MIDA, an Italian neighborhood restaurant located at 782 Tremont St. in the South End, has been named one of OpenTable’s top 100 “Neighborhood Gems” in the U.S.
Responding Tuesday, Sept. 14, to the good news, Chef Douglass Williams, the owner of and the culinary titan behind MIDA Boston, as well as MIDA Newton and now, APIZZA, wrote in an email to this reporter: “What a week this has been! Today we are opening APIZZA in Boston at Hub Hall, this past weekend I was lucky enough tobe in Aspen celebrating Best New Chefs honorees, and now OpenTable has shared this list of the top 100 Neighborhood Gems in the country. “
Chef Williams continued, “That’s what we are all about at MIDA – community and neighborhood. I used to ride my bike past this location, and I thought wow, this corner could be something special. It could be a bridge between the South End and Roxbury. And now here we are, into our fourth year of MIDA South End, and I am truly just extraordinarily, deeply grateful. We used to think a snowstorm was a big deal, but the people came. Now we’ve been fighting this pandemic, and our neighborhood supported us through the darkest days and nights. We are all still pulling together,
doing our best to support one another, to take care of one another, and that’s what it is all about. “If MIDA can bring some comfort to our neighbors on a tough day, or share some joy on a great day, then that’s what a neighborhood
the restaurant wants to do. I’ve always said the world can come together over a beautiful bowl of pasta, let’s do it right here in our neighborhood,” added Chef Williams. OpenTable, an online service for making restaurant reservations,
analyzed its internal data generated solely from diner reviews collected between April 1, 2020, and March 31, 2021, according to the company, and restaurants with a minimum “overall” score and number of qualifying reviews were included for consideration. Qualifying restaurants were then scored and sorted according to the sum of tags for
which “neighborhood gems” and “outdoor dining” was selected as a special feature. MIDA was one of five OpenTable
“Neighborhood Gems” in Massachusetts and one of only two in the City of Boston, with Ma Maison on Beacon Hill being the other.