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Guides
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.
5 Boston speakeasies worth finding
Finding the entrance is part of the evening at these Boston speakeasies. Carrie Nation has a lounge behind a red velvet curtain. Backbar asks you to find an orange door off a Somerville alley. Hecate sits beneath a restaurant you could walk past without realizing there is another room below. These are modern cocktail bars with a taste for concealed rooms and theatrical surroundings. Come for the drinks and the setting, rather than expecting an original Prohibition drinking den. Pick the room that fits the night: dinner with a reservation, a few drinks with a friend, or a small bar where you may have to wait. Carrie Nation’s speakeasy sits beyond the main bar, down a corridor and behind a red velvet curtain. Keep going and you’ll find a windowless lounge with leather seating, polished wood, billiards and its own bar. The back room gives you somewhere to settle in beyond the restaurant’s dining spaces, with a pool table providing an alternative to another hour of talking about work. The name is a deliberate provocation: the real Carrie Nation campaigned against alcohol. A cocktail club in her honor probably wasn’t the tribute she had in mind. Reservations cover the dining room only; the speakeasy and bar operate first come, first served. Book dinner if that’s part of your evening, but don’t mistake the confirmation for a guaranteed seat behind the curtain. They’re different rooms with different seating policies. Wink & Nod pairs its downstairs South End cocktail lounge with a kitchen that regularly changes hands. Its culinary residency program gives chefs room to develop their own menus, so check what’s cooking before treating this as a drinks-only stop. The current resident is Dorchester native Valentine Howell of Black Cat Eatery, whose cooking draws on Afro-Caribbean influences. The drinks list gives whiskey drinkers plenty to consider, alongside gin, rum, tequila and mezcal cocktails. My Favorite Things combines browned-butter-washed bourbon with maple, orange liqueur, bitters and cinnamon smoke; Scorched Rose takes chili-infused rum in a coconut-and-rose direction. There are spirit flights and nonalcoholic choices, too. Reservations are available through OpenTable. Wink & Nod opens daily at 5 p.m., making it a useful option on nights when several other bars in this guide are closed. Backbar’s orange door off Sanborn Court is easy to overlook. Once you’re inside this Union Square cocktail bar, the more pressing issue is finding a seat: there are only 39. The bar warns that groups larger than four have fewer places to sit and can face longer waits. Bring a couple of friends rather than recruiting everyone you know. Regular service is walk-in only, with changing cocktail menus and a separate nonalcoholic selection. For a more structured evening, cocktail classes and Closet Bar tastings can be booked separately through Tock. Those experiences are distinct from reserving a table in the main room. Backbar currently opens Wednesday through Sunday at 5 p.m., with last seating and last call at 11:15 p.m. It closes at midnight, so put this earlier in your plans rather than arriving for a final drink just before the doors shut. Saloon sits below Davis Square, with a substantial spirits selection and enough food to make dinner part of the plan. Whiskey is well represented, but the current drinks menu also has room for mezcal, absinthe and martinis that take some liberties with the format. One uses bread-and-butter pickle brine; another brings cacio e pepe to the glass. You can order three house martini variations as a flight in miniature glasses. The food goes beyond something salty to accompany a drink. Fried halloumi with chili oil and smoked honey, Portuguese mussels with chouriço, a burger and steak frites give you several ways to avoid leaving hungry. Reservations are available through Resy. Saloon makes sense when you want a downstairs cocktail bar but would also appreciate a proper meal and a table arranged in advance. Hecate’s entrance is in Public Alley 443, below Krasi in Back Bay. The dimly lit room takes its name from a Greek goddess, and the drinks give you plenty to discuss before the first sip. The cocktail menu brings together ingredients such as cedar smoke, sea moss and wormwood. Snake Oil pairs vodka and gin with eucalyptus; Nightmarch takes rum toward coconut, oolong and pineapple. Read the ingredient lists before ordering, particularly if you have allergies or avoid egg, dairy or animal products. Hecate’s zero-proof selection gets similar attention, including a drink with chicory, beetroot and fig. Choose this stop for an evening spent considering what is in the glass. For more on Hecate and The Wig Shop, read about the two Boston speakeasies that cracked North America’s top 100.
