WHO’S IN CHARGE

It took Pookie Akarasereepoowapon 10 years to find her way to owning her own place — the wonderful Eggs & Thai Café in Dedham Center. The Bangkok-born Marlborough resident moved to the United States in 2008 and spent her first year working in the kitchen of her aunt’s restaurant in Nashua. But Akarasereepoowapon didn’t want to cook — she wanted to serve people and run a restaurant’s front of house. To do that, she realized she had to learn to speak English well and spent the next three years back in the kitchen while studying the language. It took her another five years of working as a server at Framingham’s Pho Dakao to save the money to buy Eggs & Thai from its previous owner. Since opening in July 2018, word of mouth has drawn guests for lunch and dinner. “Business is good,” said its smiling owner.

THE LOCALE

Dedham Square continues to surprise as vibrant new businesses, cafes, and restaurants move into old spaces, enlivening the small city center. Eggs & Thai is on the fringe of the busy square — a mere block up High Street — in a half-subterranean space down a small side alley. The pristine little restaurant is a 37-seat space with peach-colored walls, marble tabletops, and various homey decorations: a lit candle, a fireplace hung on one wall, white lattice work behind a rattan table, flowers, colorful curtains, wall sconces.

ON THE MENU

Eggs & Thai Cafe’s wonderful basil half duck.

There’s something so gently insistent about the flavors of Thai food. They’re complex, yet not heavy, with various echoes of coconut, chili, holy basil, lemongrass, lime leaf, the ginger-like galangal, and the umami base notes that a bit of fish sauce lends. Eggs & Thai’s menu is large, with many variations on themes listed among the different appetizers, soups, salads, rice plates, stir-fries, noodles, and curries.

If you get lost, ask Akarasereepoowapon what to have: She’s the warm heart and soul of this unassuming restaurant. There’s so much good to eat here. Take the shrimp mango avocado curry ($19), and you should! It’s a fragrant light curry filled with large shrimp and hunks of perfectly ripe, slightly cooked avocado and mango that are exciting to eat in a hot dish.

The shrimp won ton soup ($6) is a rich broth with its chilies, sweetness, and lime hitting you all at once. Another soup, the chicken noodle ($13), has an overly mild broth but the fresh Chinese broccoli, cilantro, and scallions in it are good and it’s fun to eat Thai-style with a spoon in one hand and a fork for the noodles in the other.

The Thai broccoli ($8), made with Chinese broccoli, is a fine dish — the chard-like leaves and sweet stalks of this wonderful vegetable handled beautifully and rendered tender and meaty. The fresh rolls ($9) are light, springy rice paper roll-ups stuffed with perky baby lettuces, carrots, basil, shrimp (or tofu), and vermicelli: I would choose them over the somewhat tough chicken satay ($9). Not so the tender basil half duck ($23). This dish is served on a white platter with two fantastically crispy legs over moist meat served atop a stir fry of fresh vegetables.

The wide rice noodles in the drunken noodles ($11/$14) satisfy with every mouthful of this eggy, broccoli, onion, pepper, and carrot stir-fry and the pad Thai ($11/$14) is just as good. Be sure to consult with Akarasereepoowapon about how spicy you want your dishes: This wonderful kitchen runs hot!

A3 in Kingston

IN THE KITCHEN

If you live in the suburbs, you might not have a family-style eatery nearby that’s consistently good enough to frequent often like people do in many cities, especially European ones. But Boston’s suburban dining scene gets better every year, and Kingston took a step in that direction with the opening in 2017 of chef-owner John Cataldi’s A3. Named after the stretch of motorway in Southern Italy where Cataldi’s great-grandparents were born, A3 is the chef’s shot at reliving his childhood in the late ’60s.

“I grew up in my father’s first restaurant, Nanina’s in Fields Corner in Dorchester, eating with the whole family — my sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins all together,” said Cataldi. The chef, who graduated from the Culinary Institute of America, makes all A3’s pizza dough, bread, bacon, sausage, pasta, and dressings just as he’s been doing since 2004 at his first restaurant, Solstice, right next door. Whereas Solstice is more of a fine dining spot with an elaborately creative American menu, A3 is casual, but the same attention to detail is there on the plate at both restaurants.

