Food: Best of the Bay State - Massachusetts Restaurant Roundup

Like most cities, Boston has its fair share of great dining options, but eating out in Massachusetts as a whole can be hit and miss.  Here are the best places my friends and I found during our summer vacation:

Santarpio's Pizza - This Boston mainstay is well over a hundred years old.  If you go to the original location in East Boston near the airport, street parking will be hard to find (your best bet is to use their lot under the overpass, but it fills up fast).  While Santarpio's is best known for their pizza, they grill a variety of delicious meats, including this awesome Italian sausage.

Aama Lama - There are a fair number of Himalayan restaurants in the Boston metro area, and the best one we went to was Aama Lama, a tiny place in Malden. I don't profess to be an expert in this type of cuisine, but there were a whole bunch of Nepalese people eating there, and the food tasted great - delicious momo, pakodas, and sukuti.

Marylou's Coffee - I am old enough to remember when Barnie's Coffee ruled Florida malls, and stepping into Marylou's Coffee gave me that same feeling: sweet-smelling flavored coffee, piles of premade muffins and other baked goods, and a distinct pink decor that, while certainly corporate, was less generic than a Starbucks. More importantly, Marylou's brews some of the best flavored decaf iced coffee I've ever had, and, with dozens of locations in south Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it was not hard to find one.

KKatie's Burger Bar - Plymouth has a raft of decent-but-not-memorable restaurants downtown, so we opted for something a little more casual - KKatie's Burger Bar. It's a small, family-friendly local chain serving up good burgers and beer in the South Shore. The "frickles" (fried dill pickle chips and banana peppers) and fried green beans (not breaded) were unusual, and pretty good.

Coffee Obsession - The Shining Sea Bikeway provides easy biking access to Woods Hole along with beautiful ocean views, and Coffee Obsession's two locations smartly bracket the Bikeway: one location is at the start point in Falmouth, right near the bike rentals, and the other is at the endpoint in Woods Hole, right near the ferry to Martha's Vineyard. Both locations offer pretty good coffee and tea drinks, as well as public restrooms.

Ziggy's - Finding dairy-free almond milk ice cream is a chore anywhere, but we found it was especially hard near the beach in Plymouth. One happy exception was Ziggy's, which has been there since 1957. The ice cream was great, the location was convenient, and the people couldn't have been nicer.

Neptune Oyster - For our last meal in Boston, we wanted to go out with a bang, so we grabbed a table at Neptune Oyster, a Michelin Guide-recommended seafood restaurant that typically has a long line to get in. The raw oysters themselves were good, but the real standout was the lobster roll, which is probably the best in the city.