Durgin-Park - Boston, MA

Posted By Michael Stern on May 27, 2009 2:32 PM

Like the Old North Church or the swan boats in the Public Garden, Durgin-Park is a Boston landmark. It is a tourist attraction and can be maddeningly crowded, but if you want true, dowdy New England food, there is no more authentic place to taste it.

Dinner begins with a square of grainy yellow cornbread. Then you can move on to such old favorites as lobster stew or Boston Schrod, or pot roast or pork loin. The house specialty is prime rib, a gargantuan cut that overhangs its plate. Side that with a mountain of mashed potatoes (into which the kitchen indelicately slides pats of butter, still in paper wrappers) and a scoop of fresh apple sauce, and you've got a mighty meal.

What could be more all-American than roast turkey with sage dressing ... or New England boiled dinner of corned beef and cabbage? The beans Durgin-Park serves are real Boston baked beans, firm and silky, not too sweet, with a whiplash of molasses. The dessert list is tradition itself, featuring hot mince pie in the autumn, apple pan dowdy, deep dish apple pie, strawberry shortcake on a biscuit, and the quintessential Yankee dessert – Indian pudding, served warm, of course. Perhaps the weirdest thing on the dessert menu is coffee Jell-O ... invented long ago because the management just hated to throw away pots of undrunk coffee at the end of the day. So they jelled it! And they jelled it without sugar! It's actually kind of wonderful if you like coffee: cool, quivery, refreshing ... and served under a mound of sweetened whipped cream.

The Fanueil Hall Market long ago became a modern urban grazing emporium, and Boston is a city rich with up-to-date, polite places to eat. Durgin-Park is not one of them. Its wide-open dining rooms, with brusque waitstaff and elbow-to-elbow communal tables, are neither modern nor polite. The food is old-fashioned, and nobody gets celebrity treatment; nobody is even treated very nicely! Like it or lump it. We like it!

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Posted By Bret Bicoy on October 1, 2009 5:46 PM

A dinner for four with appetizers cost me $90 on a recent trip to Boston. Not an unreasonable amount of money for a nice dinner, but this was anything but nice.

I had their "famous" prime rib, which maybe is famous for its absolute lack of flavor. It was so horrible that I left 75% of it on the plate. My wife had fish and chips, which she said tasted like batter and chips. And the worst part, the batter was completely without flavor. The baked beans were bland at best.

My mom joined us and had shrimp, which was mediocre, but at least wasn't horrible like my prime rib. And my daughter opted for spaghetti, which tasted like little more that tomato sauce.

Durgin-Park is bland at best, and downright awful at its worst. And given the cost, you'd be better off saving a few bucks and eating at one of the vendors in nearby Quincy Market. Literally, the meal was so bad, and we ate so little, that we all grabbed some dessert in Quincy Market because we were still hungry. Seriously, we had them wrap up our generous leftovers and we gave them to a homeless person on the walk back to our waterfront hotel.

Durgin-Park survives on its quaint reputation for rude waitresses (which was funny, because the only thing pleasant about our meal was our nice waitress) and lots of food. Their portions are huge, but unfortunately, largely inedible. We travel extensively, and eat out all the time. We love quaint restaurants with their own oddities, and also enjoy fine dining at high-end restaurants. We're not that picky! But this restaurant was, by far, the worst place we have eaten in our ten years of marriage.

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Posted By Frederick Nachman on December 17, 2007 7:18 PM

I ate at Durgin-Park as a kid visiting Boston in the early '60s and it was a real treat. In the late '60s and 'early '70s, I ate here as a college student. I'd get a plate of fried oysters for 99 cents and walk over to the Garden for a Celtics game. We next returned on a family vacation in the early '90s and the food was so-so, to say the least. My brother and his family, visiting later from Denver, had the same experience.

I was last there in March, when I had some time to kill before taking in a Bruins game. Just wanting to see the place, I walked upstairs and the dining rooms that were open were half-empty. A plate of franks and beans went by that looked as if you could have boiled the dogs and opened a can of beans yourself; my home offering of that dish looked more appetizing. With that, I headed back to the Garden, forever disappointed that an icon from my past had seen its better days... much better days.

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