Myung Dong 1st Ave

The mesob — that woven basket that gives this South End newcomer its name — is the whole point: food meant to be pulled apart by hand, over injera, with everyone leaning in.

Sixteen seats, a 90-minute window, and a chef who won "Chopped" then poured the prize into a food truck before landing here on Sanborn Court — Kush is the kind of intimate, chef-driven room Somerville does better than anyone.

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.

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…

Energize arrived in Boston in 2016 with a mission that felt countercultural for the city's meat-heavy dining landscape: make organic, plant-based eating genuinely affordable and accessible, not aspirational.