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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 funny horror movies to watch on Halloween for people who just can’t handle it
Halloween movies are way more fun when you don’t need a Xanax. With these five you get ghosts and vampires and a hungry plant, and enough comedy to help you through the scary parts. Blood levels vary. A horror comedy can still wreck you if the joke gives up halfway through. The funny Halloween horror movies that leave you able to sleep are the ones that stay comedies. Young Frankenstein is rated PG, and the scare is mild. What We Do in the Shadows is rated R, and the blood is intentional. Gene Wilder plays a scientist who introduces himself as Fronkensteen, which is how hard he is trying to quit the family, and then finds his grandfather’s notes and runs the experiment anyway. Mel Brooks made Young Frankenstein in black and white so it would look like the old monster movies, then filled the castle with people who cannot keep a straight face. Marty Feldman is the assistant. Peter Boyle is the monster. Madeline Kahn, Teri Garr, and Cloris Leachman are in the house too. The film opened in December 1974 and it is rated PG. The British Board of Film Classification calls the horror mild and the sex references moderate. One of the jokes is the monster in bed. You do not need the earlier Frankenstein films. You need to be all right with a dirty joke in a laboratory. The Ghostbusters to put on is the 1984 one. Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, and Ernie Hudson lose their university funding and open a ghost-removal business in a New York firehouse. Sigourney Weaver and Rick Moranis live in the same Central Park West building, which is how the mess reaches the city. There is a sequel, a reboot, and later movies about a new generation. The one with the ghost in the red circle is this one. It is rated PG, and the first ghost is a jolt. In the New York Public Library, an elderly librarian turns on them and they run. Murray never looks as frightened as the plot is asking him to be. The possession scenes get strange. The movie keeps handing the job to people who brought the equipment. Get the 1988 Beetlejuice, not the sequel. Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin die, fail at haunting their own house, and hire Michael Keaton, which goes badly. Winona Ryder is the teenager who can see them. Catherine O’Hara is busy making the house worse. The dinner where the new owners lose control of their own bodies is the reason to watch it with other people. It is rated PG. The images are not mild. A face comes off. A woman carries her own head. A teenager writes a suicide note, and there is a hanging gag. The afterlife is a dreary waiting room. If those pictures are the ones you were trying to avoid, skip to the plant. Little Shop of Horrors is a musical, so the horror arrives with songs, and the monster is a plant. Rick Moranis plays Seymour, a flower-shop clerk whose miserable little specimen starts drawing a crowd once he feeds it blood. Ellen Greene is Audrey. Steve Martin is the dentist, and the song explains the career choice: he likes the work because it hurts. Levi Stubbs of the Four Tops sings the plant. It is rated PG-13. People get eaten. Frank Oz reshot the ending after test audiences hated a finish in which the plant ate the cast, so the version that played in theaters is the less mean one. A cut where the plant wins is the ending they threw out. The plant is an enormous puppet, which helps if what you cannot stand is violence that looks real. Mute the dentist if the dentist is the actual problem. What We Do in the Shadows, the movie from 2014, is not the FX series. Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement play vampire housemates in Wellington who have had centuries to learn the dishes and still have not. A bouncer will not let them into a club. The television show started on FX in 2019, with a different cast, on Staten Island. Same kind of joke. Many more nights of it. This is the bloody one. The British board classified the film 15 for strong language and bloody violence: bites, large blood spurts, and some gory injuries, played for comedy. In the United States it is rated R. If a dark house is what keeps you up, this is easier than a straight horror movie. If blood is what keeps you up, Young Frankenstein is still at the top of the list, and the vampires can do their own washing-up.