“We’re not trying to be Northern Italian,” said Cataldi. “We’re more of a family place that makes Italian-American food: simple dishes done right with a little bit more care than most places are willing to do.”

THE LOCALE

Cataldi sure found himself a great spot for A3. It’s adjacent to Solstice in downtown Kingston, although the buildings couldn’t be more different. Solstice is set back off the road in Kingston’s beautiful old train station, and A3 is a white, single-story building right on the street. Its only signage is the digits A and 3 etched on its windows. If you don’t see it, just turn in at the sign for Solstice, which shares the same driveway entrance.

The 38-seat space is a very pretty, bright, pleasing room with windows on two sides, wooden floors and tables, white tin ceiling squares, crisp white subway tiles, and yellow pendant lighting. There are high-top tables and countertop seating along the front window and overlooking the pizza ovens and kitchen. Center stage is a big 16-seat island with chairs on all four sides — perfect for a girls’ soccer team having pizza on a recent Thursday night.

ON THE MENU

A3 bills itself as a “pizza pasta parm” place, but there are also several types of crostini, meatballs, fried mozzarella, real salads with good protein add-ons, and a big antipasto plate. The margherita pizza ($19.50) has a terrific thin crust, and I love that Cataldi makes the big pie with both fresh and aged mozzarella. Order it perhaps with a side of his great meatballs ($10), which have a comforting, light texture. They’re served three to a plate topped with a dollop of whipped ricotta and served with a slice of toasted cheese bread. A3’s Caesar salad ($10.75) is a reminder of why this simple dish is a classic. The dressing is light (Cataldi also bottles it for sale), the croutons are made from homemade bread, and it’s dusted with fluffy, freshly grated Parmesan cheese. You can really bite into the strozzaprete pasta in the carbonara ($18), its creamy sauce made with house-made bacon and a sprinkling of bread crumbs. The shrimp scampi has a mild creamy sauce that’s topped with four perfectly cooked extra large shrimp. One of the things that makes A3 so good is a professionalism that gives the kitchen a consistency you can count on. That’s key.

A single Wellfleet oyster at Salt. Photo by Joan Wilder for the Boston Globe.

WHO’S IN CHARGE

Chef Johnny Sheehan has got himself his first restaurant on the Plymouth waterfront. Sheehan, who worked in Boston at Ken Oringer’s Clio and the remarkable but short-lived Liquid Art House, has partnered with co-owner Dan Casinelli and family to open Salt Raw Bar.

Casinelli, a Plymouth native, worked as a restaurant service consultant before opening Leena’s Kitchen across town in 2016. Meanwhile, the award-winning Sheehan, who graduated from Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Cambridge, loved Plymouth when cheffing at the town’s New World Tavern a few years back. Long acquainted, the two men reconnected at the 2018 Nantucket Food & Wine festival and a restaurant was born.

“I was very into working on something together because I know what Johnny’s capable of,” said Casinelli. The partners share a passion for serving guests fine food in the pleasurable environments that high hospitality can create. “We’re really excited to see more and more people sharing dishes and eating like a family.”

THE LOCALE

The owners gave the former Patrizia’s trattoria a facelift before opening in late 2018, but the 120-seat space didn’t need much. The pretty restaurant sprawls up a slight hillside from the street, set among the shops in the meandering Village Landing Marketplace. A beautiful front patio (peruse the outdoor sectional sofa for really comfy dining) overlooks the local scene and the harbor, and a covered side patio, up a little alleyway, offers shelter and extends the outdoor season. Inside, two dining rooms and two bars provide relaxed upscale seating.

