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Home Grown

Read between the lines of any menu and you learn a lot about a restaurant—and the city it calls home. Boston’s food scene is as diverse as it is adventurous. Case in point, these five raved-about dishes you won’t find in any Rhode Island kitchens (yet):

Rabbit pot pie
Matt Murphy’s is a first-rate homestyle restaurant hidden inside an authentic Irish pub. The rabbit pot pie warms the cockles, like the fare you’d find in a sod farmer’s kitchen: savory meat, vegetables and gravy in a soda-biscuit crust, served with a crunchy rabbit leg and fruit chutney.
14 Harvard Street, Brookline, 617-232-0188, mattmurphyspub.com

JFK’s Lobster Stew
Locke-Ober has been serving this stew for decades (the favorite of its namesake), so it made the cut when the restaurant was recently updated. Its appeal: broth creamy but not too thick. Its secret: one and a half cups of sherry, and a milky, buttery, heavy-cream base with lobster shells left in to soak overnight.
3 Winter Place, Boston, 617-542-1340, lockeober.com

Ash
Sibling restaurateurs Azita Bina-Seibel and her brother, Babak, exported their native Iranian cuisine—and their mother’s spice rack—to their romantic Persian restaurant, Lala Rokh, in the cobblestoned neighborhood Beacon Hill. Their Azerbaijan version of Ash, a common regional dish, is a thick savory soup made of spinach and fresh herbs, beans, tomatoes, faintly fruity with dried plums and the juice of unripened grapes.
97 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston, 617-720-5511, lalarokh.com

Tuna sashimi with soy sponge salad
At the recently reconceptualized restaurant Boston Public (formerly Restaurant L), Chef Pino Maffeo is famous for cutting-edge food technology known as molecular gastronomy. This menu item is a symphony of textures including dehydrated rice, wasabi, gelatin, julienned ginger, and hidden fried nori chips. The technique: He whips it to incorporate air, then refrigerates it to set it in “beautiful slices of perfect rectangles.”
234 Berkeley Street, Boston, 617-266-4680, bostonpublicmeat.com

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Home Grown

Read between the lines of any menu and you learn a lot about a restaurant—and the city it calls home. Boston’s food scene is as diverse as it is adventurous. Case in point, these five raved-about dishes you won’t find in any Rhode Island kitchens (yet):

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