The plethora of restaurants and the eclectic mix of businesses on Railroad Street helped land the town on a list of the "15 Best Small Towns in New England."
The story hits the streets in today's Boston magazine, according to Matthew Watkins, a spokesman for the publication.
"[The magazine] was looking for uniqueness in each community," said Watkins.
Great Barrington is the only Berkshire County town on the list, and it joins Harvard and Shelburne Falls as three Massachusetts towns in the top 15.
Three towns each in New Hampshire, Connecticut and Vermont, and two towns in Maine and one in Rhode Island rounded out the rest of the "best small towns."
In the cover story, Great Barrington is home to the Berkshires' own "restaurant row," which includes a cheesemonger (Rubiner's), an old-time general store (Gorham and Norton's), and a co-op market (the Berkshire Co-Op) all within a few blocks of each other.
"Yet the real allure of Great Barrington is Railroad Street," the magazine concludes. The street has "enough culinary delights to fill a weekend visit from beginning to end."
The magazine is obviously referring to a block with an award-winning breakfast spot (Martin's), an award-winning Japanese restaurant (Bizen), a well-regarded "New American" restaurant (Allium), one of the top ice cream restaurants in the country (Soho) and the recently revived 20 Railroad Street,
"This is a real organic town," said Robert Navarino, a spokesman for the Downtown Merchants Association, and the owner of the Chef Shop, a kitchen appliance store on Railroad Street.
"With only a few exceptions, the downtown features a lot of locally owned, independent businesses," he said. "The downtown area in particular is sophisticated and utterly unique."
Navarino opined that Railroad Street stood out because "there is not a single chain store on the street. Wherever you go in this country, you see the same stores in every town. When you come to Great Barrington, you see a downtown that doesn't look like any other town in the country. And when you come onto Railroad Street, you see something very unlike the rest of the world.
"Our downtown meets and often exceeds what you see in a lot of other downtowns. That ‘cookie-cutter' sameness that you see in a lot of downtowns is not here in Great Barrington."
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