Good choices: Chilled sweet pepper soup with coconut-mint essence; honey-soy braised chicken wings; crispy baby red snapper; long-grain rice with Chinese ham, rock shrimp and sweet peas; scallion rice cakes; seafood stew; tea-smoked chicken; steamed whole bass; lemon tartlets.
BOK CHOY
204 Washington Street, Brookline Village
(617) 738-9080
Restaurant reviewed 04/20/98 by Alison Arnett
Bostonians like colorful characters, and Siobhan Carew fits the role perfectly. An Irish immigrant who decided that the restaurant life was more compatible with raising her daughters than teaching, Carew opened a tiny Italian place, Pomodoro, in the North End and it flourished. Then she and her husband, Matt Murphy, opened the eponymous Irish pub, now wildly successful, in Brookline Village.
Now she's moved on to Chinese with another Brookline Village restaurant called Bok Choy. All this sounds improbable, but Carew and company can make it work.
Calling Bok Choy a Chinese restaurant is a bit of a stretch: It might be more accurate to say that Chinese influences, ingredients, and cooking methods have been incorporated into the kind of food Carew's chefs excel in - boldly flavored dishes using good ingredients and a modern American decorative sensibility. Chef Ben Nathan doesn't practice fusion cuisine - he hews more closely to the Chinese repertoire than the wave of mix-and-match that term implies nowadays.
Yet while sipping wine and looking around the room painted in a dusty-avocado color, one has not a moment's feeling that this resembles a Chinese restaurant. (One example: The lighting is almost too dim, unlike most Asian restaurants, where it's almost always too bright.)
That doesn't matter, though, when one is eating a stew of braised oxtail, bok choy, pickled daikon, and chow foon noodles, or tasting scallion rice cakes in a spicy sauce. The methods may be unorthodox but the results are delicious. It's true of many of the dishes; the best combine Asian ingredients with Western cooking techniques.
Scallion rice cakes, fat patties crisped on the outside and almost creamy within, were nestled in a bright, spicy sauce of red peppers and onions. They tasted very much like Italian risotto cakes, yet the ingredients - from the short-grain rice bought in Chinatown to the red chile-inspired sauce - are Asian. The delicate aroma of tea-smoked chicken speaks of the Chinese classic but was actually soaked in tea and soy, Nathan said in a phone interview, and then lightly smoked on a grill, a most Western interpretation.
Nathan, a Brookline native who had cooked at Pomodoro and earlier at Salamander, said his training is in Mediterranean food. Finding a path to an Asian menu, Nathan said, consists of "staying kind of simple, trying to make the flavors identifiable."
The entrees, called "big plates" on the menu, were presented in a Western manner, including starch and vegetables along with protein. I liked both a smoky-tasting grilled pork loin glazed with hoisin, and excellent rich, meaty short ribs flavored with sweet-sour tamarind sauce. However, these entrees were hardly simple, jumbling an extravagance of ingredients, plates in need of editing.
The fish dishes more closely followed Nathan's idea. Served recently as a special appetizer, baby red snapper, flash-fried to a crispy exterior, exemplifies his approach. The dish is simple and beautiful; the fish is moist and tastes just of itself. Underneath is a stripped-down version of a red chili sauce, thin but spicy, clear-hued, bracing against the fish and a small salad of daikon radish and watercress, but not at all oily or heavy. A small whole bass, perfectly steamed, in a lemongrass-ginger broth, was a more extravagantly garnished version of the classic centerpiece of many a Chinatown restaurant.
The major misstep in flavoring was a heavy reliance on salt. Stirfried rice with Chinese ham, shrimp, and peas got most of its salty flavor from the ham, and was very good. But egg drop soup with shiitake mushrooms was much too salty. And, although my party gravitated immediately to spring rolls with shrimp and a Chinese cabbage slaw, surely the appetizer of the '90s, these proved to be inedible. Salt was the culprit.
Bok Choy manages a short list of pleasing desserts, French-inspired, not Asian, that complement the food. Lemon curd and whipped cream tartlets on a plate garnished with fruit add a tangy note to the end of a meal. The sorbets, from a distinctive orange to a mild Asian pear to a delicious clove-scented tea flavor, also smoothed out the meal.
Bok Choy has been open since October, but didn't obtain a liquor license transfer until February. The place seems a little dispirited - unlike Carew's other places. The menus are limp, the booths cramped, and some of the benches are really uncomfortable.
The staff, which ranged from fine in service to slow and unsure, can't seem to decide whether or not to offer tea at the beginning of the meal, Chinese-restaurant-style. They should forget about it; although the teapots and cups are pretty, there's no room on the smallish tables for the tea service and the large plates. In these days of heavy reliance on credit cards, the "cash-only" policy is another drawback, requiring the customer to remember to pack enough currency. Eventually, it must cut into the amount spent.
However, the food is quite good, there's a comfy sitting area in the front of the room with a Chinese board game and deep couches, and it's a fun spot in this diverse and restaurant-rich neighborhood.
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