Telling a New Story of Boston's Culinary Culture
Why the city's dining scene deserves a makeover that reflects its inherent diversity
Last night, Nick and I dined at Comfort Kitchen, a restaurant in the Dorchester neighborhood of Boston that had the distinction of being the only Massachusetts restaurant named on the New York Times roundup of Best Restaurants in America for 2023. The Times summary of the restaurant’s appeal was spot-on: its wide-ranging exploration of the African diaspora and the global spice trade is framed through a chic, creative menu (food-wise, but especially cocktail-wise) that would draw in a huge array of appreciative diners. The restaurant’s menu is formatted like a magazine, "offering full photo spreads of dishes like slow-cooked yassa chicken leg and thigh over cassava dumplings (which have the irrestistibly rich texture of mochi donuts), with extensive explanations of each dish’s inspiration.(For example, the yassa chicken is described as an exemplary of the “single pot” cooking tradition that sustains civilizations across the globe, with yassa as a signature dish of the Casamance region of Senegal, and of West Africa as a whole.) Like all good restaurants, Comfort Kitchen aims to tell a story that connects food to history, commerce, and community. But unlike most restaurants in Boston, Comfort Kitchen is entirely interested in representing a Boston story as it is, rather than what it is presumed to be.
At various points in American history, Boston has been a major site of culinary knowledge. In the colonial era, Boston’s ports were the point of exchange for countless plants, spices, and livestock from all over the globe. It was in Massachusetts homes that African pilafs, English stews, French roasts, and crops cultivated by the Wampanog or Mashpee tribes like squashes, cranberries, and corn would converge into distinctly new dishes like Indian pudding and Pumpkin pie. Such influence would emerge again in the late nineteenth century, as teachers at the Boston Cooking School, including Maria Parloa, Mary Lincoln, and Fannie Farmer produced the foundational pedagogy of American culinary instruction (including, with Farmer’s help, the standardization of measurements to ensure uniform results from written recipes, regardless of a cook’s level of skill.) And of course, Julia Child’s 193 debut on the Boston-based educational television station WGBH-TV transformed culinary media forever, merging expert explanations, gourmet dishes, and the irresistible charisma of an unlikely star before an audience of affluent, taste-making viewers.
Along the way, Boston has also been one of the most globally diverse cities in the United States, drawing residents and workers from across the globe. Yet it also has garnered a reputation for being one of the most racist cities in America, in part due to the turmoil of the court-ordered school busing period in the 1970s and the systemic racism that persists even within some of the region’s most purportedly liberal institutions. From a culinary standpoint, the vast majority of Boston’s restaurant culture leans heavily into what aligns with its tourist sector, and to the way the rebranding of New England that emerged during the Civil War. In an effort to frame the Northern states as the true locus of American values and culture, writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and magazine editors like Sarah Josepha Hale at Godey’s Lady’s Book put a greater emphasis on Yankee cooking as the heart of America’s domestic culture. Hale even pushed President Lincoln to nationalize the holiday of Thanksgiving, as a way of promoting national unity and asserting that everyone in the nation deserved a celebratory feast of seasonal prosperity—so long as the right dishes were on their tables. Such feasts promoted a culinary uniformity within the region, but also a menu that flattened references to the many global flavors within American cookery.
Does history alone account for the overwhelming blandness—and monolithic whiteness—of Boston’s restaurant scene? Or is it a more recent phenomenon that makes restaurants like Comfort Kitchen a rarity in the so-called “Cradle of Liberty”? In her 1789 cookbook American Cookery, widely considered to be the first American cookbook, Amelia Simmons promoted humble dishes that could be grown, harvested, and prepared from the small farms of the region. Yet despite the array of dishes featured in Simmons’ book for the first time, the most important ingredient in her book was its inherent austerity, an intentional distancing from any spices, herbs, and ingredients that might inflame the tame European-descended palate. As the historians Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald wrote, the intentional disengagement with discussions of non-European ingredients in New England cookery suggested a “psychological denial of an emerging gap between high-minded, self-serving rationales and more complex realities that had the potential to call such rationales into serious question.”