ON THE MENU

Sheehan’s canvas is big and the menu he and Casinelli have created can only be called modern American cuisine — it’s full of flavors from all over the world. Sheehan deploys French sauces as easily as he does Asian influences while showcasing favorites featuring spices and preparations from regional America, Mexico, Italy, Peru, North Africa, and more. When developing the menu, the chef relied on good technique and fresh ingredients.

“I reached back to all the interesting flavors I love from across the globe,” said Sheehan.

Both lunch and dinner menus include creative raw fish dishes and a complement of small, large, and (at dinner) family-sized plates. Among the offerings are such diverse dishes as burgers and steak frites, salads, cheese dumplings, fried chicken marinated in Tikka Masala curry, lobster tagliatelle, seared salmon and halibut, and chateaubriand.

The service was just right on two recent visits and the kitchen sent out beautiful plates. Even a single Wellfleet oyster ($3) is given every respect: My friend’s arrived atop an earthenware bowl of ice with a slice of lemon and three sauces, including a deeply flavorful cherry mignonette. The fried cauliflower ($12) is a wonderful plate of tempura-like flowerets, seasoned with the Moroccan spice ras el hanout and scattered raisins and pistachios. The family-sized skillet of seafood fried rice ($34) is a gorgeous light summer dish studded with crab, shrimp, sausage, egg, peas, carrot, scallion, basil, and cilantro drizzled with a Peruvian spice aioli. The lobster roll ($19) is a big sandwich of lightly dressed lobster meat on that classic deliciousness that is a grilled brioche bun. On an overcast day, the Szechuan beef ramen ($17) hits the spot. This bowl of spicy broth is filled with wide slices of beef as velvety as pasta, shitake mushrooms, and noodles. I ate it with a porcelain spoon in one hand and a fork in the other. Yum.

Salt Raw Bar, 170 Water St., Plymouth, 774-283-4660, www.saltrawbarplymouth.com

Coconut shrimp

WHO’S IN CHARGE

Building a restaurant is never simple. After more than two years under construction, Mambo’s Kitchen & Bar at Nantasket Beach has finally opened. That’s a relief for owner-operator Anthony Ghosn, 33, who had hoped to open last summer.

“We had a lot of surprises during construction, down to the smallest thing,” said Ghosn, who has worked in restaurants and/or construction since graduating from Boston College.

Both he and co-owner Rabih Habchy grew up around family restaurants and have each owned various businesses over the last 10 years. Habchy still does (he owns a gas station), and Ghosn is at Mambo’s full time as its chef-owner-operator running the kitchen and overseeing everything else.

A view from Mambo’s rooftop deck

THE LOCALE

The partners snagged themselves a terrific spot at Nantasket Beach just across from the water. The property originally included a bit of undeveloped land and a derelict building on Nantasket Avenue, across from the Red Parrot.

After tearing down the building, the partners shoehorned an entirely new structure into the hillside as snugly as an oven fits into kitchen cabinets. The 40-seat main dining room and bar has a beachy-casual, yet solid, feel with its heavy wooden beams, stone floors, and wood ceiling.

Two large accordion windows span the front of the dining room and open completely so sitting inside is a lot like sitting outside. And for a better view of the ocean, there’s a great 60-seat rooftop patio. Or, there should be by the time you read this: The partners are waiting on a final inspection of the restaurant’s wheelchair lift. In winter, without the rooftop, the restaurant will shrink to a perfect size.

Mambo’s was worth the wait: It’s a great new year-round kitchen and bar as well as a new piece of restaurant real estate for the small seaside town of Hull.

ON THE MENU

On a nice day, it feels real good to sit at Mambo’s and grab a meal. It’s that kind of place. And, the kitchen obliges nicely, offering a dozen or so very good pizzas, creative sandwiches on homemade bread, a sampling of appetizers, big salads, burgers, and more.

The house-baked wraps Ghosn is making for Mambo’s sandwiches are reason enough to go there. They’re a wonderful cross between Syrian bread and pizza dough, but better. I’ve had them with several sandwiches in the past few weeks, and like them more each time, and the fillings, too.

