Restaurants in Wakefield

For 25 years, Marina Bay has funneled fresh breezes into The Chantey at Marina Bay's dining room, where it stirs up aromas from burgers, pizza, sandwiches, and seafood. Since they work a shell's throw away from the sea, the kitchen staff has a surfeit of fresh ingredients to work with when crafting fried-clam strips, baked haddock, and steamed lobster. They also make liberal use of the kitchen’s barbecue sauce, splashing it onto the Chantey burger, the grilled-chicken sandwich, and the chicken that dots the barbecue pizza. Seated at booths, high tables, or the bar, eaters can augment their meals with cups of New England clam chowder or appetizer plates of fried calamari served with banana peppers. Outside, a white picket fence surrounds a handful of patio tables and crab cakes that still aren’t ready to be reintroduced into the wild.

In the midst of crimson booths and dark wood tables, the nimble fingers of bustling pastry chefs carefully arrange a medley of sweets atop an open-air dessert stage, their every movement reflected by overhead mirrors to give diners an better view of the decadence they'll soon enjoy. It is this artistic and reverent approach to confections that embodies each dish at Finale Desserterie & Bakery, an upscale sweetness haven initiated by a duo of Harvard Business School graduates. The team crafts each morsel with the grace of a swan's choreographer as they put an inventive spin on classics such as crème brûlée. Although the desserterie specializes in the sweet stuff, savory cravings find satisfaction in salads, pizza, and pasta selections, many of which balance palates with suggested wine pairings.

Trattoria Bella Mia's historic Cabot Street location bespeaks a rich and cultured dining experience. The neat brick exterior gives way to a warm restaurant setting where creatively tweaked Italian classics thrive—patrons can savor pork tenderloin at tables or compose sonnets to beef carpaccio at the bar, whose overhanging lanterns cast down just enough light to read minds by. Diners are reminded of the fun of feasting by the nightly shrimp-juggling competitions and regularly scheduled live music. House favorites NightCap play the songs of yesterday and today, with vocals contributed by Katie O'Brien and chords from Steve Coffill's ticklish keyboards.

Cast in dim, incandescent light creeping out of the dining room’s decorative lanterns, Kasbah Restaurant's cushy seats surround tables filled with slow-simmered tagines, fluffy couscous, and tapas plates selected from a menu of Moroccan fare. The chicken tangiers’ apricot-kissed sherry sauce helps it maintain its status as the restaurant’s best seller, but the house specialty is the fried calamari, which arrives dotted with cherry peppers and doused in a secret sauce whose recipe is only known by the kitchen’s chef and the mayor of Casablanca. An expansive drink list showcases the eatery's carefully crafted martinis and homemade sangria, and weekly events invite belly dancers to shimmy to the sounds of a live Middle Eastern band.

From 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. every single day, chefs sizzle and deliver classic American food at Omelette Headquarters. At breakfast, eggs bundle into innovative omelets or join bacon and waffles to serve as a more pleasant beginning to the day than waking up to the apocalypse or, worse yet, the discovery that Earth ran out of bacon. Lunch, available every day except Sunday, encourages patrons to chomp into crisp salads and fries-complemented club sandwiches. The eatery also presents daily specials, the recent roster of which has included a meat lovers omelet brimming with steak tips, ham, sausage, bacon, and a mozzarella-bonding agent.

The Creperie on Newbury's chefs fill their versatile canvas, the crepe, with upscale international flavors both savory and sweet. For dinner, forks tuck into crepes filled with seafood or inspired by normally crepe-free dishes. For instance, the chicken burrito crepe conceals black beans, pico de gallo, romaine, and cheddar, and peking duck crepes brim with cucumbers, jasmine rice, and ginger-hoisin sauce.

Most of the dessert crepes are lavished with chocolate or fruit; chefs also whip up their own chocolate mousse with rum and coffee in-house. Tables can peruse a list of wines almost exclusively from France or hop on the bar's smooth white countertop to request a signature cocktail by tap-dancing its name in Morse code.