Boston’s Best Locavore Restaurant: 60 Minutes with Urban Hearth’s Erin Miller
Foraging in the Cambridge woods with the James Beard-nominated chef.
Erin Miller in the wild. / Photograph by Ken Richardson
Most chefs source wild ingredients from specialty purveyors. Acclaimed chef Erin Miller sources hers from the area’s urban landscape. Her adventurous chef’s-counter tasting menus at Urban Hearth are built on hyper-local gems—wild lettuces, knotweed, walnuts—that she finds herself while foraging. It’s this direct relationship between her expeditions and exceptional locavore cuisine that makes Urban Hearth compelling. We recently joined the recent James Beard nominee on a morning trek through Cambridge to check out this connection firsthand.
7:30 a.m. “Once you’ve seen edible plants, once you understand what they are, you can’t unsee them,” Miller tells us as we set out on a short walk from her Cambridge home to one of her favorite foraging areas. Today, she’s armed with a basket, small bags, and a knife.
7:40 a.m. As we walk, Miller points out that forageable goods are closer than you think—even in residential areas, like the yard of an empty house (here, she plucks some wood sorrel), or public lands that are or have been farms for hundreds of years.
7:50 a.m. We’ve reached a patch of knotweed, an invasive—but incredibly tasty—species. Taking out her folding Opinel foraging knife, with a curved blade optimal for slicing plants, Miller searches for the perfect specimen, a little thick but tender and flexible. You can eat it raw, cold-pickle it, or macerate it in simple syrup (to use in cocktails), she says. “It’s a little bit sour, a good stand-in for rhubarb.”
8:00 a.m. We taste a bracing bite of garlic mustard as Miller discusses Urban Hearth’s “foragers seasonal salad,” a menu mainstay that changes to highlight whatever she’s gathering—garlic mustard flowers, wild lettuces, spinach-like lamb’s quarters (“our bread and butter this time of year”). She pauses to point out jewelweed, recognizable thanks to its “little Barbie shoes” when flowering.
8:10 a.m. We come upon walnut trees, a foraged ingredient that can affect the menu a year in advance. “When they’re still soft and green, we use them to make nocino, a walnut liqueur,” Miller says. “This fall, we’ll be drinking nocino from last fall. We’re making a Manhattan-style drink out of it.”
8:30 a.m. As the foraging trip ends, Miller reflects on the time she spends in the woods. “I keep talking about it being therapy. It’s my time to be silent, to think. Focusing on searching helps focus your mind. This is when I think about dishes and challenges I’ve been trying to puzzle through, and I have breakthroughs.”
Related: Best of Boston 2025, Dining
First published in the print edition of the July 2025 issue as part of the Best of Boston 50:Dining package.
