BOSTON BOUNDS BACK

by John Mariani

    Can restaurateurs sniff out a recovery when everyone else has the jitters? It would seem so in Boston, where a slew of well-financed new restaurants have opened just as the city’s economy is showing signs of a small boom driven by high tech. In fact, the nation’s largest private sector construction project is set along Boston’s waterfront, anchored by a new $900 million, 1.1 million square-foot office building developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. Already on the scene is Legal Harborside at Liberty Wharf, a venture of the Legal Seafood chain, which has 18 casual restaurants and markets in Massachusetts and units in nine other states.
    The new two-story restaurant is President & CEO Roger Berkowitz’s answer to all those who keep asking him when he would open a true fine dining restaurant. Legal Harborside, set on what used to be Jimmy’s Harborside for 85 years, is three stories and 20,000 square feet, making it the largest restaurant in Boston. The first floor (left) is as casual as other Legal eateries, with a great bar (below) but the second floor is done in the sleek style of an ocean liner, with curved rosewood ceilings and black, mast-like columns. The wine list carries bottlings no other restaurant in Massachusetts has.
    The third floor is a 150-seat rooftop bar designed to look like a ship’s deck. Open now for only a month, the two dining levels are packed every night, with crowds spilling out onto the rooftop patio.  The menu lists fourteen species of oysters, all from cold northern waters from Cape Cod to British Columbia. Chefs Rich Vellante and Robert Fathman do a splendidly rich lobster soup dashed with sherry under a cap of buttery puff pastry, and while his tempura of soft shell crab with grits and white asparagus is the epitome of summer food, the accompanying squid ink vinaigrette is anything but. The simply sautéed grey sole, however, gains a great deal of flavor and texture from crab-stuffed squash blossoms, a green garlic velouté, and charred spring onion relish. For dessert go for the brûléed mascarpone cheesecake with minted berries and a brandy snap.
     Three of Boston’s most highly respected chefs have opened downtown. Michael Schlow, who also runs Radius and Via Matta, has debuted Tico near the Hancock Center, with a menu based on his own extensive travels in Spain and Latin America. He and head chef Joshua Smith are exemplary in being among American chefs who have turned a serious eye on Latino cuisine without going the molecular route.
         Tico is two large, colorful rooms, with an open kitchen, mismatched tables and reclaimed wood, with an outdoor fireplace on the patio. Scores of tequila bottles are backlighted at the bar (below).    The long menu of small plates is convincing evidence of just how far Latino spices and flavors have come beyond the usual Mexican and tapas fare. Tico’s tacos are terrific, juicy and well-seasoned, like the two-texture beef with morita chilies. From the Spanish plancha griddle comes quail with mango and yellow aji peppers, and tostados are piled high with tuna tartare.  The now requisite crispy pork belly, decadently fatty, is enhanced with sweet onions and mustard.
         Best ideas is to go with Tico’s “Can’t Decide” menu, chosen by the chef for the whole table.  Pray they include the creamy, buttered sweet corn with bacon, chilies, and Thai basil.
         Adjacent to the Hynes Convention Center in Back Bay is Boston’s newest big splurge restaurant—Towne Stove & Spirits, the glamorous, two-level spectacular run by Lydia Shire and Jasper White, both veteran chef-restaurateurs who since the 1980s have been innovators in Beantown. Shire took over the venerable but creaking Locke-Öber Café and turned it around, and two years ago opened one of the city’s best new Italian restaurants, Scampo. White, also  in the vanguard of the  mid-1980s New New England Cuisine movement, runs five Summer Shack seafood houses. Here they've combined forces to winning advantage.
         At Towne the two of them have put everything they know into high-end dining with a swank downstairs bar. Up a grand staircase, past glass walls and polished wood railings, you enter a two-level dining room  (right) that seats 300 people in roomy booths with starched linens, yet none of it is very formal; instead the rooms have a free-flowing, brash swagger about them.
         In that spirit, the menu offers 11 different preparations of lobster, but the one you must not miss is the lobster popover so hefty with lobster meat and so delicious you could make a lunch of it. But then you’d miss the skewer of swordfish and octopus scented with bay leaf and grilled over a wood fire, with a citrus vinaigrette and pearls of cous cous. Shire and White, along with executive chef Mario Capone, don’t seem to care a whit for dainty food, so their sugar-smoked Peking chicken—the whole mahogany-colored bird—is brought lavishly to your table and sliced, served with sweet potatoes; it’s an over-the-top, irresistible masterpiece and should become Towne’s signature dish.  If there’s any room at the end of your meal, at least share the brown sugar angel food cake with caramel ice cream and maple cotton candy.  Towne is out to blow your doors off.
    Bina (left), while not new, is a downtown Italian restaurant with a new chef, Will Foden, who works under executive chef-owner Azita Bina-Seibel and her brother Babak Bina. It's one of the best modern styled restaurants in a conservative town--minimalist, with huge windows on the street,   creamy, sandy tones punctuated with bright colors and expressionist artwork.  To the side is a groceria offering Italian foods and ingredients.  The quality of the ingredients is immediately evident in their stuzzicare (snacks, at $3 each), like lamb meatballs with goat's cheese fondue and truffled lardo.  An antipasto of sformato robiola cheese with asparagus and egg is delicious, and there are several crudi raw fish options.
    For a pasta try the ravioli "malfatti," formless ravioli with brown butter, or the sweet and savory cavatelli with rabbit ragù pear and truffle cheese. Bina is one of those rare Italian restaurants where the main courses, secondi, are even better than what precedes them.  I really liked the braised breast of veal with a pleasingly mild anchovy puree, and the Arctic char with onion puree, snaps peas, and guanciale is a marvelous mix of sea and land. There's also porchetta pig with vin santo sauce. All these entrees run under $30.

