Hungry? Get Out of the Square

While most students know that Harvard Square boasts its share of alternatives for the student who’s sick of Curry Lentil Bake and Carnival Cookies in Harvard’s dining halls, many are unaware of the not-too-distant world of cheap chow and delicious dives described in the Hungry? Boston food guide.

“It’s good for students to get out of Harvard Square,” said Kaya Stone ’00, who co-edited the guide with fellow alum Esti Iturralde ’00. A Boston native, Stone says she adores the mind-boggling gastronomic variety that the Beantown area has to offer.

“Harvard students don’t leave Harvard Square and that’s crazy. Boston’s probably one of the best ethnic food cities in the country,” Stone says. “In Allston alone you have great Indian restaurants, and you have El Capital, a great Colombian restaurant. You’ve even got Sunset Grill with 100 beers on tap, burgers, and midnight Mexican buffet. Then there’s Café Belo, a Brazilian BBQ where you pay by the pound.”

“I think there’s a lot of mediocre to less-than-mediocre food that does really good business because it’s in Harvard Square,” says Stone. He suggests that students “pick some neighborhoods and explore them.”

Although he says he feels it’s a shame that enclaves of Boston are segregated by ethnicity, Stone points out that this circumstance benefits diners in that they can choose what area to explore simply by deciding what they want to eat.

“I always love walking around neighborhoods and looking at every eatery,” said Stone. “Is it full? Who’s eating there? What kind of awards do they have posted?”

Popular Harvard Square eateries are included in a guide sidebar; Hungry? Harvard: The Best Food Stops for the Starving Student names Noch’s the best pizza in The Square, Hong Kong the best late-night dining, and Charlie’s Kitchen the “Best Place to Eat While Drinking.” Cambridge Common and Grendel’s Den receive first and second place honors respectively in the “Best Place to Drink While Eating” category.

Hungry? seems to have a veteran student’s perspective on eating in the Square. The likely reason for this insightful is that many of the contributors to the Harvard Square section were undergraduates here. Many of them, including Stone and Iturralde, got their starts at the Let’s Go travel publications.

According to Stone, the guide’s dozens of contributors are all Boston residents—among them over ten Harvard alums and the concierge at the Ritz—who write about restaurants they really know and love. This depth of knowledge is what Stone says makes Hungry? Boston different from other food guides.

Amid all the celebration of the Cambridge culinary scene in the Harvard section are heartfelt tributes to eateries gone by—particularly The Tasty. For those who arrived in Boston too late to experience this Square landmark and Boston’s other once-numerous “greasy spoons,” Stone describes them as dives “where the waitress calls me ‘hun’ and it looks like she’s been there for 50 years, and it’s family operated and dirt cheap.”

Citing Finagle-a-Bagel and Au Bon Pain, Stone says that the Square’s “unique flavor” is being overtaken by “fast food restaurants that you could find anywhere in America.”

But Stone still has his favorites—Darwin’s gourmet sandwiches, Pho Pasteur for Vietnamese, Herrell’s Ice Cream, Charlie’s Kitchen’s Double Cheeseburger Special, to name a few.

Stone has a lifelong passion for food and restaurants. “When I was 12, my dad and I tried to get going a kids restaurant guide,” he said, “We worked on it for about a year but never got it published”

Despite this stumbling block, Stone applied to work on Hungry? Boston, and the guide put him and Iturralde to the task of finding contributors. The reason so many former Harvard students made the list is because Stone and Iturralde started with the Boston experts they knew best—their friends from college.