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20 Boston restaurants worth making dinner plans for
Choosing a restaurant is easier when you know what kind of evening you want. Sometimes that is a long dinner built around pasta, sometimes it is a lobster roll, and sometimes you want a room that gives you a reason to dress up. These 20 restaurants cover those different moods across Boston and the surrounding cities. The numbers help you work through the list; the right choice depends on what you want to eat, who is coming and how much planning you feel like doing. Sarma’s menu is built for sharing, which makes it a useful choice for people who want to order broadly rather than commit to one main course. Black Sea cornbread with jalapeño, feta, honey and sesame gives you a good idea of the approach, as do lentil nachos with feta queso. Reservations open 30 days ahead at 10 a.m., while the bar and high-top tables take walk-ins. sarmarestaurant.com Darling puts cocktails and Chinese-inspired dim sum together in Central Square. Its current menu includes hot-and-sour pork wontons with house chili crisp, scallop rangoon and a Filet O Fish bao with fried fish, tartar sauce and cheese. Choose it when you want drinks and several things to share, with a menu that leaves plenty to talk about. Darling Mai brings French cooking techniques to a Japanese izakaya in the Seaport. Handrolls are made to order and served individually, while the wider menu includes miso butter cod and duck confit. It is a good option when the table wants Japanese food but not an evening devoted entirely to sushi. boston seaport At 89 Charles, the drinks lead and the food follows. This subterranean Beacon Hill bar serves snacks including green goddess dip with Ruffles, sardines with bread and butter, and a wagyu hot dog with truffle kewpie. Pick it for cocktails and a lighter meal rather than arriving expecting a conventional three-course dinner. Bar & Restaurant in Boston, MA Giulia gives pasta lovers plenty to work with. Its latest menu includes bucatini all’amatriciana, braised-beef pappardelle and squash and brown butter agnolotti, so choosing one may be the difficult part. Tables can be booked two weeks ahead, with reservations released at 10 a.m. The 18-seat bar offers a walk-in alternative. Giulia Restaurant Tonino takes inspiration from the neighborhood trattorias, wine bars and aperitivo spots around Rome. The emphasis is scratch cooking and a small neighborhood setting, which makes it appealing for a dinner you have actually planned. Reservations open 30 days ahead at noon; walk-in space is usually limited to one or two people and is never guaranteed. toninojp.com Holdfast is the choice when you want seafood without booking a long restaurant dinner. This Allston spot combines counter service with lobster rolls, oysters and crudo, giving you room to keep things simple or order a wider spread. It is especially useful for a casual seafood meal away from the waterfront. Experience Fresh Boston Seafood Fallow Kin comes from the Talulla team and chef Marcos Sanchez, with vegetables and relationships with local farmers central to the restaurant’s approach. Choose it when you want the produce to get as much attention as the rest of dinner. Its Cambridge location makes it another option beyond the familiar Italian and steakhouse choices. fallowkin.com The Shawmut Inn serves dinner in its bar, dining room and patio, so there is more than one way to settle into this South End restaurant. It is a useful option when you want a neighborhood dinner and a full bar without making the evening revolve around a tasting menu. Now Open in South End Neighborhood Qiao Lin makes dinner a shared activity. Start by choosing your broth arrangement, with single, half-and-half and triple-flavor pots available, then build your dipping sauce and cook at the table. Its Chongqing-style hotpot is an appealing choice for a group that wants something more involved than ordering individual mains. Best Chinese Restaurant Parla is an Italian kitchen and cocktail bar on Hanover Street, offering a different approach from a straightforward North End red-sauce dinner. Its menu draws on Mediterranean influences, while cocktails are a central part of the restaurant. Choose it when you want to make drinks and food equally important to the plan. parlaboston.com Oleana’s cooking draws on Turkey and the Middle East, with small plates, spices and produce from its farm helping shape the menu. It is a good choice for a table that wants to share and try several dishes. Reservations are available 30 days ahead, and the restaurant also holds space each evening for walk-ins. oleanarestaurant.com Da LaPosta gives you pizza and pasta options in Newtonville, with starters that make it worth sitting down properly. The current menu includes housemade ricotta with orange honey, cacio e pepe supplì and rigatoni carbonara. Build dinner around the pizza if that is what brought you, but leave room to look beyond it. Da LaPosta Field & Vine lets ingredients shape the