics and themes from slasher films, an hour after the DJ starts. A stand will be scooping $1 ice cream, and Union Square Donuts and The Sweetish Fish are on site. Seaport VIP Insider deals that night run from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m. The list includes Flight Club, Levain Bakery, and Puttshack, along with other Seaport businesses. The page does not list a ticket price, so check before you treat the caricature as free. Castle Island Brewing’s Oktoberfest is Saturday, October 17, from 11:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. at 10 Old Colony Ave in South Boston. It is free, and you have to be 21. The day is German lagers, a make-your-own pretzel necklace, hot beer poking, and oompah music from Kier Byrnes. The listing asks for lederhosen and dirndls. Date Faster’s Halloween singles mixer is Saturday, October 17, from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. It is 21 and over, and there are no timed dates. The page lists name tags, hosts, drink specials, and a game of Two Truths and a Lie. The prize is a ticket to another Date Faster mixer. Drinks are bought at the venue and are not included. Costumes are encouraged. Ticket totals run from $9.30 to $23.17. You can ask for a refund up to 7 days before the event, or exchange the ticket for another date. The calendar lists Howl at the Moon, 184 High Street. The description on the same event also says the venue is to be announced. Read the ticket page the day you go, and do not plan the night around the pianos at Howl at the Moon until that line is gone. The Boston Public Market Association’s Harvest Party is Thursday, October 22, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Boston Public Market, 100 Hanover Street. The market closes at 3:00 p.m. that day for the party. Tickets cover unlimited tastings from market vendors, local beer, wine, and spirits, plus live entertainment and a silent auction. Individual tickets are sold through Zeffy, so the nonprofit keeps the full price. Sponsorships and in-kind gifts are open too. Boston Landing screens Halloweentown indoors on Saturday, October 24, at the TRACK at New Balance, 91 Guest Street. Admission is free and an RSVP is required. The pre-party is at 3:30 p.m. and the screening is at 5:30 p.m. It is all ages. The page linked here lists 3:30 to 8:00 p.m. The Eventbrite listing ends at 7:00 p.m. This entry uses 3:30 to 8:00 p.m. Refunds can be requested up to 7 days before the event. PruBoo is a free family Halloween event on Sunday, October 25, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the Prudential Center, 800 Boylston Street. Kids trick-or-treat at more than 30 stores and restaurants. The page also lists face painting, Halloween crafts while supplies last, magic shows by Robert Clarke at 11:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., and The Stacey Peasley Band. A trick-or-treat bag is a $5 donation to Boston Children’s Hospital. The band is listed from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. and from noon to 1:00 p.m. The 10:30 start is before the stated 11:00 a.m. start. Sonsie hosts pumpkin painting on Monday, October 26, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. in the downstairs Wine Room at 327 Newbury Street. The ticket is $44.52 and includes a pumpkin, paints, a welcome mocktail, and light bites, and you take the pumpkin home. Food at Sonsie is 20 percent off before or after the event if you stay to eat. Refunds are available until seven days before the night. The location is still a secret. Experience Halloween Night 1 is a costume rave on Friday, October 30, from 9:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m., and the venue is listed only as TBA. Experience and Techno Brooklyn are hosting. Briela Veneno, Crossbow, and L9 play. Costumes are encouraged. It is 21 and over, and tickets are listed from $25. Ned Devine’s Halloween party is Saturday, October 31, from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. at 1 Faneuil Hall Marketplace. There is a DJ and a costume contest. First prize is $300 and the runner-up prize is $200. Guests have to be in the door by 10:00 p.m. It is 21 and over with a valid ID. Angry Orchard is the sponsor. Sales are final. The poster says advance tickets are $10. Eventbrite’s total is $11.54. Trixie’s Halloween is a 21-and-over dance party on Saturday, October 31, at Royale, 279 Tremont Street. Doors are at 9:00 p.m. Tara Dikhof opens, Trixie Mattel DJs, and the night includes pop-up performances from Boston drag performers plus a $1,000 costume contest hosted by Trixie. Katya is not performing. Presented by Royale Boston. Ticket sales are final. A promo code, DISCO, is $5 off. It does not apply to every show. Send us a message if you have an event you want added. Visit our Holidays events page for more.
