Photo via Google, Boss RyderRino's Place
- Hours
- Today: 12:00 – 8:45 PM
- Best time
- Get your name on the list well before 8:45pm — that's the cutoff for the walk-in waitlist
- Getting there
- East Boston, a short walk from the Orient Heights stop on the Blue Line
Why it’s in the log
Rino's Place doesn't take phone reservations — it never has. Walk in, put your name on the list, and as long as the whole party is present by 8:45pm you'll be seated; miss the window and you're back at the end of the line. It's a small, no-frills dining room in East Boston's Eagle Hill area, and it fills up on word of mouth alone.
The menu changes by the day and is handwritten rather than printed, built around the kind of straightforward Italian-American cooking — meatballs, veal, house-made pasta — that a lot of restaurants advertise and few actually deliver from a kitchen this size. It's been a destination for Boston chefs and regulars alike for years, well outside the North End's more tourist-facing Italian strip.
Go hungry and go early if you want a shorter wait; there's no way to skip the line, and that's clearly by design.
What people said recently
From Google reviews · see all 1,513 ↗
“I'm not exaggerating when I say they have the BEST BRUSCHETTA!!!!! It was absolutely delicious, and the portion was so generous that we couldn't even finish the rest of our meal. We love our bolognese pasta and the lobster ravioli! A…”
“Had an amazing lunch at Rino’s today! We were lucky enough to find street parking right next to the restaurant. We arrived shortly after they opened on a Tuesday, so it was nice and quiet at first, but it filled up pretty quickly. We were…”
“Going to Rino’s for the first time with no expectations more than exceded my wildest dream. Of all days we went for lunch, my family and I went on Valentine’s Day. Rino opens at 3pm. If you got there any later than 2:45 you will not get a…”
