The Boarding House

The Boarding house is a popular restaurant among Nantucket locals, partly because it is open year-round. It features a small but varied menu, good food and service. You can eat outside, inside or in the bar area. We do not recommend the bar area, as it is very noisy from music, TV and loud patrons. Outside is OK in warmer weather but not later in the season.

We found the restaurant pleasant and the service and food fairly good: some of it quite excellent. One of us had fluke($30) and antipasto($12), while the other had littleneck clams($16) and a double pork chop($35). The focaccia served with the antipasto was excellent, crusted with nigella seeds. The remainder of the anitpasto included pickled beets, zucchini with mint, and a spicy eggplant mixture I only tasted briefly. However, this was a very good dish.

The fluke was less successful: it was basically a piece of fried fish served with much too little sauce to keep it from being dry, over beets that were very good.

The littleneck clams were served in their shells but withe a delicious butter-lime sauce. Mostly butter. The pork chop was large and served over a mac-cheese preparation using very small pasta, and topped with cabbage. It was quite good but in places a bit dry.

For dessert, we split a dish consisting of 3 freshly made small spherical brioche doughnuts ($10) and warm chocolate pot-du-creme. Excellent.

Oddly, we asked for salt and pepper and they provided us with a dual salt shaker pepper mill, but kept wanting to take it away. Once I stopped them and another time they snatched it and then quickly returned it. (Maybe they need to buy a couple more?)

The bill with one drink and 3 glasses of wine was $149 including tax. This is a fairly pleasant place but as in other visits, they need to pay a bit more attention to details.