Get to know Boston
How the Irish saved Halloween in Boston
Samhain (pronounced SAH-win or SOW-in) is an ancient Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter Halloween customs turned up in other American colonies. Massachusetts sat them out. Anglican and Lutheran churches kept All Saints' Day. Maryland's Catholics did too. In the South, Scotch-Irish settlers, Scots who had lived in northern Ireland, sometimes went out in costume and called it guising. The Puritans who settled here took a dim view of all of it. The Commonwealth Museum's history of the holiday traces the night to Samhain, the Celtic new year on November 1, when the dead of the past year were thought to come back for a verdict. Disguises, and a candle in a hollowed turnip, were supposed to keep the spirits away. In the eighth century, the museum says, Pope Gregory III set All Saints' Day on November 1. The eve became All Hallows Eve. Halloween is that name, worn down. The church would rather you dressed as a saint. What people actually did on October 31 still changed from one place to the next. Artist's depiction of Pope Night in Boston, 1768 Pope Night was a different riot Boston already knew how to wreck an evening in early November. The occasion was Pope Night, November 5. Old North Church traces it to Guy Fawkes Day, the anniversary of the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament. The North End and the South End each built an effigy, the pope and often the devil, and hauled it through the streets. The crowds met and fought for the figures. North End winners burned them on Copp's Hill. South End winners burned them on the Common. Isaiah Thomas, who was in the fights, wrote that broken heads were not infrequent. In 1764 a boy was run over by a cart and killed. Houses along the way were expected to hand over money. Skip the payment and the windows could go. That is still not Halloween. The Commonwealth Museum says the connection to later Halloween pranks is not clear, and that Guy Fawkes Day is a stretch as an origin. Pope Night was an anti-Catholic riot with its own date. In 1775 George Washington ordered the army to stop burning the pope in effigy. The colonies wanted Catholic allies in Canada. Old North treats that order as the end of the holiday in Boston. Traditional Irish halloween Jack-o'-lantern made out of a turnip. Photo by rannṗáirtí anaiṫnid County Cork, then a pumpkin The customs Bostonians now recognize arrived with Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century, after the Great Famine began in 1845. In County Cork, the museum says, people wore costumes on Halloween and announced themselves at a house with cow's horns. Food or a drink from the household was supposed to bring prosperity. The lantern was a turnip with a candle in it. Once those immigrants were here, a pumpkin did the job better. There is more face on a pumpkin than on a turnip, and less of a fight. They did not invent trick-or-treating. One older thread, also in the museum's account, is the medieval soul cake: bread for the poor, prayers for the dead in exchange. The pillowcase version came later. Costumes, a stop at the door, and a lantern were the Irish Halloween traditions that Boston actually got. The Globe caught on in 1884 On October 31, 1884, the Boston Daily Globe ran "Why Thousands Will Think of Erin Tonight." The Commonwealth Museum cites the headline. Halloween historian Lesley Bannatyne quotes the article. It describes Ireland, not a candy route through Boston: a church fast that fell apart when the party started, colcannon sent from the country, and "parties of young men and their sweethearts" going house to house among relatives and friends. The candy holiday was still ahead of that. Newspapers, magazines, and clubs from the Scouts to the Rotary spread Halloween in the twentieth century, the museum says. Trick-or-treaters were being spotted in Wellesley by the 1920s. After the Second World War, the baby boom made it a product. Manufactured costumes and decorations arrived then.
Bostonians call drinking fountains ‘bubblahs’
Ask for a bubbler in parts of New England and someone may point you toward a drinking fountain. Ask in Wisconsin and the same thing can happen. Boston does not have this word to itself, even when it pronounces the ending differently. “Bubblah” is a written attempt to capture the local pronunciation of “bubbler.” The object is familiar: a fixture that sends up a stream of water for someone to drink. Its regional name has generated a surprisingly persistent origin story involving a plumbing company and a trademark. A bubbler is a drinking fountain Merriam-Webster identifies “bubbler” as a drinking fountain. The word is not a joke invented for visitors or a different kind of beverage. If someone tells you there is a bubbler down the hall, they are giving you directions to water. The name is descriptive enough. Water rises from a small outlet, making a short bubbling stream. “Drinking fountain” describes its purpose; “bubbler” describes what the water appears to do. Neither name requires a complicated explanation to be useful. That does not mean every Bostonian uses it. A family’s vocabulary, where someone went to school and the people around them all help shape which words feel ordinary. Hearing “water fountain” from a Boston resident is not evidence that they are secretly from somewhere else. The Kohler story needs a correction One popular account claims that Kohler invented the fixture, called it the Bubbler and watched the brand name become a general term. Versions of the story even identify an inventor named Harlan Huckleby. WUWM investigated that account with historian Beth Dippel, who had worked with Kohler’s archivist. The company records did not establish the supposed employee, and the dates in the story did not fit the business’s manufacturing history. Kohler did later make a design called a bubbler. But the word was already in use. That is the important distinction: a company using a name does not establish that it invented the name. Dippel discussed an older attachment on school water containers as one possible explanation. She presented it as a theory. The reporting does not replace one tidy invention story with another proved beyond doubt. Why the final R sometimes disappears The spelling “bubblah” moves the discussion from vocabulary to pronunciation. In the traditional Boston accent, an R after a vowel may disappear before a pause or another consonant. That is the pattern people are trying to represent with the “ah” ending. It does not mean a speaker removes every R from every word. R’s at the beginning of words remain, and an R can connect a word to a following vowel. The same person can sound different when saying a word alone and when using it in a sentence. The word and the accent also travel separately. A speaker can call a fixture a bubbler while pronouncing its R. Another can have a strong local accent and call it a drinking fountain. Treating those choices as inseparable makes a caricature out of ordinary speech. Other words that can trip up a visitor A frappe is another useful example. The dictionary records the thick-milkshake meaning and the pronunciation “frap.” Recognizing the word helps you order; copying the server’s accent adds nothing to the transaction. Then there is “wicked” used to mean very. It changes the strength of a description rather than naming a different object. These are separate features of regional English, not a script that everyone in Boston follows. A bottle-filling station may stand beside a traditional drinking fountain, but the fixtures serve different actions: one fills your container, while the other lets you drink directly from the stream.The next time you hear “bubblah,” you do not need to settle a trademark dispute or demonstrate your local credentials. You just need to find the fountain.