Today, countless food businesses are run by the global communities that call Massachusetts home—the extraordinary Armenian markets in Watertown, the numerous Dominican, Salvadoran, and Colombian cafes of Dorchester and Roxbury, the Cambodian grocers and restaurants of Lowell, to name just a few. (And that’s not even mentioning the empires of acclaimed globally-inspired restaurants run by Ana Sortun, Joanne Chang, and Rachel Miller.) Yet when one asks locals to talk about Boston’s food culture, the answers are almost always the same: Pizza and cannolis in the North End. Boston cream pie and the clam chowder near Quincy Market. (And, unfortunately, Dunkin’s.) What is to be gained by treating Yankee cooking as solely defined by its seafood dishes? Instead of its seafood boils and lobster rolls, why couldn’t Boston have a culinary reputation for its extraordinary array of hand-cut noodle spots, or the many Moldovan and Georgian restaurants in its outer suburbs? Why is the North Shore better known for its Italian bakeries than it is for its Portuguese bakeries? Can it be chalked up to poor publicity, or regional myopia?
In 2018, Devra First wrote a searing article in the Boston Globe, asking why Boston’s restaurants were rarely winning national acclaim, and I think she hit it right on the head: “To stand out, a restaurant must have a point of view. It needs to express something resonant, be it deeply personal, cultural, or both. It needs to tell a story.” First noticed that at the time of her writing, Boston restaurants were interested in telling stories, but not necessarily those that acknowledged the city’s inherent diversity. Instead, the narratives foregrounded how chefs were “connected and woven into the fabric” of Boston’s history and culture, rather than the ways in which they stood out. In order to expand Boston’s culinary offerings, much more needs to be done, not only to lower the cost of opening restaurants, and raising the wages of its staff, but also to demonstrate that a plurality of offerings can be welcomed critically and commercially into the city’s culinary culture. We need, in short, for our menus to tell more interesting, and more honest, stories about exactly what Boston can serve up. I was heartened by our visit to Comfort Kitchen, and I can hope that, next year, it won’t be the only Boston spot that gets some well-deserved attention.
Recommendation: I used to read a ton of fiction during my publishing days, and lived for the weekend book reviews as much as anybody, but those days are long gone and much missed. So it was with great delight that I finally tore through Beautiful World, Where are You?, the latest novel by the exquisite Irish writer Sally Rooney (most famous for Normal People, which I still have not read, but loved in its TV iteration). There were moments that I found the stream-of-consciousness, epistolary format of its prose frustrating, but I nevertheless powered through it, addicted to the prospect that somehow its characters would get out of their own way and find each other at last. Not sure if I’ll get to visit another novel for a while, but if I see another Rooney book in a Little Free Library any time soon, I’ll definitely snatch it up.
The Perfect Bite: Beyond our visit to Comfort Kitchen, we didn’t get a lot of out-of-the-house dining this week. But I was happy to bring a round of my favorite cheese, the Harbison by Jasper Hill Farm, to a dinner party this week. Peeling back the rind of ash bark on the cheese feels like a revelatory experience, especially when sharing it with someone who’s never tried it before. (Planning on spreading the remainder all over my toast this week…)
Cooked & Consumed: On Friday my daughter asked me to make her a “hole” for breakfast, and it took me several beats to realize that what she wanted was toad-in-a-hole, which I hadn’t made in many months. I happily obliged, as it really is the perfect dish to make while enlisting a toddler’s “help.” To make, get yourself a loaf of old-fashioned white bread (though if you really want to level up, seek out shokupan, the greatest grilled cheese and French toast bread of all time). Use a glass or biscuit cutter to have your kid cut out a circle of a slice. Melt an abundance of butter in a medium skillet, then add the hole-y bread and its circle to the pan and let soak in the butter. Carefully crack an egg into the center of the hole, and have your kid tell you when the white is mostly cooked. Slide your spatula under the slice and gently flip (hopefully not cracking the yolk in the process); flip the circle. Once both sides are well toasted, remove to a plate and season with flaky salt and cracked black pepper. Cook to order, dipping your bread in the runny yolk as you go. Savor your Saturday.