Destination DiningA weekly guide to dining in a different U.S. city, in honor of the summer travel season. If you’re traveling to Boston …
When I first started commuting to Boston from Chicago for work, several food-obsessed friends offered me a warning: “It’s not a great restaurant town,” they sneered. Four years later, not only do I find this opinion broadly inaccurate, and I’ve learned there’s plenty to love about the city’s dining culture. First, Boston has an exceptional sushi scene. It’s also home to ambitious bakers and patissiers serving Eastern Mediterranean, Japanese, American and even gluten-free delights. Crowd-pleasing Italian? Check and check. And ready access to superb seafood? Well, that’s obvious. I could go on. In fact, I did, in our newly updated list of the 25 best restaurants in Boston. Below, a rundown on the two new entrants to the list.
My favorite meal of 2025 (so far)There’s plenty of 2025 left, but I’d be lucky to experience another meal as unexpected and delicious as the one I had at Lê Madeline in Quincy. There’s a back story to the space at 409 Hancock Street. For years, it was a pho shop run by the parents of the restaurateur Tam Le. In 2014, Le purchased the restaurant and rechristened it Phở Linh in honor of his wife. Fast-forward a decade: Phở Linh has morphed into the more upscale Lê Madeline (named for Mr. Le’s daughter). He has been able to secure Peter Nguyen as chef, newly returned from cooking in Houston. That Mr. Nguyen grew up in the nearby Dorchester neighborhood made the Lê Madeline partnership an easy fit. Here, Vietnam and New England come together in exhilarating ways: lobster rolls dressed with ginger-scallion and calamansi aioli, or a boffo starter of lemongrass-chile oil French onion dip with shrimp crackers. Then there’s the caramelized fish sauce chicken wings and that Mr. Nguyen smokes over apple wood before frying them. To borrow a crispy and juicy chicken reference from a song my 9-year-old won’t stop singing: “Ooh mamacita, now you’re ringing the bell.” 409 Hancock Street (Billings Road), Quincy
Port AuthorityBaleia, the Portuguese restaurant from the team behind SRV and The Salty Pig, is the other new entrant on our 2025 Boston list. There’s a lot to love about Baleia, but a great three-dish set list would be the octopus carpaccio, shrimp Mozambique and the fried dough sonhos with port-caramel dipping sauce. (Still hungry? The chef Andrew Hebert bakes terrific Portuguese sweet rolls, which are essentially the predecessor to Hawaiian rolls). Baleia also has the distinction of being the prettiest restaurant I’ve visited in Boston in the past year, if aesthetics are important to you. And it’s next door to More Than Words, a lovely used bookstore and nonprofit that employs at-risk youths. 264 East Berkeley Street (Albany Street), South End For your itineraryBoston is one of America’s best cities for bookstore lovers. You’ll be glad to know many restaurants on our 25 best list are within walking distance of fine indie booksellers. Harvard Book Store is a 10-minute walk down Massachusetts Avenue from Pammy’s. Porter Square Books is next door to Yume Ga Arukara, across the street from Bagelsaurus and five blocks from Giulia. And it’s a leisurely 15-minute stroll from Brookline Booksmith to both Cutty’s and Mahaniyom. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have New York City restaurant questions? Send us a note at here. Follow NYT Food on TikTok and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.
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