menu, which changes with availability from its farmers, fishermen and suppliers. Its online sample gives a sense of the cooking through dishes such as cheddar-scallion cornbread with miso butter and tuna tostadas with daikon kimchi. Use it to understand the style rather than to promise yourself a particular dish. field & vine Zuma is a good fit for a bigger night out, with contemporary Japanese food inside the Four Seasons Hotel One Dalton Street. The dining room has views of three open kitchens, including sushi and robata counters, and signature dishes include saikyo-miso black cod and a mushroom rice hot pot. Consider the robata counter if watching the cooking appeals. Zuma restaurants Asta serves a multi-course tasting menu in Back Bay, making it a choice for people who want the kitchen to guide dinner. It is worth considering when the meal itself is the evening’s main plan. Discuss dietary requirements when booking rather than assuming a tasting menu can be changed once you arrive. resy.com Thistle & Leek takes inspiration from London’s modern gastropubs, with seasonal small plates, an Old World wine list and straightforward cocktails. Choose this Newton Centre restaurant when you want an interesting shared dinner in a neighborhood setting. There is also weekday lunch, which gives you another way to try it without arranging a full evening. thistleandleek.com La Padrona brings Italian cooking from chefs Jody Adams and Amarilys Còlon to Back Bay. It suits the kind of dinner where you want to make a reservation, give yourself time and turn the meal into an occasion. Browse the current menus before booking so you can decide how extensively you want to order. 38 Trinity Place, Boston, MA, USA All’Antico Vinaio is here for the days when a substantial sandwich is the right answer. The Boylston Street menu includes La Paradiso, with mortadella, stracciatella and pistachio, and La Favolosa, with salame toscana, pecorino cream, artichoke cream and spicy eggplant. This is a lunch choice worth making deliberately. Italian Sandwich Shop Bogie’s Place sits behind a curtain inside Jm Curley, with white tablecloths, leather seating, steaks and classic cocktails. That change of setting is part of the appeal: you enter a busy downtown bar and continue into a more intimate steakhouse. Choose it when you want a steak dinner with a little more character to the arrival. Bogie’s Place in Boston, MA If everyone wants something different, start with a shared-plate restaurant such as Sarma or Oleana. If the occasion calls for a longer meal, look at Asta or La Padrona. For a more casual plan, Holdfast and All’Antico Vinaio give you plenty to look forward to without building the whole night around a reservation.
20 Italian restaurants in Boston for your next pasta craving
Boston’s Italian restaurants can turn a pasta craving into a fairly long argument about where to go. The North End has plenty of answers, but so do South Boston, the South End and East Boston. A table of cicchetti, a bowl of lobster ravioli and a sandwich eaten on the way somewhere else all deserve a place in the discussion. These twenty choices cover different kinds of meals. Some are sit-down restaurants for a long dinner; others work for a board of cheese and salumi or a quick lunch. Start with the food and the neighborhood, then check the booking arrangements. A busy sidewalk is not a reservation system. Carmelina’s serves Sicilian comfort food with Mediterranean influences in a small Hanover Street room with an open kitchen. Pasta and seafood are central to the menu. Its reservation rules are specific: online bookings through Yelp, parties of no more than six and ninety-minute table slots. Plan the after-dinner conversation somewhere else. Giacomo’s on Hanover Street is a cash-only, walk-in restaurant, with phone arrangements listed for parties of ten or more. Its menu centers on house-made pasta, seafood and its Giacomo and Fracomo sauces. Come prepared for the actual seating process rather than arriving with a tight deadline for the next part of your night. Mamma Maria overlooks North Square and changes its regional Italian cooking with the New England seasons. It has several private dining rooms as well as its regular dinner service, making it worth considering for a meal with a particular occasion attached. Ask about the room and group arrangements directly when planning a celebration. The Salty Pig on Dartmouth Street lets you build a board from meats, cheeses and accompaniments before moving on to pasta or pizza. Its menu includes house-made charcuterie alongside products from other makers. It works for a table that wants to share a few things, then decide whether dinner needs another round of food. Bar Volpe brings southern Italian cooking to West Broadway in South Boston, with handmade pasta, vegetables and wood-fired seafood. Karen Akunowicz’s restaurant is also a pastificio, or pasta shop. You can sit down for dinner or buy pasta, sauces and ricotta to make the following night considerably easier. SRV on Columbus