    Island Creek Oyster Bar (below) is a whole lot more than an oyster bar. It's a big, loud rollicking restaurant adjacent to one of Boston's best hotels, The Commonwealth, and Fenway Park Field, making it ideal for a pre-game supper. Owners Jeremy Sewall and Skip Bennett maintain close daily relationships with their purveyors, not least New Englands' oystermen, whose names you'll find on the seasonal menu. It's a happy place and people are clearly having a good time just being here, and it's hard to be disappointed by the array of shellfish (a platter enough for four is $78).
    Appetizers may include a few mussels renditions, perhaps with lemongrass broth and chili flakes, along with house-cured gravlax, and a pan-fried Jonah crab cake with apple and fennel salad. There are at least three lobster dishes, including the inevitable lobster roll with rosemary aïoli, chips and cole slaw (not the best lobster roll I've had in Boston).
    They don't fuss too much with the fine fish they serve, so that a line-caught cod comes with clams and artichokes; pan-seared skate has a saffron quinoa, baby bok choy and creamy scallion and yogurt raita; seared scallops come with a roasted mushroom ragôut, and lentil and lobster cream--a terrific idea. And don't forget to order a side or two, or three, of the buttery biscuits, baked beans (very difficult to find these days in Beantown), or crispy zucchini cakes.
    Desserts are a paean to sweetness Americana, with strawberry shortcake (but with basil ice cream?), doughnuts with strawberry-rhubarb jelly; and even a good old ice cream sandwich.  The wine list here is excellent.   

   The Cambridge neighborhood known as Area IV, between Kendall and Central Squares, near M.I.T., has burgeoned with bio tech companies like Dyax Genzyme on Technology Square, conveniently located across from the sleek, new, very casual Area Four restaurant.  There’s a fine bakery upfront, while the dining area, facing huge, handcrafted ovens, turns out an array of small plates that include a tangy seviche of wild Rhode Island striped bass, thin-crusted pizzas with toppings of Wellfleet cherry stone clams and bacon, mussels cooked in white ale with roasted tomatoes, and a few larger plates, with a mac & cheese of daunting richness that you will fight friends  over not to have to share it. This is a fine place to pick up breakfast, delightful for lunch, and doing great biz at dinner.
    Chef-owner Michael Leviton is happy turning out such desirable comfort food, including the dripping sundae of soft serve ice strawberry ice cream, marshmallow sauce, and chocolate almond meringue crunch. In keeping with the no frills ambiance, Area Four has communal tables and serves wines mostly from kegs and boxes along with 12 rotating beers on tap.
 
   In the same neck of the Cambridge woods in Bondir (left) a darling little dining room owned by Jason Bond, a midwesterner and chef for 20 years, so natural and wholesome are worthy descriptors of his farm-driven cuisine.  The menu, fairly lengthy for a small kitchen, therefore changes daily but when I visited it contained some lovely, full-flavored, ungimmicky food of a kind you might crave week after week. This summer we thoroughly enjoyed an excellent ceviche of blackback flounder with pea greens, chili oil vinaigrette and caramelized shallots with an aniseed tuile.  Scituate scallop was sweet and fattened, with roasted fiddlehead ferns, Swiss chard, and baby bok choy, chive and chervil broth.  Mallard duck breast came with a radish green pesto, black lentils and cornmeal cake, and the roasted venison leg with a honey and spice-glazed salsify and white wheatberry salad was a hit at our table. Only a dish of mint tagliatelle with peas, pancetta, spruce, fragrant cicely and ricotta was a mess--flavors that just didn't hang together and clashed with one another.
    Leviton has the balance right on a plate--the vegetables should share at least equally with the protein.  His is a menu I wouldn't mind feasting on if it were totally vegetarian. He does overdo the tangles of microgreens, but that's not a big problem with food this tasty.