Worth going out of the WAY for!

Last Sunday night, my family and I had dinner at Waypoint in Cambridge. The restaurant is very big with dim lighting. There's a shellfish bar near where you walk in, and an open kitchen. I liked the open kitchen because I could watch if somebody lifted me up.

Checking out the kitchen!

It took a while to place our order, but once we did, the food came out quickly. We started with Kenny's bread plate, which came with seaweed butter and white bean and squid ink dip. There wasn't very much bread, especially considering that we had to order it and usually you get a bigger complimentary bread basket. But I loved the butter and the dip.

We had two kinds of oysters, Ichabod Flats, and some from Barnstable. I prefer smaller oysters because the big ones are too hard for me to swallow. Maybe when I'm a grown-up it will be easier with a bigger mouth! The oysters came with pickled fennel mignonette and fish pepper cocktail sauce. I really liked the mignonette. I don't like cocktail sauce on oysters, but other people thought that the fish pepper made this cocktail sauce very distinctive.

Next we had two crudo, a madai crudo that came with smoked onion marmalade, buttermilk and rye, and an ora king crudo, with burnt orange, szechuan and anchovy salt. They were both very good, but the madai was my favorite. It was so good that after we ate it, my mom ordered a second one!

The madai crudo is the one in front, and the ora king salmon is behind.

My brother's favorite dish was soup dumplings. I really liked them too. Soup dumplings are exactly what they sound like, dumplings with soup in the middle. They taste very good, but the soup can be hot and they can be messy, so you need to be careful! We ate six orders!!

Pork and crab soup dumplings

The radish and apple salad was another favorite. I really liked the large pieces of shaved carrot. I also liked the dressing, which was a berbere vinaigrette. I learned that berbere is a spice mixture that is used in Ethiopia and Eritrea, which are countries in Africa.

You can see some of the shaved carrots beneath the lettuce!

We all loved the blue crab and winter citrus salad with farro, tarragon, charred fennel, and shaved jalepeno. It wasn't too spicy, even though it had jalepeno in it. The crab and farro were my favorite parts. I love farro, which is a grain like rice but chewier, and I think it's better! I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make sushi with farro...

We also had the overnight roasted tomato pie, which was a pizza with basil oil and fried garlic crumbs. The basil oil made it look very artistic and pretty. It was a lighter color than pesto, even though that is made with basil and oil too. The crust was very pouffy and chewy.

We ordered the king crab special, which came with celery root puree and chanterelles. This was one of my dad's favorites. He liked the celery root puree, which was very rich and buttery.

The octopus polpetti was my favorite. Polpetti is an Italian word for meatball. I had never had an octopus meatball before, but I liked it! They came with spaccatelli, which is a pasta shape that looks like a small, rolled-up spa towel, mint, chilies, garum, which is a fermented fish sauce, and ricotta salata. Ricotta salata is a kind of cheese, but it's not super soft like regular ricotta; you can cut it into pieces. The mint added lots of flavor and went very well with the dish.

The staff was very nice. One of the bussers heard my mom telling my little sister that we didn't have any more shrimp cocktail, and she brought my sister a few more shrimp! The service was a little bit slow though, and at the the end, my mom had to bring the check up to pay because nobody ever came to get her credit card. But overall I think that Waypoint is a great restaurant and that the food is very creative and unusual, which makes it fun to eat there!