The Best Clam Chowder In Boston | Best Of The Best

INSIDER’s Herrine Ro and Emily Christian travel to Boston on a quest to find the best clam chowder. The restaurants included are Atlantic Fish Co., Boston Sail Loft, Anthem, and Union Oyster House. After seeing how some of them are made and trying all four chowders, they announce their favorite one.

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The Best Clam Chowder In Boston | Best Of The Best

[Music] i love it [Music] hi guys i’m erin hey i’m emily tomorrow we are hopping on a train to boston on a mission to find the best clam chowder now clam chowder is one of those foods that’s closely associated with boston and the new england area so we picked four places and all of these places have won awards of some sort for their chowder and the criteria that we will be looking for are the freshness and the chunkiness of the clams the creaminess of the chowder soup and the hearty bits of potato and vegetables in the soup i have a complicated relationship with dairy to say the least so uh this will definitely be an adventure for the both of us but i’m really excited we should all take a second to pray for emily and we will see you in boston see you in boston our first stop atlantic fish company [Music] so atlantic fish company has been a staple of the back bay since the late 70s fresh seafood fresh oysters lots of clam chowder the chowder here is so popular last summer they sold over 21 000 bowls but i come here because it’s this feels really fresh and clean even though it’s kind of that rich heavy creamy one i think it’s not as kind of tasty and heavy as like a legal seafood or something like that which they’re all they’re all pretty good in my book but this is a little less dense so i always come here when i want my fix the chowder’s rich flavor starts with fat from salt pork [Music] onions and celery are cooked just enough to sweat then liquid gold aka clarified butter is poured in is there anything in your clam chowder that makes it different from all the other ones um probably this this here most people use clamp bases because this is a very labor-intensive process to to poach the clams reduce the broth take the clam meat and uh chop it up you have to squeeze out the inner so your chowder stays nice and white it’s a very labor intensive thing and when you have passion the clams used here are quahogs the restaurant plates the chowder in a cup or bread bowl and it wouldn’t be as if we didn’t choose the bread bowl our chowder has won chowderfest right one of usa today’s top 10 chatters in all of massachusetts and as well as best chatter in boston i think we have the perfect balance and then when you put it inside a bread bowl there’s nothing better than that for a new england comfort food i think the clam chowder here is textbook like beautiful clam chowder that’s good the brininess of the clam still comes through in this chowder and i think the reason why that is is because they make the clam broth in house i can definitely get behind that oh yeah that is perfect you can taste the freshness it’s like you instantly know these clams came from this area i love my job [Music] but if you’re paying for a bowl of clam chowder it shouldn’t be more of a potato chowder it should have a lot of clams and for this you are getting a lot of clams in your chowder so the money is worth it a lot of the times it’s like after a few bites you kind of don’t feel good for this i’m halfway in and i feel great [Music] oh is there tabasco is there hot sauce hot sauce really truly makes everything better like let’s just it’s fine oh there it is that’s the stuff for our next stop we visited boston sail loft looking over the commercial wharf this restaurant is equipped with a few i’ve been coming here for only 28 years uh there’s no better chopper in the country than the clam chowder absolutely i’ve been coming here since i was a child it’s the traditional new england clam chowder and if you want the real taste of new england that’s about as close as it gets the sail off opened in 1984 it was my father my uncle and one of their very good friends now 35 years later my dad’s running the show and i’m here with him full time and it’s been familiar and operated all along [Music] the chatter recipe is in the saints with the day we open our not so secret secret ingredient is dill we can’t make it a secret because you can see it the minute we pour it this restaurant is known for its generous pour of chowder we just won um boston magazine busa boston chowder for 2018. last summer we were featured on the today show with al roker in our busy season we can serve up to 300 cups of chowder a day the smell of the dill isn’t too overpowering the consistency is so thick that um your spoon will literally just stand up by itself which i think is so fun and so interesting and i see already some sizable chunks of clams so these are all very good first impressions already off the bat i love the smell of dill my grandma cooked it for me all the time when i was a kid everything had dill in it so to me this smells like home it already has a place in my heart and i haven’t even eaten it yet my body hurts right now but i’m doing this for y’all i know i i want to say this is very preemptive