History is bunk

by Stephen Heuser

We live in one of the best restaurant cities in America, but it wasn't always so. Actually, that's an understatement: Boston has historically been a bit of a joke in the food department. Yankees were never exactly Rabelaisian in their appreciation of sensory pleasures, and for years the city's great claim to culinary originality -- and I'm not talking about cod, which even the Lowells couldn't claim to have invented -- was a type of baked bean so meaty and substantial that it precluded the unpleasant necessity of having to eat anything else at all.

To be fair, New England was never exactly a region without a cuisine; it's just a region with a cuisine without anything you'd want to eat between March and November. Pot roast, Indian pudding, and apple pie are the comfort foods of a people struggling not only with limited palates but also with some very unpleasant winters, and those dishes still have their place on the calendar. But they also represent the palatable end of a fairly unimpressive spectrum. In his generally boosterish 1982 book Inside New England, Judson Hale -- editor of Yankee magazine and armchair ethnographer -- started his chapter on food by desperately propping up the reputation of that disturbing meal known as the New England boiled dinner. He also documented such rustic dishes as Bumpy Stew, Burnt-Leather Cake, and something called Nameless. As for the cultured classes, all you really need to know about eating in Boston is this: for most of the city's history, a series of unprepossessing whitefish have been the preferred seafood of the well-bred. Lobster, that magnificently colored and flavorsome thing, was a sea-floor bug fit only for servants.

Lucky for us, we live here now. On such unpromising ground, a spirited young restaurant culture has taken hold, braving native indifference and increasingly absurd rents to forge a thriving community that -- if markedly New Boston in spirit and clientele -- is becoming quite central to the city's sense of itself, to say nothing of its tax base. If you still can't quite point to a "Boston" approach to food, you can certainly identify a distinctive Boston restaurant morphology: the long, narrow bistro with a banquette along one side and (perhaps) an open kitchen along the other, a shape both appealingly intimate and precisely suited to the city's 19th-century ground-floor spaces.

Lucky for us, too, that Boston's chefs have decided the city's greatest culinary resource isn't its own past, but rather, everyone else's. Boston is historically the second-largest port of entry for American immigrants, and it's their flavors that make the food interesting. The extant "New England" restaurants in the city have either a whiff of the touristy (Ye Olde Union Oyster House; ye brusque Durgin-Park) or the revivalist ($26 planked sea bass). The real action is all imported. It's imported from Italy, of course, but also from India, Portugal, the Caribbean, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam . . . the list changes subtly every year. There are two Tibetan restaurants in town, and three Malaysian. Watertown has long been sprinkled with Armenian groceries, and East Cambridge with Portuguese restaurants, but only recently has Dot Ave sprouted so many Vietnamese joints as to earn the nickname, in some quarters, Pho Row.

For a city whose attempts at genuine ethnic coexistence have been tentative and friction-filled (one suspects that not every nickname for the Vietnamese strip of Dorchester is so gentle-spirited), the dinner table has been a place of remarkable accord. For all that we can't agree on in this city, we can certainly agree that Shawarma King makes the best felafel. Or is it Rami's? Is the "realest" local pizza found at Regina or Santarpio's? Whatever the answer, we know the best way to settle it is over a felafel plate or two.

If you've never heard of Shawarma King or Santarpio's -- but if you've heard of, say, Radius and Olives -- then you're missing the fun part. I've written about restaurants in and around Boston for the past four years, and it seems to me that for people who really like food, there are pretty much two cities here, parallel but not connected. I don't mean the traditional and the new, but rather the high and the low. Boston's booming national reputation is based on its upscale bistros, the circuit of high-end places with "celebrity" chefs and professional designers and publicists. But it's the down-and-dirty (well, preferably down-and-clean) world of storefront ethnic places that seems to keep the city really fed. All the arguments about the best felafel and the only real burritos (which, incidentally, are served from carts in Downtown Crossing) take place below the radar of the expense-account dining world. The stuff you probably eat -- and much of the food you'll be reading about in this section -- mainly comes from the fabric of neat little ethnic eateries and food shops that covers the city like a wrinkly quilt.

The glamorous world is fun to visit, and there are good things happening there, to be sure. Todd English, for instance, after expanding nationally, has returned with a bold, huge local seafood restaurant, as has the long-absent New England kitchen guru Jasper White. (Although Todd promptly embarrassed us again by opening a Figs at LaGuardia Airport.) There are two new restaurants serving Indian-fusion food, a cuisine previously unseen north of New York. Clio turns out some of the best food in America. And there is a twinkly magic to walking off the street on a crisp late-fall night and sitting down in a place like Torch or Metropolis Café or No. 9 Park.

But the great secret about high-end restaurants is that many of those chefs do in their free time exactly what the rest of us do: they snag ideas and ingredients and quick, snappy meals from the dirt-cheap storefront joints that feed the rest of us. Every big-name chef worth his fleur de sel has a favorite pho shop, just like you.

And if you don't have a favorite pho shop -- well, get out there. It's the spirit of discovery that has put Boston on the culinary map. And the spirit of discovery extends not just to the food, but to the city, too. You can learn a lot about an unfamiliar neighborhood simply by trying to find Brown Sugar, or Silvertone, or Redbones, or Jumbo Seafood, and you may even stumble across your own new favorite joint in the process. Relish this chance. It is a treat, in a city famous for keeping its assets hidden, that there are finally treasures worth unearthing.

Stephen Heuser knows that "pho" doesn't rhyme with "row," but he still can't pronounce "dac biet." He can be reached at sfheuser@hotmail.com.