Union Oyster House

The Union Oyster House has been serving oysters, clam chowder, and broiled lobster in the same building since 1826, making it the oldest continuously operating restaurant in America. The building itself is even older — it dates to the early 1700s and was used as a dress goods shop where the exiled French king Louis Philippe taught French to earn money while waiting to reclaim his throne. The oyster bar on the ground floor, where patrons sit on stools and watch shuckers open raw oysters at the semicircular bar, hasn't changed in any meaningful way since Daniel Webster used to drink a tall tumbler of brandy with each half-dozen.

John F. Kennedy ate here regularly when he was a young congressman — his favourite booth on the second floor (booth 18) is marked with a plaque and is still available for diners willing to request it. The menu is a time capsule of New England seafood: raw oysters, clam chowder (creamy, never tomato-based — this is not Manhattan), lobster rolls, broiled scrod, Indian pudding. The prices are higher than they need to be and the atmosphere is more tourist-friendly than cutting-edge, but the raw bar is genuinely excellent and the chowder is the real thing — thick, creamy, packed with clams, and served with oyster crackers.

The restaurant's location on the Freedom Trail, steps from Faneuil Hall, means it catches tourist traffic that might otherwise pass it by. But unlike many historic restaurants that trade entirely on reputation, the Union Oyster House actually delivers — the oysters are fresh, the shuckers are fast, and there's something irreducibly satisfying about eating raw shellfish in a building where people have been doing exactly the same thing for two centuries.