but i know that when emily has a spoonful of this this will probably be your favorite wow that’s like ice cream oh yeah oh my god that’s delicious not only are the green flecks just very pretty to look at i think that it’s very crucial to the overall chowder and the way that it breaks down or like cuts through a lot of the richness it’s just velvety and smooth in every way it still has that nice like just melt in your mouth texture it’s at like the consistency of it is my absolute favorite part of this as well as that dill cutting through the creaminess to make it still light and airy i’m not getting too much of like like a seafoody taste though like i’m not getting like a full-on clam stock kind of taste but so so good [Music] a little harder and harder and harder a little harder next up anthem kitchen and bar [Music] anthem is a little bit of a mix of american with a little twist as you see we are located in one of the corners of a very famous venue hall which is a very um tourist destination i’ve been coming to this restaurant for about 15 years why is the chowder here so great it’s consistent our chowder has been a two-time award in the boston childhood fest just this last summer we went over 6 000 bowls the key difference in anthem’s clam chowder recipe is the clams they use this is a seaflame a cockle sea clam and then there’s another clam that we add two clams to get a better flavor out of it for here at anthem and feel our clam chowder uh stands out from the rest a little bit more because we use a couple of different clams and we use a sea clam juice that really kicks it up a notch it’s served in a warm bowl with oyster crackers this chowder seems like it’s really super thick but in a good way right off the bat this chowder looks a lot thicker than some of the bowls that we’ve eaten and the color is has like just a slight tinge of yellow i’m really thinking that’s what’s going to set this chowder apart from others is that brininess [Music] wow that is really good [Music] the clams super roughly chopped so you’re still getting like big chunks of clam and they’re not rubbery they’re not grainy they still taste very fresh it’s so good but i feel like i can only maybe have half of this bowl i love the fact that they’re using two kinds of clams i like the fact that one of them is a secret makes me feel like i’m part of something special my absolute love is hot sauce so i’m just gonna that’s the way to do it so just in case you want to know what it looks like out here in boston it’s been snowing for maybe 10 minutes and it already looks like this karen’s not okay she’s really full of chowder she’s not good i want to lay down she’s she froze i’m in california and i’m doing better than heron i just want everyone to know that our last and final stop is union oyster house we are at union oyster house um america’s oldest restaurant we are going to try the oyster house clam chowder a boston classic we’ve been shooting all day today and union oyster house is our last stop of the night we’re filled to the brim with clam chowder but we must carry on it’s really cool that paul revere was here and so we’re about kennedy’s i don’t know if polar bear was actually here but i think he was essentially president davis clean chatter before i did so because it’s the oldest restaurant in america and the chowder is a boston classic i am expecting this to be like top tier like they know what they’re doing [Music] but other than that it’s really good this tastes like classic you came to boston and you wanted some chowder and you got this and you’re like yeah i feel like it lacks a little bit in like the glammy briny flavor that other places have i feel like this is the old school classic clam shower and you know it tastes delicious it’s just i wish there were more clams in it but that’s about it i was complaining about all the chatter you consumed over the past few days um so i know this sounds strange but i could go for another bowl right now i know i was looking at the footage and i would be lying if i told you that i am not craving a clam chowder yeah seriously editing that made me so hungry i know so which one was your favorite okay so i want to be clear all the clam chowders were delicious in their own way and i feel like i would crave each individual one on a different day absolutely for different reasons it’s called best of the best for a reason they truly are the best of the best but i do have to say my favorite was [Applause] atlantic fish because it was just all around kind of on the lighter scale yes it hit all the marks for me and i feel like i would want that every single day yeah which one was your favorite so i actually would also say at lightning fish company really if it wasn’t for the dill at boston sail off that really just stole my heart i mean i told you that it’s something that’s like very close to home for me because my grandma made it for me all the time and i think it had that nostalgia that made it my personal favorite i also loved the density of the cream in that suit i honestly would go to both like i would have them back-to-back i mean we really did so so guys after you saw all four which one is your favorite or which one would you try let us know in the comments below bye