Restaurant Review: In the Lobby of the Whitney Hotel, Peregrine Soars

Can a pair of on-the-rise restaurateurs convince locals to eat dinner in the middle of a hotel lobby? With Peregrine, they just might.

In a way, Peregrine is a homecoming for chef Joshua Lewin and wine expert Katrina Jazayeri. Before they jointly opened Juliet, a European-style café-restaurant in Somerville, the couple met while Lewin was earning food-world notice as the chef at Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro. This past summer, they returned to the neighborhood with their own project: an idiosyncratic destination for Italian islands–inspired cuisine that nests a handful of tables directly within the lobby of the new boutique Whitney Hotel. (And I do mean within the lobby; you can see the check-in desk from certain tables.) To be sure, Peregrine wants to wow the transient traveler upstairs. But as an all-day, gratuity-inclusive restaurant, it also clearly aims to be the kind of refined yet familiar respite to which locals will want to return, at any hour on the clock.