How Can Any National Food Award Celebrate a Terrible Food City?

This week, the James Beard Foundation (JBF) announced their restaurant and chef award nominees. No Boston restaurant was named, and the entire state of Massachusetts was left out from the finalist round for Best Chef: Northeast as chefs from Bantam, Burlington, Dover, Portland, and Providence were awarded finalist nominations.

No chef from Boston has won that Best Chef: Northeast category since 2019 (the JBF awards were cancelled in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic). No Boston restaurant has ever won the JBF’s Best New Restaurant award (since 2022, Twin Cities restaurants won twice, and New Orleans and Portland, OR won). On April 1st, Devra First, Boston Globe’s restaurant critic, published the non-joke article, “How can the James Beard Awards not include a single Massachusetts restaurant?” The answer, of course, is that it’s because Boston is a terrible food city.

A few years ago, on Instagram, I made a mention of Boston, and I was flooded with messages describing an abominable food scene there. I was shocked: some of my fondest food memories had been in Boston, but I hadn’t visited since many years prior to the pandemic.

In my speech at my brother’s wedding, I talked about my first time visiting him in Boston, now his home. On that trip, I met my sister-in-law for the first time, and together, we all ate two dinners every night, so we could try as much food as possible. In the speech, I said that “it was the best trip” that I’d taken. Boston’s food was at the center of a visit that made me realize my brother is my best friend.

Last fall, I spent 61 days living in Boston because Abby, my spouse and a professor, got tenure, and during their post-tenure sabbatical, they had a visiting professor appointment at a Boston university. I was excited to return to Boston, where I had so many fond memories.

Ahead of my trip to Boston, I asked for recommendations from friends from inside and outside of Boston alike. My brother warned me that Boston “wasn’t an amazing food city.” A deeply-trusted nationally-focused food writer just kept telling me to go to Portland and would not offer any Boston food suggestions. I failed to be discouraged, and I failed to heed their warnings. I embarked on my fool’s errand, to eat erratically-seasoned and poorly prepared food, to have rough and thoughtless service experiences, and to pay the shockingly-high expense of Boston restaurants.

To say that Boston is a terrible food city isn’t to say that there is no good food to be had. I had excellent chocolate cake from La Padrona’s pastry chef Kimberly Beatrix’s (call to make a takeout order for the cake), excellent non-alcoholic drinks at Mahaniyom, outstanding oysters and a good Johnnycake at Neptune Oyster if you ever get seated (get every oyster with a star next to its name on the menu, get the Johnnycake, and leave it at that), and a great experience at Yume Wo Katare eating their Jiro-style ramen. The Daily Catch had a nice fried calamari and my favorite pastas in Boston with the aglio e olio and Alfredo, each with housemade squid ink linguine, though the calamari and aglio e olio both demand the provided table salt. I enjoyed the food at Moon Bar and sister restaurant Mooncusser both. I liked the steak and coconut cake at Grill 23, though the restaurant stole my numerous leftovers, a harm to be expected in Boston restaurants. I’m sure there’s more things I could have enjoyed, but they seemed to be few and far between.

I went to 35 restaurants during my extended stay in Boston, including the first, third, fourth, fifth, seventh, 11th, 13th, 31st, 35th, and 44th restaurants on Boston Magazine’s 2025 Top 50 restaurants list, 10 restaurants of the 50 listed—I also ate at the eighth restaurant on the Boston Magazine list twice in the 2010s. The Boston Globe published a list of “‘Under-the-radar restaurants Michelin shouldn’t miss,’” and I went to four of the five Boston-area restaurants mentioned. I visited 11 of 25 restaurants featured in The New York Times’ April 2026 update of “‘The 25 Best Restaurants in Boston Right Now.’” I spent several thousand dollars eating out in Boston, but Meet Boston did not respond to my request for a reparatory reimbursement.

I did not burn my money looking to hate the food and service, both of which were often lackluster-to-abysmal. I was driven by hope, by optimism. I could have spent my money at outstanding restaurants at home in the Twin Cities, or in then-upcoming trips to New York, Nashville, Chicago, and Tokyo. And on those trips, I felt that waste, how much more value I received, how much happier I was eating in those other places. I was a fool for eating out in Boston, for clinging to my pre-pandemic perception of Boston, as much as I did.

Abby quickly became disgusted at the thought of continuing to waste money dining out in Boston. I eventually lost hope, and I cancelled every outstanding reservation, which had been opportunities to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law. Instead, Abby and I cooked a meal for my brother and sister-in-law, and then they returned the favor. Those were incredible meals.

In “How can the James Beard Awards…?,” Devra First interrogated the idea that Boston is a “terrible food city”:

To the observer, the takeaway is that Boston is a terrible food city, an oft-repeated trope furthered by this list of nominees. (To this, I might pose a chicken-and-egg question in response: Is the trope repeated because Boston is a terrible food city, or is Boston perceived as a terrible food city because the trope keeps away people who visit places in part for the food, thus maintaining the narrative?)

My spouse noted that the trope could not keep away those “forced to be there.” It’s astonishing to see the restaurant critic of a major city’s newspaper discussing whether the food is actually “terrible.” That things have gotten to this point speaks volumes.

In a recent Minnesota Star Tribune article about Michelin coming to my home of the Twin Cities (and snubbing Saint Paul), food critic Raphael Brion described Boston as a “‘culinary backwater’”. During a recent visit to London, I recently remarked to a chef that lobster is so common there, but it’s all well seasoned as opposed to Boston. The chef laughed, unsurprised at Boston’s bland lobster and volunteered that they were well aware of the inadequacies of the restaurant scene across the pond. These are a common reactions to Boston, and in private conversation with culinary experts from outside of Massachusetts, I’ve rarely encountered non-negative sentiments about Boston’s food.

Writing about accolades given to Providence- and Portland-based chefs and restaurants is the closest Boston publications will come to writing about national achievements in food. What does it serve to continue the delusion that Boston has a nationally-recognizable food scene? How many rebukes of Boston’s food will it take, from five years of James Beard Foundation snubs, to the Michelin blood bath, for which Massachusetts’s tourism boards undoubtedly paid a fortune? How many articles will the Boston Globe publish, with titles, like “How can the James Beard Awards not include a single Massachusetts restaurant?” or “Why don’t Boston restaurants win national awards?” before facing the fact that Boston is a terrible food city. And the very first step to a remedy is acknowledgement of that reality.