Avenue takes its name from the Serene Republic of Venice. The menu gives you cicchetti, fresh pasta and risotto made to order, with Italian wines and cocktails. Start with small bites before deciding on the larger dishes; a Venetian-inspired meal has more routes through it than an appetizer followed by chicken parm. Coppa is Ken Oringer’s South End enoteca, serving Italian small plates, house-made pasta, pizza and charcuterie. The Shawmut Avenue restaurant also has outdoor seating when conditions allow. It is a useful choice when one person wants pizza, another wants pasta and everyone is willing to share at least the first part of dinner. Trattoria Il Panino serves pasta and other Italian dishes around Hanover and Parmenter streets, with a covered patio among its seating options. Its website lists a separate late-night menu on Fridays and Saturdays. Check which menu applies to your arrival time if you are planning dinner after a show rather than before one. Bricco on Hanover Street combines an Italian dining room and wine bar, with pasta, seafood, meat and chops across the menu. The bar offers a different way into the evening, including cocktails and pizza. Make sure you are booking Bricco Ristorante; its nearby bakery and salumeria are separate stops with different purposes. Prezza on Fleet Street gives pasta and wood-grilled dishes equal room on the menu. Its listed options include smoked mozzarella ravioli, fish stew, grilled swordfish and steaks. That range suits a group that agrees on Italian food but does not all want a bowl of pasta. Read the current menu for seasonal preparations. Rino’s Place in East Boston serves handmade pasta and substantial red-sauce dishes, including lobster ravioli, baked pasta and chicken or veal preparations. Its menu also states that the restaurant is cash only. Bring what you need to pay before sitting down; this is a detail to settle before the check arrives. Fox & the Knife on West Broadway is Karen Akunowicz’s Italian restaurant and enoteca, with handmade pasta, antipasti, aperitivi and amaro. The bar serves the full menu and is held for walk-ins on a first-come basis. It gives a solo diner or pair another option when the reservation calendar does not cooperate. La Famiglia Giorgio’s on Salem Street is built around Roman cooking and large portions. The family-run restaurant explicitly encourages the kind of meal that leaves you with something to take home. Ask about portions as you order, particularly if the table is considering several appetizers before everyone chooses a main. Arya Trattoria on Hanover Street offers a three-course menu called Fare un Viaggio alongside its individual dishes. The whole table must participate in that option, which includes appetizers, pasta and an entrée for each person. Agree on the format before ordering; it is meant to be a shared decision rather than one person’s add-on. Lucca on Hanover Street offers Italian dinner service, with separate wine, cocktail, dessert and children’s menus. Its private dining options include a wine room and other spaces for groups. Keep it in mind when the meal involves several generations or an organized gathering, and discuss the group’s needs before choosing a room. MIDA’s South End restaurant is the Tremont Street location of chef Douglass Williams’s Italian neighborhood restaurant. Use the South End menu and booking page when making plans, since MIDA also has restaurants in East Boston, Newton and Fenway. The shared name does not mean a reservation at one will get you seated at another. Euno’s menu runs from linguine with clams to mushroom gnocchi and pappardelle with a meat sauce. Seafood and meat entrées give non-pasta eaters options too. The North End restaurant also lists nightly specials based on available produce and seafood, so ask about those before deciding the printed menu has settled everything. Terramia on Salem Street serves northern and southern Italian dishes in a small North End restaurant. Its menu includes vegan ravioli as well as seafood pasta and meat dishes. It is worth a look for a mixed group of eaters, with any allergy or strict dietary requirement discussed directly with the restaurant before booking. Ciao Roma looks onto North Square and serves Roman-inspired Italian food, including homemade pasta. Outdoor seating is a separate reservation choice, and the restaurant warns that it may not be able to move patio diners inside in bad weather. Book the setting you actually want and read the terms before choosing an outdoor table. All’Antico Vinaio is the sandwich option here, with Boston branches of the Florence-born shop. It belongs in a lunch plan or a quick meal rather than a list of formal dinner reservations. Compare the fillings at your chosen location and order for the appetite you brought; a restaurant guide can leave room for paper wrapping. For another night, our Boston restaurant guide covers meals beyond Italian food. If dinner is only the start, keep the next stop nearby: the speakeasy guide gives you a few places to continue the evening.
