BOSTON’S FOOD SCENE has come a long way from the classic chowder bowls.
Recent years have seen a boom with the introduction of star restauranteurs like Todd English, Gordon Hamersley, Jody Adams, Lydia Shire, Joanne Chang, and Barbara Lynch – who last week announced the closure and sale of several iconic restaurants after reports of Lynch’s alleged workplace abuse and harassment of employees. We’re now on the front edge of another era, one driven by the pandemic and marked not just by evolution in outdoor dining or cocktails to go, but labor unrest.
“We started hearing a lot about what was happening for restaurants, and learning about workers’ conditions, and people’s consciousness were being raised in some ways,” Boston Globe food critic Devra First said on The Codcast. “I think of the duck swimming – it’s very elegant gliding on the surface and there’s all of the frantic paddling that goes on underneath. I think as diners began to learn more about that frantic paddling, and we started talking more about labor and living wages, and also as a labor crunch worsened with really no ease in sight for that, we’ve started to see people trying different models of how to make restaurants work in a more humane way and how to make it work when it’s hard to find skilled people to help it run.”
First entered the food criticism world during the 2010s post-recession comfort food era, with New England lobster turning into lobster mac and cheese. “As the economy goes, so goes the food scene,” she said.
The health of a city’s restaurants can be hard to pin down, First notes. Even as downtowns started to feel more like ghost towns, splashy new openings, like the Portuguese restaurant Amar in the new Raffles Boston hotel, create boomlets where “you couldn’t get a reservation to save your life,” which can seem “promising,” First said.
New restaurants are opening all the time, she said, and the message they often get from diners is, “‘We’ll support you when you’ve just opened. We’ll come out in droves,’ but how about [in] a year, in two years? What is it gonna take now to open and run a successful restaurant over time? So, I do wonder a lot about the sustainability, but that said, I’m gonna take these full dining rooms and this lively scene as a positive sign in that regard.”
In 2023, the Greater Boston food scene broadened and evolved, with First pointing to pan-African restaurant Comfort Kitchen in Dorchester as a standout recent example of the way food can be tied in with cultural storytelling, by tracing maritime spice trading routes through space and time.
“How do we, as humans in different cultures, adapt to hardships and necessity and migration,” she mused. “So I think it’s intellectually interesting and satisfying if you want to think about it, but also you don’t have to think about it. You can just eat and drink and have a good time. And so I think that’s really nice. I think people are wanting to see more stories like that presented.”
Looking into 2024, First expects some pandemic-sparked changes to hang in there, partly because of the persistent hybrid work patterns, like a rise in the quality of at-home cooking and reliance on takeout and delivery. But cities are scrambling to pull diners and drinkers back into local haunts. Billboards touting a colorful noodle bowl over a humble homemade sandwich for lunch pepper Boston’s downtown.
It’s not just the food on the table that’s evolving. Drinking alcohol, though still widely prevalent, is on the decline.
“People are just drinking less,” First said. “Particularly younger people, and the sort of people who are more likely to go out every night, are drinking less. And there are a lot of reasons for that – health awareness and health stuff, the rise in recreational marijuana.”
The trend is also being driven by costs hitting restaurants, bars, and consumers alike. “Get comfortable with the $20 cocktail. It’s not going anywhere,” Bon Appétit warned in 2022. Add to that external health trends, as drinks with mood-stabilizing herbal supplements called adaptogens are becoming more common.
“We have this fitness culture where you can fine-tune yourself with apps and adaptogens, and I think that’s really affecting it as well,” First said of alcohol sales. “A big way that restaurants make money is through alcohol sales, so I think restaurants need to respond to that change and also want to respond to that change.”
Non-alcoholic cocktail programs are part of the response, where bartenders can use all their normal skills to craft a drink of fruit juices, syrups, carbonation, and non-alcoholic or low-alcohol bitters. The end result, says First: “It’s gonna be just like drinking a cocktail in every way except for one, which is that you’re not gonna get drunk and you’re not gonna be consuming alcohol.”