What is a restaurant for? What is the point, or should be the point, of preparing food for someone? What makes this moment exciting? What is most pleasurable? What can I say that has not yet been said, but must be? What is the purpose of my life, and what is the story I want to share? A good restaurant doesn’t necessarily need to engage with any of these questions; the best restaurants cannot help themselves. How could they, when the people who make them are living a life that is completely obsessed by them? A truly great restaurant is as invested in aesthetics and technique as it is in a totally unique philosophy of what a Great Restaurant can, should, and must be.
I wonder how many courses the average guest experiences at Nightshade Noodle Bar before arriving at the conclusion that it’s easily the finest restaurant in Boston. By my recollection, I made it around four of them my first time before the realization dawned on me. I have that realization once again every time I return.
Technique, aesthetic, and most of all, philosophy is delivered on the plate with every course at Nightshade Noodle Bar. If this team simply wanted to become Boston’s best restaurant, they could have stopped working a long time ago, but like any great artist, they cannot help themselves. Chef Rachel Miller and her brilliant team are obsessively inventing, chasing, and re-inventing a personal philosophy of perfection.
And it is personal: Chef Miller’s dishes blend memories of cooking in the South with her French-Moroccan-Jewish grandmother with her study of French and Vietnamese culinary techniques, as well as the regional and seasonal ingredients of New England. That’s the only way anyone could end up preparing uni caught in Marblehead with a brown butter and red curry hollandaise, then topping it with lightly torched Vietnamese cinnamon. The result is creamy and unctuous, rich in depth and complexity, hard to enjoy without closing your eyes to savor it.
That’s just one great idea; Nightshade has so many. The caviar course is a re-imagination of traditional chips and dip, featuring an aerated foam so light and delicate you won’t believe how fully it captures the flavor profile of egg salad. It hits the table just before a plate of goose barnacles, to be twisted from their delicate casings and dipped in a habit-forming fermented citrus-peppercorn sauce. Then a lightly fermented rice cake topped with kabocha squash bột chiên and crispy confit duck tongue. A delicate fluff of tamarind brown butter pork floss, resting delicately atop a pillow of grilled sticky rice moored in a shallow pool of lightly sweetened coconut milk.
It starts to dawn on you: my god, it’s all going to be this good. It is. At Nightshade Noodle Bar, a culinary insight so striking that it would become a signature gotta-try-it item at any other restaurant is the bare minimum requirement to make it onto the tasting menu. The habanero caramel sauce that enrobes a delicate bite of black cod is intentionally ever-so-slightly burnt, thrillingly harnessing the bitterness of the torched sugar and evolving the black cod dishes made famous by chefs like Nobu’s Morimoto. A spicy rock shrimp roll with a stunning, showstopping red lime chili sauce renders me speechless. It’s the best sandwich I’ve ever had.
The ideas keep coming. We haven’t even gotten to the noodles yet, and they earn their spot in the title: housemade phở noodles in a creamy, nutty cheese sauce topped with Australian truffle shavings, for a start. It’s a love letter to southern Mac and cheese, rewritten with signature Nightshade depth and complexity. A dessert course of salted chocolate mousse has the exact flavor and texture of the chocolate icing you got from the grocery store as a child, only now completely composed of top-quality ingredients. It’s a sense-memory you eat with a spoon.
The problem with trying to do a write-up of this restaurant is that every single course deserves its own effusive paragraph. There’s no way not to leave something out. (Like the incredible gin martini service, which Chris called the best he’s ever had. Or the lightly creamy and delicately tart Moon Rabbit cocktail that I cannot wait to enjoy with every visit. Or the cheese courses. There’s no good place to stop, so I’m just stopping now.)
Taken in its totality, the philosophy of the restaurant steps into the light: a great fine dining restaurant should be, perhaps must be, this inventive, this surprising, this restlessly creative. “This is what a restaurant is for”. Even deeper than that, Nightshade seems to allude to another big idea: “this is how people should be treated”. They apply the same philosophy to their place within the industry: they’re closed three days a week to ensure all staff get two consecutive days off. They close for a summer break once per year. Their service fees are structured to address wage disparity between front-of-house and back-of-house workers, and in the event they are selected for a Michelin star this winter, they’ve already made a public statement affirming their commitment to accessible pricing rather than changing to meet any of Michelin’s higher pricing expectations. This is all very unusual, and very commendable, in a typically cutthroat culinary world.
But even if you don’t care about the Michelin guide, or back-of-house wage disparity, or philosophical questions about what food could or should be, you’ll have a good time at Nightshade because the food is so unbelievably great. A fois gras course is traditionally one of the first dishes to hit the table on a tasting menu like this, but not here: a truly awe-inspiring morsel of claypot caramel fois gras paired with amarena cherries closes out the savory portion of the menu. If you’re a fine dining obsessive like Chris, you’ll enjoy the extra layer of a daring, gutsy change in service order. But even if (like me) you’re not, the most important reaction is guaranteed: “I can’t believe how delicious this is”.
I don’t need to wait for Michelin, and neither should you. You won’t find a more exciting, enthralling, unbelievable meal anywhere in this city. There are many restaurants competing to be the best in Boston; this is the only restaurant in Boston competing to be one of the best in the world. I think at least one star is inevitable, so you should get a table now before the rest of the world catches on.