I’d order all of these again: the Mediterranean hummus sandwich ($8); the Bluefin (tuna salad) sandwich ($8); the Greco grilled chicken sandwich ($9.50); and the grilled veggie monster with provolone cheese ($8).

The pizza list is long and they all come in two sizes. A sweet balsamic drizzle atop the Lighthouse pizza ($12/$17) is a delicious surprise; the old-fashioned cheese pizza ($8.50/$12.50) perfectly satisfying; and the Gunrock ($12/$17) the best of the three. It has long strips of sweet and hot peppers, tiny bites of sausage, and fluffy hunks of ricotta cheese.

The calamari ($11) is beautifully done: Served with a homemade remoulade, they’re light and go ever so nicely with the thick and delicious fries ($4) in the salty air. The coconut shrimp ($10) are very coconutty, but done in such a light batter, they find their way to your mouth and melt there. The garden salad ($7) I had one night was a very large bowl of a much-appreciated blend of fresh, crispy romaine, mesclun, and iceberg lettuces. Ordered with the good, grilled chicken add-on ($3), it’s a hit at $10.

WHO’S IN CHARGE

Thank goodness for consistent neighborhood restaurants we can count on to have good food when we want a satisfying meal and don’t have time to shop, cook, or go out. I’m partial to family-run places and the Karavasilis family, who own and operate Cohasset’s Olympus Grille, gives families a great name.

Olympus serves the dishes Anastasia Karavasilis grew up eating with her mother and grandmother in Katerini, Greece, and her Boston-born sons, Steven and Jordan, take care of everything else. “We serve family recipes handed down generation to generation, through my mother and grandmother and her grandmother,” said Steven.

One or both brothers has always been at the restaurant when I’ve stopped in on occasion over the last five years to get my go-to faves: the avgolemono soup (it’s chicken and rice with lemon) and the butter beans. Since branching out lately, I’ve discovered how well Olympus does other dishes, too. The brothers always seem to be both efficient and relaxed when taking your order. They also do hospitable things like throw in some terrific tzatziki (they know you want it) and not mention it.

THE LOCALE

This is an everyday eatery: The lights don’t have dimmers. Two sidewalk tables, with red umbrellas, however, ratchet up the desirability factor big time, especially since the restaurant is set back well off the road. If you’re crazy about sitting outside, remember Olympus. The 22-seat spot is one storefront in the stretch of good-looking stores and second-floor residences that constitute Old Colony Square at Cohasset Station on Route 3A. It has eight indoor tables, including two set in nooks next to the front windows. A counter for ordering sits adjacent to a glass cabinet filled with cold sides, and a stainless kitchen extends to the rear where you can sometimes see Anastasia cooking.

ON THE MENU

The tourlou: a rustic baked dish of large hunks of eggplant, carrots, zucchini, onion, potatoes, and garlic in olive oil

Olympus does all the foods you’d expect: wraps, gyros, skewers, fried appetizers, salads, and a different daily entree assigned to each weekday (so if they have stuffed peppers, you know it’s Monday, etc.). The aforementioned meaty and mild butter beans ($4.69) are huge limas somehow baked to deliciousness. For a non-meat meal, they’re wonderful with another hot side, the tourlou ($4.69). It’s a rustic, baked dish of large hunks of eggplant, carrots, zucchini, onion, potatoes, and garlic in olive oil. Entrees are served with your choice of hot sides, all five of which are wonderful, and an iceberg Greek salad (feta, olives, grape tomatoes, red onion) with a dressing I don’t love, but there’s good olive oil and vinegar on the tables. (Iceberg gets a bad rap, but I like it because it holds up well and delivers some crispy rawness to your meal.) We enjoyed the grilled shrimp skewers with rice ($16.69) and ordered the roasted potatoes (quartered, peeled potatoes seasoned with a bit of lemon and olive oil) to go with the good grilled chicken skewers ($15.99). The Karavasilis’s (vegan) grape leaves ($4.59) are lovely bundles of tangy leaves enclosing creamy herbed rice. Friday’s special — the tender baked lamb ($18.59) — is served with home-style green beans in a light tomato sauce and Thursday’s moussaka ($14.99) is to die for: a square serving of the mouth-watering eggplant and ground beef casserole, with béchamel sauce, topped with whipped potatoes. Absolutely try it.

