AURORA
310 Congress St., Boston
(617) 350-6001
(Directions)

Restaurant reviewed 07/07/97 by Alison Arnett

AURORA Type: Russian, American Prices: Appetizers, salads, soups: $2.50-$15.95; entrees: $12.95-$23.95; desserts: $3.50-$4.50. Good choices: Borsht; Russian pickles; blini with red caviar; chicken tabaka; shashlyk (grilled meat skewers); stuffed cabbage. Hours: Lunch: Daily, 11:30-4 p.m.; dinner: Sunday-Thursday, 4-10 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 4-10:30 p.m. Reservations accepted. Smoking outside; smoking, nonsmoking sections inside. Credit cards: All major. Access: Fully accessible.

There are all sorts of appealing things about Aurora. First of all, it's a pleasure to dine outside in the shadow of the Children's Museum. The setting sun slips in and out between downtown buildings, glinting off glass towers, caressing the ripples of Fort Point Channel. Two women drift by in a rowboat, waving to diners on deck as a sea gull lazily carves circles in the sky above them. The restaurant is firmly grounded and only looks like a ship but there's the feeling of drifting too, a vague sensation of water motion. It's a pleasant way to spend a summer evening.

Then there are all those bottles of vodka lined up like soldiers on the long divider down the middle of the restaurant - more than 150 varieties from all over the world. To someone who thinks of vodka as a colorless, if potent, liquor, these are eye-opening. A short sampling proves that the flavors are as varied as the shapes and sizes of the bottles.

And a sense of the exotic floats in the air: The decor only discreetly suggests Russia with a few wooden nesting dolls and other trinkets in the otherwise sleek, shiplike room. But nonetheless, tables of young emigres sharing vodka and blini with Russian accents rolling through the room give an aura of being somewhere else. It's not quite ``Dr. Zhivago,'' but it is entertaining.

Now if the food were so evocative. Or at least consistent.

Aurora, owned by Leonid Komarovsky, actually has two menus, one marked Russian, one marked American, each two pages long - the better to appeal to an office and tourist population, explains manager Eugene Komarovsky, Leonid's son. But four pages of dishes ranging from clam chowder to solenka (a puckery soup), to Black Angus steak to stuffed cabbage must be a lot for the kitchen to deal with.

The chef, Jose Alvarez, has three Russian cooks buttressing the ethnic specialties, as well as others who handle the American fare. The whole style, from often flustered wait staff to much bustling back and forth through swinging doors into the kitchen, gives a slightly frantic tempo to an evening here.

Concentrating on what Aurora does well can sustain an aura of exoticism. Russian pickles, the cheapest dish on the menu at $2.50, is a platter of pickled green tomatoes, zucchini, and cucumbers along with a cabbage salad and marinated shredded carrots. The presentation is very home-style with the vegetables left whole, and they're delicious, tasting cleanly of vinegar and spices. The salads, which accompany many of the dishes on the menu, also have an honest, homemade flavor.

Borsht, a beet and vegetable soup, is thin-textured and refreshingly light. Solenka, made with capers, olives, pickled mushrooms and very thin strips of smoked sausage, follows a Russian tradition of slightly sour soups. One taste is sharp enough to pucker one's lips and yet the flavors draw one back for more, each ingredient either accenting or rounding out the previous one.

Blini, Russian-style crepes, are papery thin and light in texture, perfect to wrap around pearls of black or red caviar, dipped in a little sour cream. In fact, one of the soups, some pickles, a vodka martini sampling, and a finale of blini and caviar - as much as the purse will allow since the caviar is pricey - would definitely induce a Zhivago-like trance.

That's not to say there weren't good main dishes. I liked chicken tabaka, a Georgian classic, with its garlicky flavor infused into the crisply pan-fried skin of the chicken. Sour plum sauce provided a slight tang. The grilled skewers of chicken, shashlyk, were simple but tasty. Stuffed cabbage filled with ground beef and rice was a hearty and well-seasoned dish.

Several of the American choices - from a well-made mixed green salad with plenty of well-handled mesclun to a classic boiled lobster - were fine, handily solving the challenge of feeding those wary of the ethnic side of the menu.

However, other choices, even ones that seemed the most obvious in a Russian restaurant, were disappointing. Piroshki, the ubiquitous Russian puff pastry envelope filled with meat, potato, or cabbage, were sweet and stale-tasting, suspiciously tasting like Sara Lee frozen dough. Since the filling was almost nonexistent, the oily and odd taste of the dough lingered on the palate.

Smoked salmon and sturgeon in an appetizer was dry, the edges of the sturgeon actually curling from exposure to the air. And that was all that was on the plate - no bread or butter. A cold cucumber soup was pallid and bland. A salad described as tomatoes, cucumbers, and farmer's cheese instead had copious shavings of what tasted like American block cheese. Pelmeni, or Siberian dumplings, looked and tasted as though they had been plucked out of a Chinatown frozen foods case, the dough thin and rubbery.

And the Russian cakes, elaborately decorated and layered with mousse, whipped cream, and buttercream: Let's just say they were inedible and leave it at that.

The younger Komarovsky says the intent of Aurora, which also has a nightclub upstairs, is to recall the London and Paris restaurants emigres from Russia opened after the czar fell early in this century. ``Not like other Russian restaurants here,'' he adds. ``Classier.''

Well, maybe, if they get the food better under control.