Boston

Boston's dining record begins at the water. Oyster houses multiplied across New England as the shellfish became popular in the late eighteenth century, and the Union Oyster House — opened on Union Street in 1826 as Atwood's Oyster House, with a U-shaped semicircular oak bar installed that year — is generally cited as the country's oldest continuously operating restaurant. Its building had earlier housed Isaiah Thomas's Massachusetts Spy and, in the 1790s, the exiled future King Louis Philippe. Durgin-Park, trading at Faneuil Hall from 1827, carried the Yankee repertoire of clam chowder, prime rib, baked schrod, and Indian pudding until January 2019.

Hotel dining supplied the city's contributions to the national menu. At the Parker House, opened in 1856, Harvey Parker separated lodging from board and served meals continuously through the day; the kitchen is credited with Boston cream pie, now the official state dessert of Massachusetts, the Parker House roll, and baked Boston scrod.

The nineteenth-century establishments were long-lived but not permanent. Locke-Ober, opened in 1875 near Boston Common, spent 137 years as the city's political and celebrity dining room — Lydia Shire and Paul Licari undertook a restoration in 2001 — before closing in 2012, and L'Espalier ended forty years of fine-dining service days before Durgin-Park's own closure.