On Boston
Boston ain't your kind of town / There ain't no gold – Dave Loggins
As a food writer based in the Bay State, where I’ve spent almost half my life, I hear one criticism more than others, and it comes with frequency from (mostly) white writers. Boston food is terrible, they want me to know. To which I say: Are we experiencing the same Boston? The most scathing commentary arrives, I find, from influencers with no reporting chops, or from people who live far away and have parachuted into Boston.
For a while, I wondered why the criticism of Boston bothered me so much. Certainly I wouldn’t have cared if someone had lobbed the same complaints against New York, where I spent the other half of my life. New York, though, is relatively easy to defend. Something about the criticism of Boston’s culinary scene strikes me not only as incorrect, but also as more deeply problematic.
How do you understand the shape of a city? How do you understand the shape of Boston? I’d like to help you try.
In 1974, the Boston Public Schools were required, in observance and enactment of the 1965 Racial Imbalance Act—a response to the Report on Racial Imbalance in Boston Public Schools—to desegregate. (Massachusetts public schools had effectively ignored both the report and the Act.)
Nearly a decade had elapsed since the Act’s passage, when W. Arthur Garrity, Jr., United States District Judge in Massachusetts, ordered, in Morgan v. Hennigan, that busing begin. For two fraught years—1974 to 1976—racial protests and riots brought violence to the city, as well the suburban “white flight.” Those two years set the tone for a pattern of systemic segregation in Boston, which would last far beyond the busing’s dismantling (it officially ended in the late 1980s).
The hostility from what we now refer to as the “Busing Crisis” had a chilling effect. Post-modern Boston became even more segregated. According to reporting conducted by WBUR between 2023 and 2024, neighborhoods like Chinatown, Dorchester, East Boston, Mattapan, Hyde Park, and Roxbury are now primarily non-white, whereas Boston’s other neighborhoods—Back Bay, Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Allston, Brighton, Fenway-Kenmore, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill, Roslindale, the North End, the Seaport, the South End, South Boston, and West Roxbury—are primarily white. (This data excludes areas in Greater Boston, like Malden, Quincy, Chelsea, Everett, and Revere, which are majority non-white, and Brookline, Somerville, Cambridge, and Newton, which are majority white.)
It’s not uncommon, in major urban areas, for minority groups to congregate in certain neighborhoods, but Boston’s areas of distinction, should you look at a map, are striking. White neighborhoods lie within the city’s more central areas, whereas non-white areas fall farther afield. They are harder to reach, by foot and by public transit. The city suffers, as a result, from disjointedness, defined by the 1974 crisis. The Othering & Belonging Institute, run by the University of California at Berkeley, classifies Boston as a “highly segregated” city, and, using data extrapolated from a 2023 American Community Survey, as the 18th most-segregated city in the United States.
Critical to an understanding of a city of just 673,458 people (according to the 2024 Census) is its infrastructure and configuration. Can you assess Boston as a visitor if you stay, eat, and tour its white neighborhoods, which, given the layout, is quite easy–nay, the easiest–to do? Are you seeing the true Boston if you are eating, say, lobster rolls and chowder–particularly given the caveat that lobster, as most local fishermen will tell you, is mostly no longer a native catch due to climate change? (Ask any Market Basket shopper and she’ll happily tell you that the $4.99/lb specials are advertised as “Nova Scotia-caught.”)
We don’t all experience the same Boston, as a result. The Boston that produces La Padrona—the critically acclaimed restaurant within the Raffles Hotel in Back Bay—is not the same Boston that produces Comfort Kitchen, the critically acclaimed restaurant rooted in the African diaspora, and located in the Upham’s Corner area of Dorchester. These are two warring cities, one often positioned as more important, more prestigious, and more Boston than the other. (I’ll leave it to you to determine which version receives more attention.)