Olympus Grille, 132 Chief Justice Cushing Highway, Cohasset, 781-923-1917, www.olympusgrille.com .

Joan Wilder can be reached at joan.wilder@gmail.com.

The chicken & waffle Benedict includes locally sourced eggs, maple syrup, chives, buttermilk, cheese, and butter. (BRIAN SAMUELS)

IN THE KITCHEN

Evidently, there are 720 ways you can reorder six objects in a row. To my way of thinking, that’s about the same number of ways you can love what people do with food.

Chandra Gouldrup, chef-owner of The Farmer’s Daughter in Easton, inspires that love through her passion for local foods and layers and layers of flavor. Gouldrup, who won WGBH’s 2016 Culinary Stewardship Award, makes the labor-intensive and costly effort to do everything she can to further humane animal husbandry and a sustainable food chain. She buys as many of the restaurant’s foods as possible from area vendors, farmers, and makers.

(JOAN WILDER)

Growing up with a Sicilian mother and a father who’d been raised on a farm, Gouldrup found her way from the backyard garden into the kitchen early in life, and hasn’t strayed. It’s reassuring to see the chef at a place, and on one recent visit she popped out of the kitchen twice, delivering plates to guests.

THE LOCALE

The town of Easton seems to enjoy a low profile (few people I mentioned it to could place it, it’s near Brockton), but Gouldrup is changing that. The Farmer’s Daughter opened in 2013, drawing crowds for breakfast and lunch. In 2017, Gouldrup opened Towneship, for dinner, just up the street in a converted church. The restaurants anchor a main street that is both so quaint and so upscale it might be a Hollywood set.

Inside, The Farmer’s Daughter is country-chic made real by a couple thousand days of packed houses and dishes served. The 52-seat space has wooden floors and tables, a well-outfitted bar, large photos of scenes around town, banquets, and blackboards. On both my visits, there was a line, but people seemed happy to wait in rocking chairs on the sidewalk. And, joy of joys, outdoor tables give guests the option of eating al fresco when the weather is so nice you just can’t consider anything else.

ON THE MENU

Many of the breakfast dishes at The Farmer’s Daughter (breakfast and lunch are served all day) are unique brunch-like specialties. Take the chicken & waffle Benedict ($16.95) (and you should): This dish alone (in early May) had at least six foods Gauldrup sourced nearby: eggs from Raynham’s Feather Brook Farms; maple syrup from Hollis Hills Farm in Fitchburg; chives from Easton’s Langwater Farm; buttermilk from Kate’s Homemade Butter in Maine; cheese from Grafton Village Cheese in Vermont; and butter from Vermont’s Cabot. The result is luscious forkfuls of crispy, brined chicken sauced with spilled yoke and some savory waffle clinging to bits of sweet bacon jam and the rich wetness of hollandaise.

At the same meal, I also ordered a single (crazy good) banana pancake ($7.95), with caramelized bananas and pecans, real maple syrup, and cinnamon honey butter.

Lunch options include bowls, sandwiches, and various sides as good as mains. The Sandwich Formerly Known As “Smoked Steak + Cheese” ($16.95) was a big old thing — enough for two — and so was Tad’s chicken salad ($16.95), which was sided with the treasure of ripe fruit.

The lamb grilled cheese ($16.95) was wildly over-salted, but one of the sides that come with sandwiches — the chickpea and black rice salad — was resolutely delicious and joins several other vegan options on the large, creative menu. The breakfast burrito ($10.95) was a very satisfying workaday meal: a grilled burrito filled with scrambled eggs, cheddar, black beans, hunks of ripe avocado, chewy black quinoa, and sided with local baby greens. You might want to peruse the menus online before your visit: There’s so much beautiful food here.

