Travels With Hannah: Winter Foodie Tour of Boston Never Disappoints

We pulled up to the hotel as dark was just approaching. Boston Common had come alive, the trees wrapped in colored lights. Inside the newly renovated lobby of the 239-key Four Seasons Boston — the multimillion-dollar renovation, completed in 2023, included the overhaul, initiated by Ken Fulk — a hot chocolate station, topped off with candy canes and marshmallows, awaited us.

Actually, we had checked in online, so in just minutes, we were shuttled up to our room, a Public Garden-facing suite with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the park. Outfitted with a king-sized bed in one room and a sofa bed and sitting area and table in the next, it was spacious — but the hotel had plenty more to explore. Following the hotel’s reopening after the pandemic, Jim Peters, the property’s director of creative, initiated the addition of the Vault on each floor, bespoke snack rooms accessible by room key with playful wallpaper, scavenger hunt clues, and various snacks like jelly beans and nuts, an instant hit with my sons.

Our goal: make a 7 p.m. reservation at Grill 23 & Bar, one of the city’s legendary restaurants, particularly around the holidays. But first, we had one quick and necessary pit stop: the Very Important Kid Mystery Closet, hidden behind the front desk, and accessible to all kids who stay at the hotel. Kids with the key can enter and choose any toy of their dreams, which is why mine chose two large and slightly slimy toy toads.

Grill 23 & Bar, a Wine Spectator Grand Award-winning restaurant that opened in 1983, is a de rigueur stop for anyone spending the weekend in town, my brood and me included.​ A coveted lunch reservation at the holidays is hard to come by, so we opted for dinner instead; the restaurant is known for its spirit, décor, and, naturally, food and wine. Norwegian crab legs, served warm and with a side of drawn butter, were no match for my husband and my appetite, nor were two crab-rich cakes, served with grilled lemon and a spicy aioli.

The dry-aged prime ribeye for two was not a mistake, nor was the truffle butter, the au poivre sauce, or the hulking slice of coconut cake I ordered for dessert. (It comes with pineapple sorbet, a welcome palate-cleanser.) The next day’s lunch, ramen eaten at Waku Waku after hours spent walking the quiet halls of the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum wasn’t a mistake, either.

Crisp pork gyoza. Bowls of tonkotsu ramen, filled with bamboo shoots and chashu and jammy boiled eggs and scallions and black fungus. Springy noodles. Bottles of Ramune. Despite the cold — a gray, December day, requiring jackets zipped all the way up — we left by foot, venturing back over to the Common, this time to the Frog Pond, to see if there was an opportunity for skating.

The line, though, was long. Better to watch, I told my kids, and when that got boring — and a little cold, I’ll admit — we made like tourists and headed to nearby Newbury Street, where the toniest stores were also giving out hot chocolate, the nicest of which we found on the top floor of Cartier. A fine gentleman offered two varieties, dark and milk, as well as a topping cart filled with shaved chocolate, M&Ms, peppermint candies, marshmallow, and fresh whipped cream.

Of course, you can only stay in Cartier so long without doing damage, and I intended not to. Back at Four Seasons, instead, we slipped into swimsuits and headed to the pool and hot tub, where we encountered plenty of other families doing the same.

Then, it was down to dinner at Coterie, the hotel’s brasserie. The hotel’s post-pandemic reimagination has introduced a few stunning options, including a true coffee shop, Sottovento, with made-to-order espresso drinks that are complimentary included for each hotel guest; Nespresso pods these are not. Coterie, with its raw bar and take on New England cuisine — I ordered the lobster roll — was the ideal conclusion to a weekend in the city. Cozy in a corner booth, we ate bivalves and knocked back martinis while our boys colored pictures of the swan boats.

By late morning light, after a Benedict (lobster for me, regular for my husband, and a very fat stack of silver dollar pancakes for my kids), it was time to head over to the Titanic Exhibition, only a few minutes’ walk, cold notwithstanding, from the hotel. Boston, petite and walkable, is great even in cold weather if you want to ditch a car, and we did want to ditch ours. Inside the exhibition, guests are assigned tickets and are told to check, at the end, whether they lived or died. Half of us would mock-perish on the ocean liner, as it turned out.

The exhibit is filled with artifacts rescued from the bottom of the ocean, items that survived over a century beneath the sea: forks, plates, shoes, ephemera from one of the greatest tragedies of all time. Ushered into a central room, guests can pose by a magnificent replica of the central staircase, the one that first-class passengers saw on the days and nights that they enjoyed before the ship made her final bow.

We made our final curtain call to Boston about an hour later. It was time to head back up north, to an equally cold North Shore. Another cup of hot chocolate in hand — with thanks, of course, to our new friends at Four Seasons, who had loaded us up before the drive — we were back on the road without another thought, thinking only of when we might come back. Maybe next time, we’ll take the 2,590-square-foot Royal Suite, which comes with its own movie theater — you know, just for fun.