The Critics Ate Burgers, Italian Food, and Polynesian Dishes This Week

The Boston Globe’s Sheryl Julian visits Nosh & Grog this week, where she finds signature burgers and shoestring fries. The Medfield Center restaurant has food that “makes you want to say ‘Bring me anything,’” Julian writes. The gem salad comes sprinkled with ranch and garnished with bacon, and the mussels are sweet and plump, she writes. Julian also recommends the signature “Oh S#%T” burger, which comes on a potato bun and is “gigantic, delicious, tender, juicy, and full of good flavors and textures.” Other standouts include the roast chicken, which can be split between two people, and the Bolognese sauce over homemade pasta. For dessert, she suggests the French toast pudding with maple glaze.

The Improper Bostonian’s MC Slim JB dines on Italian food at MIDA in the South End, where he finds crisply coated arancini with “an uncommonly creamy interior,” along with a Maine grains salad with shaved squash and pickled rutabaga. Of the pastas made in-house, he praises the spicy duck confit orecchiette and writes that the bucatini di mare is a “smash hit.” The striped bass is “exquisitely cooked,” and the desserts are “simple, homey and very good.”

Kara Baskin takes a tour of Greater Boston’s Polynesian restaurants (and their cocktails) in her latest for The Boston Globe. At Bali Hai in Lynnfield, she finds cheap drinks like the “Hawaiian Itch” for $4.50, plus a carb-heavy lo mein. At Cathay Pacific in Quincy, there are strawberry daiquiris and pupu platters as well as “juicy Peking ravioli.” Kowloon, located off Route 1 in Saugus, serves coconut drinks in the shell and entrees like crispy crab Rangoon and sushi, while Tahiti in Dedham has “an impossibly cheap selection of cocktails,” she writes, plus a big section of Polynesian dishes like flaming ambrosia (fried shrimp). Finally, at Tiki Island, Baskin finds that “an egg roll will leave you full for hours” and the Shark’s Tooth cocktail with rum and sloe gin “promises certain doom after the second round.”

• A Kitchen That Makes You Want to Say ‘Bring Me Anything’ [BG]
• Border Crossing [Improper]
• Where to Get Your Tiki on in the Boston Area [BG]