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."
Why North Station and South Station have no direct train
Take the Downeaster into Boston and you get off at North Station. Take Amtrak toward New York and you leave from South Station or Back Bay. Getting between North Station and South Station is your problem. Boston made changing trains mean leaving the railway. The names sound like two stops on one line. They are separate terminals for separate networks. A train from Maine does not keep going through downtown toward Rhode Island. The split is older than the Big Dig and older than Amtrak. Nineteenth-century railroads came into Boston from different directions and built their own depots. The two big stations gathered those companies under two roofs. They never joined the northern and southern tracks. North Station, Boston Before North Station and South Station On the north side, several railroads crossed the Charles and piled up around Causeway Street. The Boston & Maine kept its own depot a few blocks south at Haymarket Square. Amtrak’s history of North Station says the Boston & Maine financed the original union station, which opened in 1893. It replaced a cluster of northern terminals. It did not create a through route across the city. That is the distinction that still matters. One roof made it easier to change among trains from the north. It did not connect those tracks to the railroads arriving from the south and west. The geography is blunt. Northern tracks ended at the edge of downtown, on the Charles. The station sat at the end of those tracks. A passenger who needed to keep going had to get off. South Station, Boston South Station solved a different problem South Station opened on New Year’s Day 1899, according to Amtrak’s station history. Five railroad companies formed the Boston Terminal Company and replaced a set of southern and western depots with one arrival hall. Planners even built a two-track loop under the main concourse for electric commuter service that never ran. Amtrak’s account describes a steam-train trial that filled the underground rooms with smoke. The unused level later became a bowling alley. It is now office and storage space. Boston could reuse a failed rail basement. Connecting its two principal terminals was the harder job. South Station was never designed as the south end of one downtown station. Like North Station, it was a collection point. The gap survived both projects. People have been drawing a tunnel for a century The idea of joining the terminals is much older than the Big Dig. The North South Rail Link campaign’s collection of early plans includes a 1914 proposal for an underground connection with a new boulevard on top. Those drawings show how long the problem has been obvious. They are not evidence that the tunnel exists. A map from 1914 and a train you can board are different things, especially with a suitcase. Passengers could once ride between the terminals on the Atlantic Avenue Elevated. That moved people along the waterfront. It did not let a mainline train run through Boston. Transferring riders and joining the tracks are two different fixes. What the tickets actually say Amtrak’s North Station page is plain: only the Downeaster uses North Station. Boston’s other Amtrak trains use South Station and Back Bay. Amtrak does not provide connecting transportation between North Station and South Station. The two are about a mile apart. Read the station name on both reservations before you treat them as a connection. Leave time to exit one building, cross downtown, and find the next train. Weather, luggage, and mobility all change how sensible a walk is. The subway does not solve it with one ride. North Station is on the Green and Orange Lines. South Station is on the Red Line. You can transfer. You cannot stay on the same train. A booking that says Boston has not settled this. North Station and South Station are in the same city. Your ticket does not fill the space between them.