Photo: PhotoCo./Flickr

Today on Radio Boston, co-host Mehgna Chakrabarti speaks with Charlotte Silver, daughter of Upstairs on the Square co-owner Deborah Hughes, about Charlotte au Chocolat, Silver’s new memoir recounting her childhood years at the iconic Harvard Square eatery Upstairs at the Pudding.

It’s a thoughtful interview, with Silver recalling the Pudding as “…a fabulously theatrical place” where she used to nap underneath the bar and eat pheasant for dinner. Yet beyond the period specific, back-in-time look at Harvard Square when the subway had just been built and Pudding chefs such as her dad could still smoke cigarettes behind the line, Silver feels her memoir carries a universal message — one that transcends the exotic-sounding details of her restaurant girlhood. It involves education, fun and magic, those quintessential ingredients of childhood.

Listen to the interview.