The Farmer’s Daughter, 122 Main St., North Easton, 508-297-0287,

www.thefarmersdaughtereaston.com.

Fire & Stone fans, Aerosmith’s Joe Perry and his wife Billie at home in Duxbury with a quartet of Jeffcote’s pizzas. Photo Aaron Perry

IN THE KITCHEN There’s something so easy about takeout: You don’t have to get dressed, for one thing. But where to get good takeout in the suburbs? It’s usually an afterthought at restaurants and you might want higher quality fare than you can get at a fast-food place. This was Christopher Jeffcote’s thinking when he decided to open Fire & Stone Trattoria in Duxbury for takeout only. “In the takeout industry there are no expectations about the food, but we’ve flipped that around,” Jeffcote said. “We make almost everything from scratch and take immense pride in our sourcing. Our whole motivation is to do something different.”

Duxbury’s Fire & Stone takeout trattoria photo Joan Wilder

THE LOCALE Fire & Stone started in 2015 when Jeffcote, a stone mason, built a shack with two wood-fired ovens in a parking lot and started making pizza as a summer side thing. When business exploded and a space opened up across the street, Jeffcote expanded into a year-round restaurant with a full menu. Fire & Stone is a pleasing storefront in a pretty cedar-shingled building in the new part of the old Millbrook Station. The airy space is almost all kitchen, with a counter for ordering and another in the front window with a couple of stools. Two 6-foot-deep, stone, wood-fired ovens blaze along one wall. The wooden planks of the vaulted ceiling are painted in watery tones, and stacks of wood are piled for feeding the fires.

Jeffcote’s fig and goat cheese burger made with beef from a family farm in Vermont. Photo Aaron Perry

ON THE MENU You have to love a chef who can recite the (arcane) Italian regulations governing how a real Neapolitan pizza must be made, uses high-quality olive oil in his dishes, and gets his antibiotic-free beef from a family farm in Vermont.

“We’ve got three kinds of customers,” Jeffcote said. “The kind that call us a pizza place, the kind that call us a burger place, and the kind that call us a fish place.” That’s about the size of Fire & Stone’s menu, but it doesn’t convey the whole story. The restaurant also offers salads, appetizers, sides, and a variety of wonderful sandwiches made with the Italian flatbread piadina.

I love the grilled (vegetarian) three-cheese eggplant piadina ($9), with its meaty strips of roasted eggplant, spinach, red peppers, and cheeses. Good, too, is the satisfying Italian meatball piadina ($9) thick with slices of meatballs in marinara topped with provolone and Parmigiano-Reggiano. It’s as weighty as a meatball sub, but the thin, grilled piadina holds everything together deliciously without adding the bulk of a roll. Half-pound burgers, sided with great fries, come with a variety of toppings. The fig and goat cheese version ($12) is all a burger can be. Served on a bun from Plymouth’s Hearth Artisan Bread, the sandwich delivers a salty sweetness from the fig and pancetta and the luscious gooeyness of warm goat cheese. Jeffcote’s pizzas are beautiful, too: their thin crusts blistered and charred lightly. Pizzas are individually priced and start at $10 for a 14-inch pie. Each can also be ordered in a smaller, personal size, making it inviting to sample various kinds. Sven and Kristoff’s creation ($20/$11) is a beautiful pie with a caramelized onion and mushroom reduction that lends a rich flavor to its mozzarella, chorizo, and wood-grilled asparagus toppings. The good haddock sandwich ($12), like the house haddock and chips ($15), comes with fab fries and delicious homemade tartar sauce. Always order the fried dough ($5): It’s a large warm oval of crispy, yet light and flaky, dough topped with a bit of butter, cinnamon, and sugar. It’s a rustic confection that’s as sweet as can be.

Fire & Stone Trattoria, 285 Saint George St., Duxbury, 781-934-6310, www.fireandstoneduxbury.com.

Joan Wilder can be reached at joan.wilder@gmail.com.