In Boston, Asian restaurants shine – The Boston Globe

Of course, anyone who eats in these parts doesn’t need an international dining guide to tell them so. It’s been this way, and it’s only getting better. But Michelin’s choices highlight the fact, showcasing the excellence of Asian restaurants across a spectrum of cultures and concepts, from family-run establishments serving affordable fare to omakase restaurants questing after perfection.

Of the 26 local restaurants included in the guide, 10 serve Asian-inspired food and/or are Asian-owned.

One Boston restaurant received a Michelin star: 311 Omakase, which serves Japan-inspired tasting menus created by a chef, Wei Fa Chen, originally from Fujian, China.

The restaurant offers a special experience, like visiting a speakeasy created by a Zen monk who is absolutely obsessed with food. Diners arrive at a basement apartment of a brick row house in the South End — is this the right place? — then pass through an incense-scented entryway to a 10-seat wood counter in a small, serene dining room. Chen is slicing fish, so close to customers one could reach out a finger and touch the blade of his extremely sharp knife (not recommended). Carrie Ko, the manager and Chen’s wife, narrates the experience course by course. Each dish, each ingredient, has its own story. A meal here couldn’t be more intimate, and it is easy to see what the Michelin inspectors saw in 311.

Six area restaurants received the Bib Gourmand designation, which Michelin uses to recognize restaurants that offer both quality and value. Four of these serve Asian cuisine.

In Brookline, Mahaniyom was recognized for the originality and deliciousness of Thai dishes like pomelo salad and crab curry. Co-owner Chompon “Boong” Boonnak also received an award for the restaurant’s cocktails. Cambridge made a strong showing: Jahunger, a Uyghur restaurant where hand-pulled noodles are a particular strength, was named for its vibrant, nourishing, honest cooking. Inspectors found Pagu, where the menu is inspired by Asia as well as Spain (think black cod croquetas with Thai chile alioli, braised pork belly bao, and laksa made with invasive green crabs), both fun and thoughtful. And Sumiao Hunan Kitchen was praised for its regional specialties as well as the care it takes with core Chinese menu dishes.

(The other two Bib Gourmands, chef Karen Akunowicz’s Bar Volpe and Fox & the Knife, were both Italian — a cuisine that pulled its own weight, with seven restaurants included in the guide.)

Michelin also recommended Asian-owned tasting-menu restaurant Lenox Sophia in South Boston; Vietnam-inspired Nightshade Noodle Bar in Lynn; Downtown Crossing Korean restaurant Somaek; a second omakase restaurant, Wa Shin, in Bay Village; and Chinese hand-pulled noodle shop Zhi Wei Cafe, near South Station.

To compare with another small city for context: Philadelphia’s guide, also in its first year, included 33 restaurants. Just two of them serve Asian cuisine, both specializing in Japanese cuisine. The cultural culinary dominance might be less striking somewhere like California, where the population is 17 percent Asian. In Boston, it’s about half that.

I know: Enough with the Michelin talk already. An arbitrary guide created by dining experts who parachute in fails to capture the lived daily reality of any city’s culinary scene. It honors only the present moment, without regard for restaurants that show up consistently over long spans of time or acknowledgment that an excellent kitchen can have an off night. It overlooks so many places that the people who live here love and patronize in force.

But the guide does matter in a few clear ways.

One obvious one: It is a driver of tourism dollars, thus the sponsorship of Michelin’s presence by Meet Boston and the Cambridge Office for Tourism. According to a 2025 Ernst & Young study, 60 percent of international travelers under the age of 34 use the Michelin Guide when picking which restaurants to visit. Expats also may invest more weight in Michelin’s opinions: “I’m getting more Europeans who are living in Massachusetts. They are more in tune with Michelin and more accustomed to it,” said Lenox Sophia chef-owner Shi Mei.

Boston is light years beyond baked beans and chowder, things we are known for but rarely eat. Maybe that’s news, though, for the rest of the world. Michelin’s choices can help revise, even in a small way, how people see this city, rewriting stale narratives about what Boston is today. (Home of the bean curd and ginger-scallion cod, apparently!) If observers are surprised to find a more open, diverse portrait of a place with a reputation for clannishness and racism, welcome to 2026, and also please help yourself to a heaping plate of what this country is still truly, essentially about, despite the dangers it now poses to those very international travelers who tend to follow Michelin.

Because behind the guide are stories.

Wei Fa Chen came to Boston from China because he had family here. He worked at takeout-oriented places that belonged to friends and relatives, as well as Ruka, the Japanese-Peruvian restaurant downtown. Then he moved to New York for a chance to work at the Michelin-starred omakase restaurant Masa. During the pandemic, he came back and decided to stay. Now Boston has a Michelin-starred omakase restaurant of its own.

Two childhood friends from Phetchabun province in Thailand came here to study, at Boston University and Northeastern, and discovered a passion for the restaurant business. Smuch Saikamthorn and Boonnak became partners in Mahaniyom, where they conjure up the flavors and dishes they were missing from home, and give us the chance to fall in love with them too. Boonnak’s experience bartending at Shojo in Chinatown was formative, helping to inspire Mahaniyom’s award-winning cocktail program, as well as the one at the team’s sister bar, Merai.

Sumiao Chen, a doctor and scientist from Hunan, China, earned two degrees here: a master’s in FDA regulatory affairs and health policy from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Science, and a certificate in French culinary arts from Le Cordon Bleu. In 2017, she opened Sumiao Hunan Kitchen, bringing in chefs from Michelin-starred Chinese restaurants in other cities, and providing these parts with a rare taste of Hunanese cuisine.

When doors are closed, when people can’t move freely for work, education, family, or opportunity, stories like these are never written into existence. The Michelin results are a reminder of how much richer we all are for them — and how much better we eat.

Devra First can be reached at devra.first@globe.com. Follow her on Instagram @devrafirst.