Boston is no longer the sleepy town it once was, proclaims Raymond Sokolov in the Wall Street Journal. As a matter of fact, “for its size, this Atlantic coastal conurbation of 4.5 million may be the nation’s liveliest, as well as most incestuous, restaurant center.” On a recent visit to the Hub, Sokolov tried (and loved) “two of the buzziest places”: O Ya and L’Espalier and couldn’t get over how different the Boston of Frank McClelland, Lydia Shire, Barbara Lynch et al is from the city where he attended college in the late 1950s, where there were exactly four restaurants of note (Locke-Ober, Jacob Wirth, and the now-closed Chez Dreyfus and Cafe Budapest). So what if L’Espalier and O Ya are a little last year and most media attention has switched to Sportello and Hungry Mother? It’s still nice for Boston to be acknowledged as what it is: a tremendously exciting restaurant city deserving of national attention.
Boston Goes Way Beyond Cod [WSJ]
[Photo: A salad from L’Espalier, nodame/Flickr]