10 best restaurants in Boston
Dinner at Tres Gatos can end with a new record. At Comfort Kitchen, the table might fill with jerk jackfruit sliders, Nepali-style beef and prawn curry. At Deuxave, you can give the evening over to five courses and let someone else make the decisions. Our best restaurants in Boston list covers different kinds of nights, from biscuits and bourbon to a tasting menu. Choose the food first, then the setting. A room built for sharing plates with friends is a different proposition from a long anniversary dinner. Buttermilk & Bourbon makes a strong argument for ordering biscuits before you have worked out the rest of dinner. The warm honey-glazed biscuits come with smoked cinnamon butter and pimento cheese spread. New Orleans barbecue shrimp with cheddar grits and fried chicken sliders continue the Southern direction of the Back Bay menu. Weekend brunch adds chicken and waffles and biscuits with sausage gravy. Pick the Boston location when reserving; there is also a Watertown restaurant. UNI gives you a choice between ordering à la carte and committing to a tasting menu. That matters if one person wants to choose every plate and another would rather hand the evening to the kitchen. The Commonwealth Avenue restaurant’s daily tasting menu is $225 per person, with an optional beverage pairing charged separately. It also offers a chef’s-choice family-style meal by arrangement. Discuss the budget and dietary requirements with the restaurant before settling on that format. Comfort Kitchen in Upham’s Corner connects ingredients and cooking traditions of the African diaspora with Asia and the Americas. The menu makes that idea concrete: jerk jackfruit roti sliders, Nepali-style marinated beef and prawn curry with coconut and timur chili oil. The kitchen encourages sharing as plates arrive. Dinner, weekend brunch and the limited weekday café service have different schedules, so choose the visit you actually want. The small dining room, full bar and outdoor patio offer several ways to spend time here. Fox & the Knife is Karen Akunowicz’s South Boston restaurant for handmade pasta, antipasti and an aperitivo before dinner. Its attention to Italian food and drink extends to an amaro program, giving you a reason to stay after the plates are cleared. Reservations open 30 days ahead, but the restaurant also saves its bar for walk-ins and serves the full menu there. That makes it worth considering when a dining-room table is unavailable. At Eataly, head upstairs to Terra for a meal built around the wood-burning grill. The restaurant’s menu includes grilled beef, prawns and artichokes, with Italian wine and seasonal cocktails alongside them. It suits a longer lunch or dinner in Back Bay, particularly if you want to browse the food market in the same visit. Terra is a distinct restaurant within Eataly; reserve it by name rather than assuming any table in the building is the same experience. Yvonne’s occupies the former Locke-Ober space, with dark wood, bookshelves and a library room that makes dinner feel like an occasion before anything arrives. The food is intended for sharing, from crab beignets and chicken-quinoa meatballs to larger dishes for the table. Come with people who are happy to order together. The room and cocktails are part of the appeal, so this is a better choice for a sociable evening downtown than a hurried plate before heading elsewhere. Tres Gatos combines a Spanish-inspired tapas restaurant with a book and music shop in Jamaica Plain. You can make dinner and browsing part of the same visit, which is a fairly persuasive alternative to waiting for a table while staring at your phone. The kitchen’s shared-plate approach works well with a few people willing to order across the menu. Leave time for the shop, rather than treating it as decoration on the way to your seat. Toro’s South End dining room is built around Barcelona-inspired hot and cold tapas. Order several plates across the menu and share them, rather than treating each small dish as someone’s individual dinner. The drinks include classic-inspired cocktails and natural wines. Chef Ken Oringer created Toro in 2005, and its Spanish focus gives this list a different sort of meal from the pasta restaurants and tasting menus. It is a choice for people who like a table with plenty to pass around. Deuxave sits at Commonwealth and Massachusetts avenues and serves modern Italian-French cooking. The menu ranges from lobster gnocchi fricassée and duck confit to potato-crusted halibut and handmade pasta. You can order individual courses or choose the seasonal five-course tasting menu, which requires the whole table to participate. This is a place to set aside time for dinner. Look at the wine and nonalcoholic pairing options if you want the restaurant to handle those decisions, too. The Banks Seafood & Steak is on Stuart Street in Back Bay, with a menu broad enough for the oyster person and the steak person to agree on dinner. Clam chowder comes with Berkshire pork belly; lobster rolls can be hot or cold. There are also steaks and whole fish. The restaurant serves weekday lunch and weekend brunch as well as dinner, so you can fit it around a daytime visit to the neighborhood rather than saving it for a late reservation. If a restaurant you want is booked, our reservation guide explains release times and walk-in options at six other Boston-area restaurants. Check the full cost of tasting menus, including service charges and drinks, before choosing one for a group.