Get to know Boston
4 Boston-area gangster hangouts with brutal backstories
The Winter Hill Gang once conducted business in a Somerville garage that now welcomes a church congregation. On Prince Street, Mafia associates talked inside an apartment while the FBI recorded them. In South Boston, a couple opened a liquor store and soon found themselves being told to hand it over by men threatening to kill them. Boston mob headquarters were a first-floor apartment on Prince Street, a liquor store on Old Colony Avenue whose owners kept saying no, and two garages, one later filmed by state police and one now used as a church. The North End headquarters with microphones in the walls 98 Prince Street, North End Gennaro Angiulo and his associates used a first-floor apartment at 98 Prince Street as a Mafia headquarters. From January 19 to May 3, 1981, the FBI recorded the conversations through hidden microphones, and a concealed camera outside photographed people coming and going so the voices on the tapes had faces. Those recordings became evidence in federal court. An FBI supervisory special agent later told the Senate that one slice of the Angiulo family's numbers business was bringing in $30,000 a day. For nearly a year before those tapes, the FBI could not get video of the address. People nearby reported suspected investigators to the Angiulos, often with a license plate, and they were usually right. Across 103 days of pictures, someone brought the brothers a new car or a new face on nearly every day. Agents hid a camera in a vehicle and changed that vehicle every evening. They were not spotted. The liquor store Whitey Bulger refused to take no for 295 Old Colony Avenue, South Boston Stephen Rakes and Julie Rakes opened Stippo's Liquor Mart in 1983. Julie later used the name Julie Rakes Dammers. In January 1984, James "Whitey" Bulger, Stephen Flemmi, and Kevin Weeks let themselves into the family's South Boston home. Bulger said they had been paid to kill Rakes and had decided to buy the store instead. Rakes said it was not for sale. Bulger said he would be their partner. Rakes refused that, too. They were back that evening. They sat at the kitchen table, showed a gun and a switchblade, and threatened to kill him. Flemmi picked up the couple's one-year-old daughter, stroked her hair, and said it would be a shame for her not to see her father again. Bulger handed Rakes a paper bag with roughly $65,000 and promised $25,000 more, which he later refused to pay. Flemmi said the store had new owners. The First Circuit's account of the extortion lays out that visit. The Rakeses held out for weeks, left for Florida, and came back still trying to keep the business. Julie's uncle, Boston police detective Joseph Lundbohm, asked FBI agent John Connolly for help. Connolly told Bulger. Bulger then told Rakes to make Lundbohm back off, and the family signed the title over. The store was at 295 Old Colony Avenue. Public records show Kevin Weeks bought the property. In May 1986 the building was sold to Weeks, Bulger, and another person, and South Boston Liquor Mart, Inc. was set up to do business there. The shop was also known as Columbia Wine and Spirits and by its original name, Stippo's Liquor Mart. A federal forfeiture appeal is where the address and the 1986 company are traced. The garage where the afternoon visitors weren't coming for repairs Lancaster Street, near the former Boston Garden Mechanics had the Lancaster Street Garage in the morning. Most days around 1:30 p.m., Bulger and Flemmi arrived, Bulger in a black 1979 Chevy that he pulled into a bay, and the visitors came for them rather than for a repair. Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill describe that routine in Black Mass. George Kaufman, who had operated Marshall Motors in Somerville as a front for Howie Winter, ran this garage for the two of them. They had moved the meetings downtown, a short walk from 98 Prince Street and a couple of blocks from Boston Garden. Massachusetts State Police filmed Bulger there in 1980. The Justice Department still has the footage. The Winter Hill headquarters that became a church 12 Marshall Street, Somerville Marshall Motors, at 12 Marshall Street in Somerville, was the garage they left behind. Kaufman ran it as a front for Howie Winter, and the back room is where Winter, John Martorano, and Bulger met. The Boston Globe described the place as the Winter Hill Gang's office for gambling and loansharking. James Sousa was killed there in October 1974, after other gangsters worried he would talk to police about a botched plan to rip off a dentist with a fake gold sale. A mobster, remembering the room years later, said, "There was blood everywhere." A church bought the building in 2008. In May 2026 the Globe found it open as Greater Works Church of God Somerville. Reporter Danny McDonald went to a Sunday service and found purple seats, screens welcoming worshippers, and a mural of people being baptized in a river. Rev. Collin Green led the prayers. After the service he brought up Howie Winter on his own. "It's changed," he said. "It's not that way. God is in the building."
