The Restaurant
Hojoko opened in 2015 inside the Verb Hotel at 1271 Boylston Street — a converted mid-century motor inn one block from Fenway Park's Yawkey Way — and is the second restaurant from chef-owner Tim Maslow (Strip-T's, formerly of Momofuku Ssäm Bar in New York). The dining room is configured as a true Tokyo-style izakaya: low ceilings, dark wood, neon kanji signage along the back wall, a counter of twelve seats overlooking the yakitori grill, a centre dining floor of high-tops and four-tops, and a small private back room called the Listening Room that holds a vintage hi-fi system and a rotating vinyl collection. The soundtrack is selected nightly — punk in early service, late-Sixties Japanese rock through dinner, deeper electronic and free-jazz after eleven — and the volume is part of the experience rather than an apology for it.
The kitchen splits between a yakitori grill (binchotan-fired Berkshire pork belly skewers, chicken thigh tare, beef-tongue with shio, hen-of-the-woods mushroom with kewpie) and a small ramen and donburi programme led by the Tokyo-trained ramen team. The menu reads encyclopedic but executes precisely: hamachi crudo with yuzu kosho and crispy garlic, a soft-shell crab bao with Sriracha aioli, the Hojoko spicy miso ramen with a pork-bone broth that runs for fourteen hours, a karaage chicken with house pickles that has been on the menu since opening, and a beef-curry rice bowl that is the late-night signature. The sushi side is small — six or seven nigiri, four or five rolls — but technically tight, supervised by an itamae trained in Sapporo.
The bar is where Hojoko picks up its full character. The sake programme runs to about eighty references and is broken down by style rather than region (junmai, ginjo, daiginjo, nigori) with a tasting flight available at three tiers; the cocktail list is deliberately whimsical — a sake-old-fashioned with brown sugar and orange bitters, a Japanese-whisky highball at the proper proportion, a margarita with shiso and yuzu. Beer is craft-Japanese (Hitachino, Coedo, Echigo) and the wine list is short and natural-leaning. Bon Appetit named Hojoko one of America's ten best new restaurants in 2016; the room has only sharpened in the decade since.
Why This Is Boston’s Birthday Pick
Hojoko is the Boston birthday default because the room is engineered for shared, theatrical, high-energy dinners that take pictures well — neon kanji, yakitori grill visible from the room, a Listening Room you can reserve for parties of ten to twelve with a rotating vinyl host. The yakitori-and-ramen menu format encourages a group of friends to order half the page and share at the centre of the table; the cocktail and sake programmes scale to a group of twenty without slowing the kitchen; and the volume of the room absorbs a 'Happy Birthday' chorus without the rest of the floor noticing. The bill — serious but not absurd — leaves room for a karaoke after-party two blocks east, and the location next to Fenway Park means out-of-town birthday guests can walk back to the Verb Hotel without arranging a car.
Leave a Review
Registered members get published by default; guest reviews are moderated first.