PRICE:
Frommer's Very Highly Recommended

"Locke's" is the traditional Boston restaurant, a power-broker favorite since 1875. Famed Boston restaurateur Lydia Shire bought it in 2001, but if the ghosts who surely hang around here mind having a woman in charge, you'd never know it. In an alley off the Winter Street pedestrian mall, the wood-paneled restaurant entertainingly evokes a Waspy men's club. The long, mirrored downstairs bar dates from 1880, and the service is 19th-century-style courtly. The food deftly combines old-fashioned and contemporary. Traditional fish cakes sit alongside new-fangled jasmine rice, red-pepper aioli comes with Maine crab cakes, and delectable scalloped potatoes accompany the signature roast beef hash. Other traditions, including excellent steaks and chops, Wiener schnitzel a la Holstein, lobster Savannah, and broiled scrod with brown bread, endure. So does Locke-Ober, an "only in Boston" experience if ever there was one.

Copyright: Excerpted from Frommer's Boston 2009, (c) 2008, Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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