Boston Eats

Photos by Theo Keetell, Eugene Oh

34-year-old Theo Keetall takes a break from marketing lifestyles to live it up in Yankees fans’ forbidden land—Boston, Massachusetts.

Theo Keetall Bio

Brief bio, occupation: I’m the Director of Lifestyle Marketing for PUMA North America. I have a background in the music business and used to be Marketing Director for The FADER magazine in NYC.

Length of time in city: Four and a half years

Eat & Drink

Favorite high-end restaurant:

Central Kitchen
567 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge
I don’t really go to high-end restaurants, but Central Kitchen is “neighborhoody” and unpretentious. My favorite: Friday night, grab a couple seats at the bar and destroy their braised pork shanks. Top-notch food, and the staff is great for helping you pick the best wine with your food. Also, directly above Central Kitchen is the cool, misleadingly-named Enormous Room club, which hosts well-known DJs.

Shangri La
149 Belmont St, Belmont
A real local gem just outside of Cambridge, my favorite Chinese restaurant ever. Always packed, authentic and amazing food. A must.

Best deal restaurant:

Boca Grande
1728 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge
Boston’s a college town, so cheap eats are competitive; but you can’t beat the west coast style burritos and Mexican plates at Boca Grande. Extreme satisfaction for under $10.

Best street food:

Fenway Park
4 Yawkey Way, Boston
Not a lot of street food in Boston, but Fenway’s staple is sausage and peppers on a hoagie roll. Peppers and onions cooked on the same grill as the sausage, so you get all the flavors mixed together. Healthy, no, but it’s street food, right?

Favorite cafe:

The Trident Bookstore
338 Newbury Street, Boston
Great coffee, great books, great magazines, free wi-fi. Crowded on the weekends--the kind of place where if you find a seat you don’t want to move for hours.

Best bar:

B-Side Lounge
92 Hampshire St, Cambridge
A low-key place for conversations over pints and solid fare, great for relaxing and getting away from the “pick-up” scene. (Boston is filled with those that went to school here and never left.) Only drawback: no parking.

Read

Best bookstore:

The Trident Bookstore
338 Newbury Street, Boston
The Trident, again. Only blocks from Harvard, Berklee School of Music, and MIT, so the staff knows the deal and the place is pretty dialed into the needs of the community.

Best magazine stand:

Out of Town News, Harvard Square, Cambridge.
Decent selection of magazines smack in the middle of Harvard Square, and occasionally an obscure title surfaces. Nini’s Corner, right across the street, also has a solid selection.

Shop

Best boutique:

Bodega
6 Clearway St., Boston

Uniform
511 Tremont St, Boston
For great menswear, Uniform in Boston’s South End, a staple shop that carries really nice stuff. For great sneakers and a unique experience, Bodega; a secret door behind a soda cooler in a working bodega opens into one of the craziest sneaker boutiques in the country.

Sightsee

Favorite art space/gallery/museum:

Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Ave, Boston
The fantastic Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) is right on the bay (seriously, it hangs over the water), the building is amazing, and the exhibits are now starting to pick up speed.

Favorite outdoor space:

Memorial Drive, Cambridge
JFK Park, Memorial Drive (Located outside of the Rubenstein Building @ Harvard)
From April through mid-November they close down a section of Memorial Drive from Harvard to the Charles River, so you can bike, walk, run, or skate right alongside the river every Sunday afternoon. My wife and I also like to sit in JFK Park along Memorial Drive and read while dads play catch with their kids. Discovering this little gem was one of the moments I fell in love with Boston.

Best touristy thing to do:

Boston Harbor Cruise
Spend a day at the waterfront near the Boston Aquarium, and take a boat tour of Boston Harbor. Spend a whole afternoon on and off the boat (with drop-offs at each of the historical islands that surround the Bay), or do the 45-minute booze cruise, then hit The North End for some amazing Italian food, followed by a nice afternoon of shopping at Faneuil Hall.

Only local does or knows about:

Boston’s great, but locals know when to get out and take advantage of New England. We’re surrounded by a lot of great little towns and suburbs and amazing local farmer markets dot the outskirts of the city: Wilson’s Farm in Lexington, Russo’s in Watertown, and Idlewild in Acton. Locally grown, extremely fresh produce, breads cooked on premise, and equally amazing prepared foods.

Wilson Farms
10 Pleasant Street, Lexington

Russo’s
560 Pleasant St, Watertown

Idlewild Farms
366 Central Street, Acton

The must-see thing in your city:

Fenway Park
4 Yawkey Way, Boston
Fenway Park and the Red Sox, period. I’m not even a baseball fan and my wife hates sports, but our first game at Fenway had us hooked. We’ve been lucky enough to witness not only one World Series Championship, but TWO. Go Sox!

Events

Best events in each season?

Again, once baseball season starts, every game at Fenway is an event.

Tips

How would you spend a day off in your city?

A perfect day off would be riding my bike down to JFK Park on a Sunday and playing wiffle ball along the Charles River. Then, a great meal either at home or a friend’s house.

Best website for local info:

http://www.boston.com. If you need anything, you can find it right here.

Anything else you want to mention?

When most people ask me about living in Boston, I usually say something snide or cheeky like, “Well, I’m a New Yorker living in Boston.” To some extent, that’s true. But Boston has become my home, and there are a lot of great things to see and do here. As far as quality of life, it’s tough to beat.