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From the 33rd floor the best view in Boston is matched by impeccable service and a litany of luxury menu items, including caviar.

Light, fresh, delicately

nuanced, and artistically presented international cuisine is complemented by soaring post-modern architecture.

Formerly known as the Old Corner Bookstore, this enduring spot on the Freedom Trail remains one of the most tangible sites associated with the writers of the New England Renaissance of the last half of the 19th century. Both the Atlantic Monthly magazine and Ticknor & Fields (publishers of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau) made this modest structure its headquarters during an age when Boston was the literary, intellectual, and publishing center of the country. The store now features daily papers, books maps, and special editions and reprints of the Boston Globe newspaper.

When the Custom House was built in 1840, Boston was one of America’s largest overseas shipping ports, and customs fees were the mainstay of the Federal budget. The Neo-Classical structure once sat on the waterfront, but now stands two blocks inland. The 16-story Custom House tower, added in 1913, was Boston’s first skyscraper. Since the 1990s, peregrine falcons have nested in the clock tower under the watchful eyes of wildlife biologists. The lobby displays a few artifacts from the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, and tours of the tower give sweeping harbor views.

This pedestrian shopping area is flanked by Filene’s and Macy’s department stores but is given its real life by the pushcart vendors and downtown office workers who fill the streets.

This retro lounge lizard bar-restaurant jumps after work and on weekend nights with downtown execs. Cosmopolitan cocktails are top notch (see Good Life Downtown).

The new Ritz offers old American favorites in a dizzyingly designed dual-level dining room with an exhibition kitchen at center stage.

Crisp formality characterizes this sumptuous, traditional French restaurant. Think roasted rack of lamb crusted with Niçoise olives. Excellent wine list also.