Strip T's Review

Overall rating: 87

Food rating: 90

Strip T's: A really unusual restaurant

Update as of Summer 2013:

I raised my ratings for Strip T's, as I think they've gotten more consistent, are using higher quality main ingredients, and the lunches have also gotten better. With this, the prices have gone up a bit, but overall they remain a pretty great value, even more so for lunch than for dinner. Strip T's has really moved into a group of our favorite restaurants for food. The overall dining experience still seems odd, and there are quieter more intimate places for a date or to hang out with friends, but in the Newton, Waltham, Watertown area, this really has become the restaurant with the best and most interesting food.

Original review:

We've been to Strip T's several times for dinner. I don't think I've ever been to a similar place. It's location and name suggest a dive sports bar, and the internal decoration suggests the same. There's a counter with some high stools for seating, and a tiny dining area with a few tables.

Everything about Strip T's suggests that if the food is any good, it should be good burgers served with good fries and onion rings and good beer. In reality, though, the food has an Asian flare, and even taking that into account the chef does all sorts of odd combinations of foods and tastes.

Mostly, this works extremely well. The food is generally really good for the Boston area. If there's better food in Watertown I haven't found it, and you'd probably have to head one town over to Waltham for the nearest better tasting food (at one of the two great Italian restaurants in Waltham, La Campania and Il Capriccio, both more expensive than Strip T's).

The banh mi, a Japanese vegetarian sandwich, is great. One night I had the roasted wild striped bass, which was a fairly small portion of fish. The fish itself was only okay, but the accompanying sauce, kohlrabi, clams, and roasted pistachios were wonderful. We also got a side dish of brussel sprouts (with sardines?!) that was great. For dessert, we had the goat's milk panna cotta, which was also great, but also a mocha chocolate cake that had little if any mocha flavor and just wasn't that tasty or interesting.

Most recently we went there for lunch, because we'd heard the burgers really were great and they don't serve them for dinner (and mostly don't serve the banh mi at dinner either). The burger is served with a miso/lemon aioli on a really nice and flavorful bun. I ordered mine medium rare, and it came medium well. Despite that, it was delicious.

We have the sense that the food at dinner gets better preparation than the food at lunch, but the lunch food is still very good. Also, the preparation and sauces at dinner sometimes seem better than the actual quality of the main ingredients, particularly when it comes to fish dishes.

I'm impressed by the number of favorable reviews on TripAdvisor (Zagat gives it a 21 for food, which is inappropriately low). The unexpected foods and odd taste combinations seem likely to not be what most people walking into an apparent dive bar in Watertown would be looking for. But if you like this sort of food and are looking for a chef who experiments and usually seems to succeed, this is a great place to eat and a great value.