The Resy Hit List: Where In Boston You’ll Want to Eat Right Now

It’s no exaggeration to suggest that Juliet may be one of the Boston area’s most interesting places to eat. The independently owned and operated restaurant is at once a breakfast-and-lunch café serving housemade pastries and burgers, and a dinner destination focused on Niçoise cuisine (spaghetti pomodoro, pollock meunière, etc). In addition to that regular menu, it also hosts “rotating menu productions” that change throughout the year, giving diners the chance to experience prix-fixes themed around Quebecois cuisine, Persian New Year, the New England coast, and more.

There’s truly no wrong way to use the Smoot Standard, a new Cambridge third space that functions as an all-day café and restaurant by day and turns over for dinner service and cocktails by night. So, depending on the timing of your visit, you may find yourself at the counter for a pulled pork breakfast burrito and a cortado in the a.m., a fried green tomato sandwich around noon, or a chicken Milanese and a rum-based espresso martini after the sun goes down.

Beacon Hill, as central as Boston gets, has long lacked a serious cocktail bar of its own. That’s changed with the welcome arrival of 89 Charles, a sultry subterranean lounge with an Art Deco touch serving drinks like the Soda Jerk with smoked pineapple, Green Chartreuse, and silver dust, or an as-advertised Filthy Martini with marinated olive brine and MSG saline. Thankfully, a menu of snacky smaller plates ranging from foie gras bratwurst to a spicy ‘nduja flatbread are on hand to help soak it all up.

JP gem Tonino has a scant 28 seats — which makes the neighborhood-style Italian restaurant feel all that more homey. The menu is as tight as the dining room, focused on pizzas by the slice or whole, plus small plates like warm cabbage Caesar or countneck clams with guanciale, and climaxing with a selection of housemade pastas ranging from bucatini in anchovy chile butter to cavatelli with Italian sausage and broccoli rabe.

Joe Cammarata and Daren Swisher — the longtime industry vets behind Daiquiris and Daisies in High Street Place — have a standalone bar of their own in the form of Tall Order. Located just outside of Inman Square in what was once the Thirsty Scholar, the drink menu is bound to please cocktail nerds (take its eponymous drink, a blend of rums with Madeira, pineapple skins, and clarified coconut milk), while also catering to the low-ABV crowd and teetotalers alike. The edible offerings, meanwhile, represent pub food at its best with pork sausage rolls, karaage fried chicken sandwiches, and Denver steak frites.

Fallow Kin had big culinary boots to fill as the successor to the Central Square space that once hosted Craigie on Main. It helps that the new restaurant is helmed by an all-star roster of local talent, including Talulla owners Conor Dennehy and Danielle Ayer and veteran chef Marcos Sanchez. The focus here is squarely on the local and seasonal, which manifests in a menu that puts veggies front and center, like twice-cooked sunchokes with broccoli pickles and smoky cabbage in a seaweed broth with crispy chicken skin, but doesn’t forgo meat, seafood, and pastas.  

The nondescriptly named Café Sushi, ensconced in a strip mall between Central and Harvard Squares, is a textbook case of don’t-judge-a-book-by-its-cover. Because hidden in plain sight remains one of the city’s best sushi programs, now four decades old, served in a simple but artfully appointed dining room with spare wood furniture and hanging paper lanterns. You’ll be well-served with a spicy scallop hand roll over sushi selections including Japanese mackerel with poblano miso and 12-spice pineapple, or a creative house roll like the ceviche with shrimp, salmon, avocado, and pickled jicama. 

There aren’t many places where you can sit down for dinner and expect hamachi sashimi, rigatoni Bolognese, or a 14-ounce rib eye in peppercorn brandy sauce to follow. But the newly opened Back Bay location of this Canadian chain is one of them. Add all of the above to a sprawling, high-ceiling dining room with a wrap-around bar, slightly trippy flowing wood décor, and modern art, and we’ll admit that the Canadians are on to something.

Oleana is now 25 years old — and still a competitive spot for a reservation. You can chalk that up to chef Ana Sortun’s well-spiced menu of Middle Eastern mezze, which manifests in now-classic dishes like spinach falafel with beet tzatziki and pickles, fried mussels with hot peppers and Turkish almond tartar sauce, and the “Sultan’s Delight” composed of tamarind beef in a smoky eggplant puree. And while not strictly Middle Eastern in inspiration, there’s no missing the renowned baked Alaska with coconut ice cream and passion fruit caramel.

Before its closure in 2009, Sage was a North End mainstay beloved for its housemade pastas. Now it’s back in a slightly smaller, 50-seat dining room as Little Sage, under the auspices of original chef Tony Susi. What hasn’t changed is the emphasis on scratch-made pasta like ricotta gnocchi with Maine lobster and brick oven-baked entrees including head-on Argentinian shrimp in an artichoke puttanesca.

Deep within Matria at the InterContinental Boston — we can’t tell you exactly where — is the unmarked door that leads to Loyall, a speakeasy inspired by the tavern backrooms where patriots plotted the American Revolution. As such, there’s a colonial theme to the drinks and drinking vessels (expect metal tankards and chalices), from which you might drink a Cyder For the Present Use made with applejack, aged rum, and apple blossom water, or the Incident On King Street utilizing Madeira, two kinds of rums, lemon, and raspberry.

Lanner Noodles, originally of Cambridge, has touched down in the Seaport with a second location serving … noodles. But that word barely does justice to the variety of piping-hot bowls flying out of the kitchen, often made with hand-pulled noodles and served in aromatic broths made from braised beef, lamb shank, and more. And contrary to the name, non-noodle offerings are available too, including barbecue lamb skewers seasoned with a house spice mix and a spicy chicken and potato stew.

The old Worden Hall space on West Broadway has been transformed into Kahaani, a new gastropub with bold Indian flavors and flower-festooned walls. Specializing in Hyderabadi cooking, which incorporates Turkish and Arabic flavors, signature dishes here include slow-cooked chicken biryani and Haleem meat stew.

Cambridge’s Umami Omakase has touched down in Boston proper with a sister restaurant, Umami Crudo. While the former — as the name would imply — is omakase only, Umami Crudo delivers an a la carte experience utilizing the same top-shelf seafood, resulting in dishes like oyster sashimi with a grapefruit granita, toro caviar rolls, and lobster somen.

Jamie Bissonnette’s latest ventures (see Somaek, Temple Records, etc.) have a funny way of expanding into adjacent spaces. Now the same has happened with Zurito, whose next-door neighbor — formerly a pizzeria — is now Willie’s, an intimately sized new restaurant serving chewy, thin-crust pizzas and housemade pastas with influences from Spain or Asia. For instance: the P.C.T. pie, essentially a large-scale pan con tomate, and spaghetti carbonara made with yuzu kosho and Parmesan dashima.

“That ‘70s vinyl lounge,” could be an alternate title for Retroroom, a groovy new hideaway on Boylston that features DJs on the weekends but invites patrons to pull records from its extensive house collection anytime. All while enjoying of-the-decade treats like onion ring towers, cheese fondue and “super-size” large-format cocktails including the Back Bay Killa made with pineapple-infused vodka, orange juice, and dark rum, served in a kidding-you-not disco ball.