Neighborhood Bar Most Needed by its Neighborhood: J.J. Foley’s Café
Opened in 1909 and run by its eponymous founder’s grandson and great-grandson, J.J. Foley’s (117 E. Berkeley Street, Boston, 617.728.9101) is the South End’s last authentic tavern. It still welcomes off-duty cops, reporters, and factory workers to its well-worn rail, but it began attracting new regulars last year when it converted a disused back room into a restaurant serving modestly priced Irish and American pub fare. Next to the delicate, expensive hothouse flowers that comprise the South End’s restaurant scene, Foley’s stands as a hoary old oak. Locals desperate for beers, burgers, and exurbanite-free bonhomie are exceedingly grateful.
Most-Anticipated Opening: Drink
Local restaurant empress Barbara lynch is ever restless, building a big new luxury-class restaurant and retail concept in fort point. But her cultish fans are most frenzied by the first leg of that project, Drink (348 Congress Street, South Boston, 617.695.1806), her new temple to golden Age cocktails. Helmed by local mixological treasure John Gerstein, manager of the supernal bar at no. 9 park, Drink aspires to be nothing less than a world-class cocktail palace à la Manhattan’s Pegu Club. Discriminating Boston boozehounds spent the summer practically chewing through their cherry stems at the prospect that lynch and Gertsen might achieve their lofty ambitions. Here’s to ’em!
Best New Pizza: Gran Gusto
“Best pizza” is an inherently controversial topic even without inviting New Yorkers, Chicagoans, New Havenites, or other folks with nostalgia-tinged regional biases to the discussion. But for lovers of the thin-crusted Neapolitan style, the pizza margherita served at Gran Gusto (90 Sherman Street, Cambridge, 617.441.0400) is classic in construction — topped with coarse san Marzano tomato sauce, basil leaves, and fresh mozzarella, then fast-baked in a hot wood-fired oven — and formidable in flavor. House-made pastas and other dishes show similar Campanian freshness and restraint, but pizza is what keeps the customers returning to this easy-to-miss trattoria in remote North Cambridge.
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