Tom Meek The cacio e pepe at Little Donkey in Cambridge uses ramen noodles and miso.
Central Square may be the hottest spot to dine that you don’t really think about. Inman’s got a tight packing of eclectics in S&S, Casa Portugal and Puritan Oyster Bar and the Harvard Square-to-Porter Square stretch of Massachusetts Avenue has Giulia, Season to Taste and Black Ruby. When you wrap your bean around it, Central too is a hot hub of diverse eateries. In the past, we’ve highlighted valued area staples such as Pagu and Miracle of Science as well as hot newcomers Althea, Si Cara and Saigon Babylon. Add to the list Ken Oringer’s Little Donkey, now on the verge of notching its 10th year in the square.
Like Babylon, Pagu and Althea, when you step through the doors of Little Donkey you’re stepping off the hot (especially recently), gritty neck of Massachusetts Avenue that connects Central to MIT and into a dark, cool space with a cosmopolitan air and a flash of Iberian festivity. The cuisine’s probably best described as world-infused tapas with rotating touches that have included Korean, Turkish, Spanish and Mediterranean. Many of the offerings have a comfort-food or gastropub lean: mushroom fried rice, Bangkok street noodles, wagyu beef birria, a crispy fried chicken sandwich (with pickled jalapeños and avocado ranch) and a burger with jalapeño chips opposite a wide array of crudos and grilled branzino and octopus.
Seafood dominates the menu, both in the raw and from the grill. You can get a triple-tiered seafood tower or oysters on the half with the option to add caviar to punch up the indulgence. If you like plump and briny, the Clearbrooks will fill your bill; they appear also on the snack menu as pizza oysters, essentially oysters Rockefeller with the essence of pepperoni in the flavorful mix. On that finger food slate, other nibble of note are the caviar sandwich and wagyu tartar.
If you want to get messy, the lamb bacon lettuce wraps are an intriguing changeup and a Donkey favorite – thick slabs of bacon with tangy tomato jam, pimento cheese and picked onions to add to your green leaf fold – rich and delicious and not as filling as they look. I also enjoyed the shrimp toast bao buns, which are essentially shrimp-stuffed baos fried and served with a spicy aioli. They’re listed as snacks but are pretty sizable, and the menu overall has a shareable vibe to it.
Getting to the mains, Donkey’s beloved burger is your basic smashburger made of seasoned dry-aged beef and topped with melted yellow cheese, sweet and succulent Buffalo pickles and a wisp of mayo with onion soup essence. Oh yeah: It comes with those jalapeño chips, which are normally tucked under the bun. I got them on the side and was glad I did, because they’re delicious in their own right (and not that jalapeño hot) and I like some continuity of texture in my burger-biting endeavors. As was, the burger was flavorful, moist and lean, but it is a smashburger; if you’re dreaming of a juicy medium-rare you’re going to need to fulfill that at another time and place – smashburgers are pretty much medium by design and technique.
Little Donkey via Yelp
Burgers at Little Donkey come with a layer of chips – but they can be served on the side.
For some unique blending of cuisines, give the cacio e pepe a try. It’s recognizably the old Roman-Italian dish that involves pasta, pecorino cheese and pepper, but the Donkey’s spin uses angel-hair-thin ramen and miso. What you get is the best home-cooked butter noodles with light cheese, cracked pepper and a kiss of miso – silky slurps with a hug of comfort.
Back to the wide-ranging selection of crudos, you can get tuna and salmon belly tartare or a tuna and avocado tostada as well as a halibut ceviche. (You say ceviche, I say crudo; while conceptually the same, crudo is Spanish in origin, where the fish remains raw and translucent when plated, whereas ceviche is Latin American and citric acid is used to essentially cook the fish.) The one that jumps off the page is the hamachi (yellowfin tuna) crudo done with strawberry, rhubarb and lime.
The menu also has veggies, roasted asparagus, Kowloon-fried cauliflower (step aside, Buffalo) and Malay street corn. Future visits have those pizza oysters on the hit list, as well as the manti, a spiced Turkish meat dumpling with garlic and red pepper butter.
If you’re looking for an early bird steal, there are now “Donkey Hours” on Fridays and Saturdays starting at 4 p.m. offering $2 oysters and loaded hot dogs with global crownings that include the essential Carolina chili dog, a lamb bacon dog (those lettuce wraps gone doggie) and an okonomiyaki dog, like the Japanese pancakes with the culinary kitchen sink thrown into them at Izakaya Ittoku, as well as cocktails that are allegedly served in a grapefruit.
Oringer’s no stranger to tapas. In Boston he’s been serving small plates at Coppa since 2010 and Toro since 2005 – Italian and Spanish focuses, respectively – that make his newer, Central Square outpost something of a global, gastronomic melting-pot. Oringer parted in 2023 with longtime partner Jamie Bissonnette, who went on to open a series of hip-to-be-at restaurants in Downtown Crossing including the Korean infused Somaek, Temple Records and its Sushi counter.
The sign at the end of the bar at Little Donkey playfully states, “Don’t Be a Donkey, Be Kind,” with the subtitle, “Kicking Ass Since 2016.” Given that looming 10-year anniversary in a changing Central Square, you could make the argument that Little Donkey may just be Central Square’s fine-dining OG.
Little Donkey, 505 Massachusetts Ave., Central Square, Cambridge
Cambridge writer Tom Meek’s reviews, essays, short stories and articles have appeared in WBUR’s The ARTery, The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, The Rumpus, The Charleston City Paper and SLAB literary journal. Tom is also a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics and rides his bike everywhere.