Stuff Boston

Leftovers: Testing the enduring appeal of some of Boston’s old-school dining favorites

Photos by Mitch Weiss 

Ever been out to dinner and asked yourself, “Damn, is this the hottest restaurant in town right now?” The signs are obvious. Weekend prime-time reservations are like gold. The bar is four-deep with walk-ins waiting an hour-plus for a table. There’s excitement in the air, in your glass, on the plate. You spot a local celebrity or two. You can’t wait to tell your friends how amazing it is. You’re at an “It Place” all right.

Of course, seasoned observers know It Places don’t stay that way for long. Most have their moment in the sun and quickly fade. The crowd that makes it their obsessive business to patronize only the freshest of the fresh has a short attention span — after a few months, it grows bored and moves on, anointing another darling du jour. Today’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chips wrapper.

Boston’s restaurant landscape is pocked with craters from meteoric stars that flared briefly before crashing to earth — like Excelsior, a former Back Bay hotspot that abruptly shut down last month. The current economic freefall is partly to blame: many high-end restaurants are struggling to survive the drastic shrinkage in business entertaining.

So how is it that certain former It Places — restaurants whose bright, shining moments passed years before Excelsior’s — manage to survive despite the imploding economy? Trend-conscious locals may dismiss them with a “pfah, that place started sliding 10 years ago” or “oh, I guess we loved it as kids when our grandparents took us there.” But they’re still packing in the customers. One theory is that today’s patrons of faded It Places are naïfs who’ve been sold a bill of goods: clueless tourists following their hotel-room dining guides or business travelers steered by graft-collecting concierges.

But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? Could these superannuated superstars still have something worthwhile to offer? How fun would it be to convince your food-snob friend that a restaurant she derides as a passé tourist trap is in fact a hidden gem? I decided to test this contrarian idea by revisiting a few restaurants that are still popular, despite not having been “hot” since at least the arrival of PlayStation 2.

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