Good choices: Tuna tartare with shredded toi soi; sake-marinated rock shrimp with seaweed salad; rainbow trout stuffed with lobster mashed potato; roasted sea bass with sun-dried tomato-cumin sauce; creme brulee; mixed nut nougatine with berries.
RITZ CAFE
Ritz-Carlton Hotel, 15 Arlington St., Boston
(617) 536-5700
Restaurant reviewed 06/23/97 by Alison Arnett
'' Puttin' on the Ritz,'' Irving Berlin's catchy ode to '20s elegance, infects even the casual visitor to the Ritz-Carlton - suddenly there's the urge to don a silk evening gown or black tie and top hat.
It's as though time has stood still for decades, and one has presumed the food would follow the traditional, tried and true line. Even though the news of a new young chef, Mark Allen, has spread, it's still a surprise to read the menu and ponder dishes such as tuna tartare with shredded toi soi; filet of sea bass on cucumber mashed potato with sun-dried tomato cumin sauce; or roasted Muscovy duck breast with caramel custard and barley fritters.
Does this sort of flouting of convention work?
Chef Allen, at only 30 with several years of California cooking in his past, manages to mingle the new with the old. Sometimes, the quality of the food is uneven; sometimes he reaches too far. But for the most part, the new Ritz Cafe menu delivers: A deft hand with seasonings, attention to details, and imaginative twists on use of ingredients make the cuisine often sing.
The cafe still offers some of the classics, too, and at lunch one could glance around and see a man visiting town for the Burberry sale tucking into his Ritz-Carlton lobster salad while an elderly woman who looked as if she owned her table tried the chef's bouillabaise.
It's one of the liveliest lunch places in town (Allen says in a phone interview that serving 100 at lunch is average). As we muse on the patrons, the waiter brings tuna tartare in a martini glass. The curls of raw tuna glisten, wrapped tightly in a package around shreds of Asian greens. A little roll of sushi perches atop the tuna. The effect is charming; the tastes clean; the size petite for $13.50. A dish called a crab and white asparagus tower with Asian greens and wasabi grapefruit dressing follows a similar line. The name proves to be an exaggeration since the crab and greens rise to only maybe two-story proportions but each element is fresh and delicate with a slightly creamy dressing providing an accent note.
However, the classic Caesar salad was disappointing, the romaine casually piled on a plate and the dressing lacking in bite. Much better to watch the captain in the Ritz's main dining room take his careful time making it fresh at your table, one of the true pleasures of dining in that more formal restaurant.
One of the best salads in Allen's repertoire was an appetizer of sake-marinated rock shrimp with seaweed. The shrimp, done ceviche-style so that they are ``cooked'' in a mixture of rice vinegar, sake, chipotle peppers, and sugar, are firm to the bite, still tasting of the sea. In a part of the country where shrimp are usually served frozen, thawed then cooked so the effect is only a vague taste of the shellfish and often of cardboard, these Maine shrimp are a revelation. The combination, too, of the spicy vinaigrette, shrimp, and the slightly crunchy seaweed salad is a felicitous balance of sweet, hot, smooth, and crisp.
Allen's main courses, especially the fish, continue to show his creativity. Rainbow trout is stuffed with mashed potatoes mixed with lobster meat, sauteed, and then served with a Vidalia onion sauce. The trout, Allen says, was caught the day before in Maine, and that shows in its firm flesh and clean taste. The sauce, done with a little molasses, balsamic vinegar and veal stock, had a gutsiness that played well off the mild fish and melded the trout with the richer lobster meat. Halibut stacked atop cucumber mashed potatoes was a gentler combination, the sauteed cucumbers adding a surprising delicacy to the potatoes. A sun-dried tomato and cumin sauce countered that with bursts of acidity.
I liked the beef tenderloin with morels and a celery root puree strongly laced with horseradish. But the red lentils served with it seemed out of place, not quite up to functioning as a vegetable, not quite bland enough to be a starch backdrop. Of the braised lamb shanks on wild mushroom spaetzle, the less the better, for they were greasy and dull. Unfortunately, they brought to mind the lobster, shiitake, and rice pot stickers from the appetizer selection, in which dark brown was the predominant color and soy the overwhelming taste. The lobster was totally lost in the combination. Chef Allen's talent definitely seems to lie in the lighter, brighter range of cooking.
The Ritz Cafe wine list and desserts don't seem to have been updated along with the rest of the cuisine. The wine prices rise quickly into the stratosphere; the selection in the reasonable range of $20-$35 is narrow and uninteresting.
Desserts are frou-frou or classic; actually, in this area, I preferred classic. Creme brulee fell into that category, barely sweet, wonderfully creamy, and lovely. An extravagant sail of nougatine - essentially a cookie - served with berries was very good. A raspberry mousse tower looked like a child's party hat: A white chocolate cone filled with the mousse sat upside down on the plate. The combination was overly sweet and a little silly.
One of the reasons to go to the Ritz is to feel pampered, and generally the wait staff manages that with aplomb. However, there's always the exception: One luncheon our waiter could barely bring himself to take orders, practically tossed the basket of bread and crackers onto the table, and seemed affronted when asked to correct the request for coffee, not tea, that he had mixed up. Maybe it was his last day.
But that was the exception in visits to the Ritz where the buzz in the room, the young chef coming out to chat with customers, and the innovations on the menu signal a new era of ''puttin' on the Ritz.''
Tips & hits
