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Type: Mediterranean
Prices: Appetizers and salads, $4.95-$8.95; pasta, $12.95-$15.95; entrees, $15.95-$21; desserts, $5.25.
Good choices: Crispy polenta with grilled shrimp; vegetable antipasti; quail with chestnut vegetable stuffing; lemon linguine with seafood; roasted chicken with broccoli rabe; pan-seared salmon, corn and tomato relish; duck breast, polenta-Swiss chard cake.
Hours: Lunch: Mon.-Fri. 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; dinner: Mon.-Sat. 5-10 p.m.
Reservations accepted. Smoking in bar area.
Credit cards: MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Transmedia.
Access: Fully accessible.
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PORTABELLO
265 Northern Ave.
(617) 338-5958
Restaurant reviewed 05/21/98 by Alison Arnett
Boston these days reminds one of the life stages of a butterfly -from caterpillar to cocooned pupa to, we hope, a beautiful result. Now, with the expressways and byways mutating nightly, with the signposts and recognizable guideposts of the city obscured or moved weekly, it's sometimes difficult to see the end - not to mention to find that restaurant you always wanted to visit.
The Seaport District is one of these mutations. Once we might have talked about going to the Fish Pier or down by Anthony's or, for the club crowd, close to Polly Esta's. Now the area's been redubbed the Seaport District. Eventually, when Boston clears away the construction dust, this area - with the World Trade Center, the mammoth federal courthouse, and a new hotel - will be prime. That day is not quite here, but restaurants like Portabello Bistro are poised, hoping for the future crowds.
Portabello is a bit of a butterfly itself. Owner Michael Scola has expanded his sandwich shop into an adjacent space to create a full restaurant that contracts during the lunch hour and enlarges at night. In the process, a loosely Italian concept gained the moniker of a bistro. It's an attractive place with splashes of color, bright graphics, and a cozy ambience, notwithstanding some really tight booths.
Tom Cutrone, who previously was at Walden Grille in Concord, is the chef. His bold, layered style of cuisine works well in many of his dishes, although the focus can wander, making some creations merely a collection of ingredients.
A chef must offer a broad range of foods on a menu to satisfy the clientele, but his or her true loves almost always can be discerned. After several visits to Portabello, polenta leaped out at me as Cutrone's passion, a hunch he verified in a subsequent phone conversation.
In an appetizer, a plump little quail is stuffed with chestnuts and vegetables and then roasted. The bird was fine, although not quite browned enough; the stuffing was very tasty. But the polenta on which the quail rested was the best part, soft as a pillowy cushion, soothing in texture, with a clean cornmeal taste. A backdrop, yes, but one that conveyed the flavors of a red wine demiglaze and yet held its integrity.
Cutrone said he loves to work with polenta because there are so many different ways to prepare it. Another example was polenta shaped into a cake and crisped on a grill. Grilled shrimp accompanied the polenta, and the crunch of the shrimp matched the texture of the polenta, especially good as a minuscule sandwich. Sweet cherry tomatoes, a sliver or two of avocado, greens, and a thin horseradish dill sauce made a bountiful plate.
Portabello offers a vegetable antipasti table with the dishes displayed on a table the way it's so often done in Italy. A half order - olives, grilled eggplant and red peppers, vinegared cauliflower and carrot salad, little onions sauteed in a piquant balsamic glaze - was more than enough for two to share. But a special appetizer one evening of fried calamari missed the mark. Fried calamari has become the Cajun popcorn of this decade - it flies off menus, and even children and those squeamish about seafood devour it, probably because it can taste quite a bit like a McDonald's creation. If the rings and tentacles of squid are lightly breaded, quickly fried, and served piping hot, the calories involved are soon forgiven. But unfortunately these were room-temperature, flat-tasting, and in desperate need of salt or other flavoring. The accompaniments didn't help much: The dressing tasted like old-fashioned Russian, the avocado was odd with the calamari, and the couscous underneath was really quite weird. Why would one want more starch with a breaded, fried food?
Other times, Cutrone can transform unusual-sounding combinations into very flavorful dishes. Black pepper tagliatelle was tossed with apricots, dried cherries, dates, raisins, pinenuts, and goat cheese, a dish inspired by an Italian Lenten preparation Cutrone said he learned long ago. The sharp-sweet, slightly sour medley worked, more intriguing in the eating than the reading. A very lemony sauce on linguine with scallops, crabmeat, capers, and tomatoes also was assertive and very good.
Pan-seared salmon was lovely, flanked with corn, tomato, and red onion touched by a little Strega liqueur that gave just enough accent to the straightforward tastes. The chickpea-rosemary cake had a nice flavor, but was too dry. Roast chicken was fittingly homey with slightly bitter broccoli rabe.
The dishes were not always bountiful. A perfectly pleasant broth laced with Pernod held only six littleneck clams, which seemed too skimpy for a cost of $17.95. The crostini covered with a sun-dried tomato paste was hardly compensation. Grilled ribeye steak certainly was large enough and the garlic and chive-spiked mashed potatoes plentiful, but that didn't make up for the extra-chewy texture of the steak.
The desserts, which are from Sweet Endings, were heavy on the buttercream and sweet chocolate but tasted a little stale, a little held over. Besides that, the rather stiffly elaborate cakes, the lemon torte, and a deep chocolate cake that our party tasted didn't really match the more casual style of the cuisine.
Portabello's generally solicitous service made up for some lapses in attention, especially at that crucial juncture - bringing the check. However, there was no attitude and no flagging of cheer, making the meal a pleasant experience. With some work on the details, Portabello should be ready for the eventual blooming of the Seaport District.
Tips & hits