In the past, I’ve internalized my harshest criticisms of influencers, parachute journalists, and “food agitators,” and have, instead, tip-toed around the words I really want to use toward the people who slam Boston’s dining scene after they’ve ignored the most culinarily progressive neighborhoods. But I’ll say it here, in a moment when the United States reckons with a government that actively seeks to dismantle democracy in the interest of making America whiter: Calling Boston a bad food city is racist. There is no other objective way to view a dining perspective that flatly ignores the city’s Black-, Brown-, and Asian-owned restaurants, simply because they are not in Back Bay or Beacon Hill, or simply because Boston is a city that does not avail itself to the same conveniences as most other cities.
A busing crisis long ago set this city up to be divisive to itself, and now it has set others up to follow in the same divisive footsteps, weaponizing that same racism. What interloper would go to New York and dine only in Midtown?
What neophyte would dare experience a tenth of what a city has to offer and try to argue that city cannot live up to its expectations?
And yet, we hear this about Boston constantly, because no one wants to climb the steps up or down into a dumpling house in one of the United States’ oldest and most diverse Chinatowns; because getting in a car—practically required in Boston, I hate to tell you—is an inconvenience; because no one likes the fact that the city is split into a hundred different moving parts.
The deep generational racism that created geographical partitions in Boston and that so frequently opens the city up to attack as a “bad food city” is obvious to those of us who live here. You have to interact with Boston in order to understand it. You have to make concessions, go outside the central neighborhoods, take chances, and exit the areas best served by public transit.
I’ll concede that Boston, due to socioeconomic conditions that have nothing to do with the people who make the food within the boundaries of the city, is a challenging food city, but the fact that visitors fail to interact with it is steeped in ignorance and racism, tacit or overt. Replace “bad” with “hard” and you may find that the problem is laziness, not a lack of cultural capital. But I find that an unwillingness to interrogate this place is just as evil as the sin of coming here without having read a single thing about it. Ignorance is, plainly, never a defense.
To that end, real, honest travel requires labor, and Boston is no exception, despite its relatively small size. If you think you’ll go to Boston—have you heard it’s nice in the summer, do you think some snow would be nice?—study up. Relying on food tropes is actively harmful, not only to visitors, but also to the hardworking people who source, prepare, and serve food in any given city. That’s particularly true here, where the tropes no longer apply, for reasons that range from overfishing to climate change to evolving tastes.
If you come to Boston expecting clam chowder, you should know that softshell clams, most frequently used in clam chowder, are native not to Boston’s Suffolk County, but to Essex County, in the North. For clam chowder, visitors should absolutely visit the towns dotting the clam flats of Essex and Ipswich, where these clams are sourced, but the chowder served in the city isn’t eaten by people who actually live here.
Cape Cod may be named for codfish, once used in fish and chips, but advanced trawling in the 1970s depleted cod populations so significantly that we have more haddock than cod these days—and anyway, you’re more likely to see scrod on your plate if it’s fried (not an actual species, but slang for a small, white fish, which could be just about anything).
And maybe all of this tangential information about what we actually eat here, in and around Boston, brings me back to my original point. Boston food is terrible, outsiders say. Yet they have done no work to understand it, excavate it, learn about it. (Ask yourself whether you have ever once seen a Bostonian eat a cream pie.) They have ignored how climate change and changes in population and native taste have shaped what we cook and eat.
Most important, these same outsiders—some of them even tastemakers, or so they’d like to have us believe—have ignored how racial constructs within this city are a barrier that consumers must actively overcome in order to understand, appreciate, and, yes, digest Boston’s emphatically diverse culinary community. In order to be good arbiters of culture, it’s essential to understand where we are going and what we are eating, that we put in as much as we take out. Any perspective that lacks that thorough input and output is nothing short of lazy and unworthy of our serious consideration.
Boston rewards the rugged, and that’s not just some expression we use to forgive the weather. Come here. We’d love to have you. We promise to feed you well, if you’re up to it.
Hannah Selinger is a James Beard Award-nominated lifestyle journalist and the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Cellar Rat: My Life in the Restaurant Underbelly and the forthcoming novel Valley of the Moms, out June 2. She lives in Boxford, Massachusetts with her husband, two sons, two dogs, and one Russian tortoise.