5 Boston sports moments worth watching again
Boston sports history gives you plenty of reasons to watch the same few seconds again. A pass that should never have been thrown. A stolen base everyone knew was coming. A hockey player suspended above the ice after scoring the goal that ended a long wait. These five Boston sports moments include championships, a playoff escape and an Olympic win with a strong Boston University connection. They did not all happen in Boston, and they did not all end a championship game. The details make them better, especially when you remember just how close things came to going the other way. Bobby Orr wins the Stanley Cup in 1970On May 10, 1970, Bobby Orr scored in overtime against the St. Louis Blues and gave the Bruins their first Stanley Cup in 29 years. The photograph of him airborne became the image of the moment, but the puck had already done its work before the celebration was captured. Derek Sanderson supplied the pass. His account of playing with Orr is worth reading alongside the familiar picture, which can make a team play look like a solo act. Watch the exchange as well as the finish. The Bruins needed someone to deliver the puck, and Sanderson was in the right place to do it. The BU connection to the Miracle on IceThe United States beat the Soviet Union 4–3 at Lake Placid in 1980, with four former Boston University players on the American team: Mike Eruzione, Jim Craig, Jack O’Callahan and Dave Silk. For Boston fans, that gives an already remarkable Olympic game a very local cast. BU’s recollection of the game is a useful starting point. The Soviet victory was not itself the gold-medal clincher; the Americans still had to beat Finland. Craig’s BU Hall of Fame profile records both wins. That last game deserves to stay in the story. Beating the favored opponent would have meant something rather different without finishing the job. Larry Bird steals the pass and Dennis Johnson finishesIn the 1987 Eastern Conference finals, Bird intercepted an Isiah Thomas pass and fed Dennis Johnson for Boston’s winning layup. The NBA’s account of the play makes the division of labor clear. The replay with the Boston broadcast calls is a good way to revisit it. Watch Johnson as well as Bird: his movement gives the steal somewhere to go. Basketball highlights tend to put one player’s name on a moment, but freezing this one at the interception leaves out the basket. Dennis Johnson belongs in the sentence. The Red Sox come back from three games down in 2004Before the World Series celebration came an American League Championship Series that Boston was losing three games to none. In Game 4 at Fenway, Dave Roberts stole second in the ninth inning, Bill Mueller’s single brought him home to tie it, and David Ortiz later won the game with a home run. The Baseball Hall of Fame’s account follows the comeback through Boston’s Game 7 victory. The Sox became the first MLB team to win a postseason series after trailing 0–3, then swept the Cardinals in the World Series to end an 86-year championship drought. The parade was earned, but Roberts getting to second is the replay to start with. Malcolm Butler intercepts Seattle at the goal lineThe Patriots led Seattle 28–24 late in Super Bowl XLIX when the Seahawks reached the one-yard line. Russell Wilson threw toward Ricardo Lockette, and Malcolm Butler intercepted with 20 seconds remaining. A drive that looked capable of deciding the game did exactly that, just for the other team. The Patriots’ game record preserves the sequence, including Jermaine Kearse’s catch and Marshawn Lynch’s run before the interception. Watch those plays first. Butler’s finish is more startling with Seattle’s progress fresh in your mind. The February 2015 win gave New England its fourth Super Bowl title. For the baseball chapter, our Fenway Park guide gives the ballpark its own attention. For the rest, start the footage a little before the famous play. The score, the clock and the possession matter. Watching only the celebration skips the part where Boston looked as though it might lose.