Get to know Boston
How the Irish saved Halloween in Boston
Samhain (pronounced SAH-win or SOW-in) is an ancient Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter Halloween customs turned up in other American colonies. Massachusetts sat them out. Anglican and Lutheran churches kept All Saints' Day. Maryland's Catholics did too. In the South, Scotch-Irish settlers, Scots who had lived in northern Ireland, sometimes went out in costume and called it guising. The Puritans who settled here took a dim view of all of it. The Commonwealth Museum's history of the holiday traces the night to Samhain, the Celtic new year on November 1, when the dead of the past year were thought to come back for a verdict. Disguises, and a candle in a hollowed turnip, were supposed to keep the spirits away. In the eighth century, the museum says, Pope Gregory III set All Saints' Day on November 1. The eve became All Hallows Eve. Halloween is that name, worn down. The church would rather you dressed as a saint. What people actually did on October 31 still changed from one place to the next. Artist's depiction of Pope Night in Boston, 1768 Pope Night was a different riot Boston already knew how to wreck an evening in early November. The occasion was Pope Night, November 5. Old North Church traces it to Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament. The North End and the South End each built an effigy, the pope and often the devil, and hauled it through the streets. The crowds met and fought for the figures. North End winners burned them on Copp's Hill. South End winners burned them on the Common. Isaiah Thomas, who was in the fights, wrote that broken heads were not infrequent. In 1764 a boy was run over by a cart and killed. Houses along the way were expected to hand over money. Skip the payment and the windows could go. That is still not Halloween. The Commonwealth Museum says the connection to later Halloween pranks is not clear, and that Guy Fawkes Day is a stretch as an origin. Pope Night was an anti-Catholic riot with its own date. In 1775 George Washington ordered the army to stop burning the pope in effigy. The colonies wanted Catholic allies in Canada. Old North treats that order as the end of the holiday in Boston. Traditional Irish halloween Jack-o'-lantern made out of a turnip. Photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid County Cork, then a pumpkin The customs Bostonians now recognize arrived with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, after the Great Famine began in 1845. In County Cork, the museum says, people wore costumes on Halloween and announced themselves at a house with cow's horns. Food or a drink from the household was supposed to bring prosperity. The lantern was a turnip with a candle in it. Once those immigrants were here, a pumpkin did the job better. There is more face on a pumpkin than on a turnip, and less of a fight. They did not invent trick-or-treating. One older thread, also in the museum's account, is the medieval soul cake: bread for the poor, prayers for the dead in exchange. The pillowcase version came later. Costumes, a stop at the door, and a lantern were the Irish Halloween traditions that Boston actually got. The Globe caught on in 1884 On October 31, 1884, the Boston Daily Globe ran "Why Thousands Will Think of Erin Tonight." The Commonwealth Museum cites the headline. Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne quotes the article. It describes Ireland, not a candy route through Boston: a church fast that fell apart when the party started, colcannon sent from the country, and "parties of young men and their sweethearts" going house to house among relatives and friends. The candy holiday was still ahead of that. Newspapers, magazines, and clubs from the Scouts to the Rotary spread Halloween in the twentieth century, the museum says. Trick-or-treaters were being spotted in Wellesley by the 1920s. After the Second World War, the baby boom made it a product. Manufactured costumes and decorations arrived then.
Why Bostonians say “wicked” so much
“Wicked good” is a compliment. “Wicked expensive” is a complaint. The same word does both jobs without any concern for whether the subject deserves praise. In Boston, “wicked” often means very or extremely. It turns up the volume on whatever comes next. Say someone is wicked tired and you mean they are very tired, not that they have become a worse person. The meaning comes from how the word is being used. That is the useful thing to know before attempting a Boston impression. You can pronounce every R and still use the word correctly. You can also drop every R and put “wicked” in a sentence where it sounds like you learned to speak from a souvenir sweatshirt. Why Bostonians say wicked before almost anything In this usage, “wicked” is an intensifier. Merriam-Webster records its adverbial meaning alongside the older adjective meaning morally bad. The two uses can occupy the same language without confusion. A wicked person and a wicked good sandwich are different propositions. Think of “wicked cold,” “wicked funny” or “wicked crowded.” The word strengthens the description. It does not tell you whether to like the thing being described. Someone saying the restaurant was wicked busy might be recommending it, explaining a long wait, or wishing they had stayed home. The placement is more important than putting on an accent. “That was wicked good” has the familiar local construction. “That was wicked,” meaning excellent, is another slang use, but it does a different grammatical job. Adding the word everywhere will not make every sentence sound more Boston. The Puritans do not get automatic credit Boston’s reputation makes an origin story involving stern Puritans tempting. But the fact that an old word existed in England does not prove that seventeenth-century settlers brought this particular local use with them. The language program A Way with Words discusses “wicked” as a New England intensifier. That regional association is useful. It does not supply the name of the first person who said it, or a neat date when everyone in Massachusetts agreed to start. There is no need to invent a founding ceremony. People repeat words they hear in their families and communities, and a familiar expression can feel entirely ordinary to one speaker and immediately regional to another. “Wicked” works perfectly well without a colonial certificate of authenticity. Ordering a frappe does not require dropping an R Other local words need a little more translation. A frappe is a thick milkshake; the familiar New England pronunciation rhymes with “cap.” The spelling can make visitors expect a different word, especially if they are thinking of a coffee drink. For an order, the menu is more useful than a debate over terminology. Ask what is in the drink if the distinction matters. Regional vocabulary is interesting until it becomes the reason you receive something other than the ice cream you wanted. “Bubbler” means a drinking fountain, with a history that reaches beyond Massachusetts. Our bubbler explainer separates the regional word from a frequently repeated manufacturing story. Calling it a water fountain is also a perfectly effective way to ask for water. Vocabulary is not the same as an accent The Boston accent concerns sounds: which R’s a speaker pronounces, what happens between words, and how vowels are formed. Vocabulary concerns the words chosen. They overlap in conversation, but one does not require the other. A person raised here might say “wicked” constantly, occasionally, or never. Another might arrive from elsewhere and pick it up. Neither case is a useful citizenship test. Boston contains more than one way of speaking, and ordinary conversation is less uniform than the movie version. If the word is new to you, listen to what follows it. Good, bad, fast, slow, cheap, expensive: the next word does the describing. “Wicked” just makes sure you heard.