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Guardian columnist thinks Boston eats too many bowls. Do we?
OK, yes, there are a lot of bowl options in Boston. But there is also plenty of other food to try.
If you’re visiting Boston for its food, you’re most likely eating the city’s delicious seafood, staying warm with clam chowder, grabbing a cannoli for dessert in the North End. But are you buried in bowls?
The city was visited by a European guest recently who then shared her experience in an opinion piece for The Guardian. Writer Emma Beddington said her mind was blown at the sight of wild turkeys and the consumption of iced coffees in the dead of winter, but her main takeaway: Bostonians eat too many bowls, such as from Chipotle, Cava, or Sweetgreen.
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“I’m baffled by bowls,” Beddington wrote. “In this corner of the world full of twentysomething Stem graduates wearing Patagonia and Lululemon activewear, with earning potential many multiples of mine, meals seem almost all bowl-based, composed of grain, protein, greens and some kind of sauce.”
To be clear, bowls are not a new food trend, but they are everywhere — and have surged in popularity since the trend began several years ago, according to Giliah Librach, ezCater’s director of merchandise operations. Based out of Boston, ezCater is an online ordering platform geared toward employers, with bowls being a popular catering option for work lunches.
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“We’ve seen orders for bowls double from 2022 to 2023 and we see no signs of this slowing down,” Librach said.
(A reporter’s note: Boston.com’s office is right next to a Sweetgreen, and it is in fact typically slammed during lunch hours.)
To paint bowls as a Boston food item might not be fair, but the bowls trend is definitely emblematic of American lunching culture during the work week, said Leora Halpern Lanz, assistant dean of Boston University School of Hospitality Administration.
“We’re notoriously known for work, work, work, work,” Lanz said. “I don’t know too many people that take a real lunch break. Usually it’s a working lunch, or it’s something quick at your desk.”
When crunched for time, Lanz said she often orders a bowl from Life Alive — with her app, so that by the time she gets into the restaurant, it’s ready for her to take back to her desk.
So convenience is a key ingredient. Fast casual lunches have long been part of the American work week diet — and lunches in London may not be as different from ours compared to their leisurely neighbor diners in France. But now with bowls, instead of eating a burger, there’s a healthier option.
You get a protein, a grain, and a veggie tossed in a sauce of some kind. What’s more: If you don’t like the options presented to you on the restaurant’s menu, there’s a big chance they’ve built their business around customization of said bowl.
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“You can put in it whatever you want,” Lanz said. “You can make it as tasty, or delicious, or nutritious as you want it to be because you’re going there knowing what the choices are.”
It turns out Beddington did not agree that this was a tasty lunch option, saying that her “not Sweetgreen but similar” restaurant meal was “perfectly edible, but spookily soulless.”
In defense of bowls, you can skip the salad chains and find more local, diverse bowl options that have heavily inspired menu items at these chains, like bibimbap from Cambridge favorite Koreana, vermicelli at Pho Le, and a burrito bowl from Dora Taqueria.
And Lanz said sit-down restaurants have bowls on their menu, too. So yes, they are everywhere in Boston, it seems. But just as there are many choices to eat food out of a bowl, if that’s your thing, there are many more options to eat anything else.
“In fairness to Boston, the restaurant scene in Boston has just elevated from what it used to be,” Lanz said. “There are so many more varied and delicious restaurant choices that didn’t exist here before. It’s not impossible to get a delicious meal by any means.”
It seems Beddington was in a hurry, which is maybe why she chose to eat the bowl, but Lanz said she hopes she’ll come back to Boston to try the variety of culinary options it has to offer.
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“We should invite her back and let her have the dining experience she wanted because there are places she can get absolutely delicious foods and feel like she isn’t confined to just a bowl,” Lanz said.
But she leaves any future visitors with these tips: Do your research, make reservations, and if you’re in a rush, bowls are fine options.
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