Alden & Harlow

Let me be honest about what this is: a walk-the-line bowl shop on Boylston, not a room you linger in.

Burg & Shaw is the kind of concept that shouldn't need explaining but always does — because the mashup sounds like a novelty until you realize it isn't.

Tabla Express landed inside Novo Marketplace — Allston's 20,000-square-foot, sixteen-vendor food hall on Brighton Avenue — and the fit makes sense on multiple levels.

In the North End, where Italian-American dining has been performed for tourists at markup for decades, O'Cheese operates on a different frequency entirely.

Harvard Ave in Allston runs on student hunger and cheap thrills, which makes B2J Tasty Pot — 不二家酸菜鱼 — an interesting outlier: a restaurant built around a single, considered northern Chinese tradition rather than the usual scatter-shot me…