Alba

Twenty minutes south of downtown Boston, in Quincy Center, Alba has served prime steak and seafood since 2001. White tablecloths, a raw bar, the kind of room people book for an anniversary. What makes it worth the drive, for anyone tracing where Albanian America actually is, is the person who built it.

Leo Keka left Albania in 1990 by swimming across a lake into Montenegro. He spent about a year in a Serbian prison and in refugee camps before he reached Massachusetts, where he started out washing dishes at Anthony's Pier 4. Roughly a decade later, weeks after September 11, he opened a restaurant of his own. It is still here, and it has since grown into a small group of them across the South Shore.

Nothing on the menu is Albanian, and that is part of why it belongs in this series. Alba is not a heritage restaurant. It is the quieter kind of evidence: a man who arrived with nothing and built an American institution that has lasted more than twenty years. A lot of Albanian America looks exactly like this — carrying no flag on the sign, recognizable only if you know the name behind the door. This is one you can sit down in.

No one paid to be here. We don't take money to be recommended. This piece was put together from public reporting — Leo Keka's escape and early years are as he described them to NBC Boston — and the restaurant's own listings. We haven't eaten there ourselves.