The Critics Ate Italian Food, Pho, and Crudo This Week

This week, The Boston Globe’s Ted Weesner pays a visit to Fat Hen in East Somerville. "The food is elegant and arrives with a pedigree," he writes, noting owner Daniel Bojorquez’s adjoining restaurant, La Brasa. From the wood-fired semolina and olive oil rolls to the anchovies, Weesner has much to praise. "The pasta lineup at Fat Hen has no holes," he writes, calling out the tortellini brodo and the spaghetti with Jonah crab. His most loved dish: the corzetti with cloumage cheese in mushroom stock. Weesner also recommends the swordfish from the main courses, and the affogato with caramel gelato and plum crostata for dessert.

Sheryl Julian heads over to Pho #1 Waltham in her latest piece for the Globe. The place offers traditional Vietnamese soups, plus Thai soups and salads and Korean-style double-fried chicken. The larb Thai salad is "sweet and sour and aromatic and just right," she writes, and the pad see you is "mildly sweet, and delicious." While the spicy tofu "tastes tinny," she writes, the vegetarian pho rau cai is mild but pleasing with "plenty of bean sprouts and basil."

Finally, the Improper Bostonian’s MC Slim JB visits Waypoint in Cambridge. Slim samples the raw bar offerings, including oysters, along with smoked and salted shrimp and a daily crudo. The pizza has a chewy medium crust, and Slim recommends the chopped clam pie topped with pickled peppers. "Composed plates offer the most beautiful platings and subtle flavors here," he writes, including in the monkfish cheek with eggplant puree. The wood-roasted char belly "is a superb skin-on chunk," Slim writes, and the Maine lamb shoulder breaks apart with a fork.

• Not braggadocious. Just quietly excellent at Fat Hen. [BG]
• Pho #1 Waltham: now playing (too many of) Asia’s greatest hits [BG]
• Gold Coast [Improper Bostonian]