Nothing like the owner's touch
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Type: Spanish
Prices: Appetizers $2.50-$7.50; entrees $17-$22; desserts $3.50-$6.50
Good choices: Fresh anchovies, cherizo sausage, braised rabbit.
Hours: Sun.-Sat., 5:30-11 p.m.
Credit Cards: All major credit cards.
Access: Restrooms not handicapped accessible.
Other establishments in this review:
SANDRINE'S
8 Holyoke Street, Cambridge
(Harvard Square)
(617) 497-5300
Type: French
Prices: Appetizers $6-$16; entrees $16-$29; desserts $7.
Good Choices: Traditional flammekeuche, salmon with carrot scales.
Hours: Sun.-Thurs. 5:30-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 5:30-10:30 p.m.
Credit Cards: All major credit cards.
Access: Fully accessible.
Read previous Sandrine's review.
TREMONT 647
647 Tremont Street, Boston
(South End)
(617) 266-4600
Type: Tibetan
Prices: Appetizers $5.50-$8.50; entrees $16-$19.50; desserts $6.50.
Good Choices: Momos, braised lamb with risotte, grilled rib eye steak with tater tots and creamed spinach.
Hours: Sun. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. (brunch) and 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Mon.-Thurs. 5:30-10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 5:30-10:30 p.m.
Credit Cards: All major credit cards.
Access: Fully accessible.
Read previous Tremont
647 review.
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DALI
415 Washington Street, Somerville
(617) 661-3254
Restaurant reviewed 11/12/98 by Sheryl Julian
Neighborhood restaurants build their clientele from the people who walk over, or, at the very least, have a resident sticker on the car. They would never use valet parking and they come after work not because it's a special occasion but because they don't feel like cooking.
I arrived at Dali one Friday night and there they all were: customers spilled onto the street, a packed bar, and noisy, lively dining rooms. It felt like a huge neighborhood party.
This is the domain of Mario Leon-Iriate, who you have to see in action to believe. (We had plenty of time to watch, since it took an hour-and-a-half to get a table.) Everything Leon-Iriate does, he does with a flourish. He seats a couple, picks up the napkin from its place on the table, and dramatically drapes it over the woman's lap. With this kind of attention, who wouldn't wait?
While Leon-Iriate is a master host, full of Spanish charm, customers are lined up at his door not just for authentic tapas, but because he's there. It's reassuring. A proprietor who is always on the premises (as opposed to someone who checks in during the day and is nowhere in sight during service) makes the place feel good. It gives a restaurant an identity that it simply can't attain otherwise. And certainly it's the reason chains are lifeless.
In addition to Leon-Iriate, what's nice about Dali is that it has a mysterious quality in which you're taken into another realm, an older world, a dark restaurant with a warren of rooms. The waiters really know this menu. It hasn't changed much in a decade. Neither have the waiters.
There are places all over Spain with the same slightly musty quality of Dali. And they probably all serve the tapa bokuernes, fresh anchovies marinated in olive oil and vinegar, with just a little garlic and parsley. Grilled chorizo sausage, a la plancha as it's called, were wonderfully spicy, slightly smoky morsels.
Conejo escabechado, braised rabbit, was gorgeously golden with melting meat, in a deep-tasting sauce made from cinnamon, hot peppers, tomatoes, red wine, sherry and sherry vinegar, thyme, oregano, coriander, and juniper berries. Less successful was the zarzuela de mariscos, a seafood stew brimming with clams, mussels, scallops, shrimp, squid, and scrod. The aromatic, mildly tomatoey broth was beautiful, though the fish were hopelessly overcooked.
Never mind. You can't be a disgruntled diner when the owner helps you slip into your coat when you leave. There is so much flourish I wonder if he trains the bullfighters.
Raymond Ost of Sandrine's in Harvard Square runs quite a different place (much calmer), but he notices everything that's happening on the floor. I stop in here because I like Ost and his distinct Alsatian manner, and because I'm waiting for him to turn Sandrine's into a real Strasbourg bistro. Right now, there are elements of his homeland, but mostly stylized food that looks cooked and plated for hotel guests. (Ost came from the Meridien Hotel, where he was executive chef for many years.)
I had expected Ost to make food that has no structure, that looks plainer, closer to the land, more countryside in taste _ like his choucroute.
We ate salmon with carrot scales, served with wilted Swiss chard on a large puff pastry "sandwich." With its pleasingly mild horseradish cream sauce, it was perfectly cooked. But somehow too precious.
A rabbit confit went through three separate stages of preparation and cooking before it arrived on mashed potatoes, and the result was disappointing, the rabbit dry, the potatoes splendid, but the syrupy veal stock unable to save a dish simply not worth this much trouble.
A traditional flammekueche, the thin bacon-onion tart served all over Alsace, shows Ost's finest side. And when he catches a glimpse of me (I sit with my back to him, but I should have remembered that he doesn't miss anything), he insists on making us a special fruit flammekueche.
This tart, usually offered as a special, is covered with fresh berries and pastry cream mixed with fromage blanc, then drizzled with raspberry coulis. It's fanciful and certainly prettier than these tarts are intended to be, honest nonetheless _ and luscious. Perhaps Ost can bridge the gap in a similar way with the rest of the menu.
No identity crisis lurks behind the menu of Tremont 647, Andy Husbands's two-year-old restaurant where the food is big, robust, smoky, and things move at a clip. Beside me at the bar (overseen by doting bartender Peter White), one of Tremont's regulars awaits a tableful of guests. Husbands leaves the kitchen to greet her. No flourish, but it counts.
We order momos, just because of the name, which means "smile" in Tibetan. Tsering Dongshi, a Tibetan chef, has made these darling flour-and-water dumplings since the restaurant opened, filling them with pork and ginger (and other combinations), steaming them, and frying them to order.
Lamb shank was a giant of rich meat, seared first on the wood grill, then cooked in red wine and herbs for four hours so the meat was almost falling off the bone. The saffron risotto underneath was delicious, but gilded the lily. The two might have been better off as separate dishes.
Grilled rib eye, with tater tots and creamed spinach, offered everything anyone would want on a tired Friday night: smoky meat with real flavor, fried mashed potatoes hiding a nibble of Fontina in the center, and creamy baby spinach, all seasoned Fontina in the center, and creamy baby spinach, all seasoned perfectly. We scarfed it.
Husbands says that weekdays, his clientele is almost entirely neighborhood. The valet must be twiddling his thumbs. Soon he'll be busy parking my car, while I tuck into another of those glorious steaks.
Tips & hits
