10 best restaurants in Boston

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.