Welcome back to Food Crawls, a series in which Eater Boston staffers guide you on food and booze crawls in the Boston area. When we go out, we often want to try more than one restaurant or bar at a time — a drink and a snack here, another drink and dessert there. Eater Boston crawls are meant to be relatively walkable, and the amount of food and drink is meant to correspond roughly to a couple of average appetites — so bring a friend. Email us if there’s a particular theme, dish, drink, or neighborhood you’d like to see covered in a future installment.
Those of us living in Boston proper, Cambridge, and Somerville could eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at a new restaurant every day and probably never exhaust our options over the course of a year. But just because our neighborhoods feature a glut of quality dining options doesn’t mean we shouldn’t venture to the suburbs every now and then.
Newton Centre and its various culinary delights are fewer than four miles from my apartment in Allston, and yet for some reason (sloth, mostly) I rarely hop on my bike and head that way for a meal. On the occasions I do dine in Newton Centre, I pedal back to Allston happy and fatter than I was hours before.
This crawl is admittedly less a beat-by-beat itinerary than our other crawls; who eats breakfast, lunch, and dinner out in the same day, let alone in the same neighborhood, except perhaps a rare tourist staying exclusively in Newton? Instead, it’s more a short list detailing the best places to get your three (or four) squares in Newton Centre. As such, the usual food crawl statistics will be absent.
Breakfast: Poppyseed Bagel With Lox and a Schmear at Rosenfeld’s Bagels
1280 Centre St., Newton, MA 02459
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A poppyseed bagel with lox, red onion, tomato, capers, and a schmear is the single greatest breakfast item on the planet. Rosenfeld’s has been slinging some of the area’s best bagels for 45 years. This place is breakfast in Newton Centre.
Lunch: Spicy Miso Ramen at Little Big Diner
1247 Centre St., Newton, MA 02459
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Little Big Diner is one of three Newton restaurants owned and operated by David Punch. The small plates, rice bowls, and poke bowls are worth your money, but the ramen is the main event. Get the spicy miso — niblets of sweet corn are the perfect juxtaposition to the rich, umami-bomb miso broth.
Dinner #1: Some Oysters and Some Small Plates at Comedor
105 Union St., Newton Centre, MA 02459
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Comedor serves $1 oysters from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. Grab a beer, down a dozen oysters, and order one of the small plates — especially something from the sea, such as the excellent scallop empanadas. Fernanda and Jakob White — the wife-and-husband duo behind Comedor — recently added a 3 percent kitchen appreciation charge to all checks in order to pay their kitchen staff a more fair wage, which is all the more reason to support this hip little Chilean-American fusion joint.
Dinner #2: Veal Agnolotti (With Something From Trillium to Drink) at Sycamore
755 Beacon St., Newton, MA 02459
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Sycamore is one of Punch’s other Newton spots. Head here for a pint or two from Trillium — the Sunshower is peppery and malty and criminally drinkable for a beer that’s 8.5 percent alcohol by volume — and the veal agnolotti, which comes with chanterelles and Oregon huckleberries.