PRICE:
Frommer's Highly Recommended

Chinatown's go-to place for fresh seafood is a subterranean hideaway with no decor to speak of. You won't be looking around much anyway -- the service is so fast that just saying "calamari" seems to make spicy dry-fried salted squid appear on your table. Gobble it up while it's hot, then turn to the delicious dishes that follow in lightning-quick order: messy clams with black-bean sauce, braised chicken hot pot, an emerald-green pile of stir-fried pea-pod stems. Spicy salt shrimp -- you can eat them whole, shells, heads, and all -- is only the most recent commendable dish I've tried here; my favorite is that same spicy salt preparation applied to meltingly tender scallops. Fair warning to the soft-hearted: Order the Cantonese classic fresh fish steamed with ginger and scallions, and the waiter brings the poor creature to your table thrashing in a plastic bucket; it reappears moments later, perfectly cooked. Peach Farm is virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the little restaurants that dot Chinatown's narrow side streets, except that it's so crowded -- savvy locals and celebratory groups fill both compact dining rooms every night.

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

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