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Type: Bistro
Prices: Lunch: appetizers, $5.75-$11; entrees, $8-$13; desserts, $6. Dinner: appetizers and salads, $5-$11; entrees, $12-$27; desserts, $6-$9.
Good choices: Roasted butternut squash soup; grilled lamb and apricot sausage; grilled loin of lamb with ancho chili-lime butter, prickly pear sauce; baked halibut with braised leeks, littlenecks; grilled roasted pork chop, basil risotto; warm chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream; upside-down pear cake. Hours: Lunch: Monday-Friday, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Dinner: Monday-Thursday, 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 5:30- 11:30 p.m.
Reservations accepted, lunch and dinner. Smoking at bar.
Credit cards: All major.
Access: Four steps up.
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THE VAULT
105 Water St., Liberty Square. Boston
(617) 292-9966
Restaurant reviewed 10/27/97 by Alison Arnett
The Vault is tricky to find, sandwiched in a maze of curving Financial District streets, dark and windy after closing time. So when it suddenly looms up on a corner of Water Street, big glass windows beaming light, it's a welcome sight. One's first thought upon stepping across the threshold is that it doesn't really feel like a restaurant. ''Cheers' with ties,'' is the quick-witted comment of a friend. The Vault was indeed a bar for years after its first incarnation as a bank. Now the space has been opened up, lightened and scaled up, with a bistro decor, a trendy menu and Rebecca Esty as chef.
The place is a paean to the economic boom of the last few years. ''We are flush,'' the dark woods and glittering glass, the laughing men and women suited for business, the bustling waiters, the cabinets of fine wines and cigars all seem to say.
A first glance at the menu could fool one about the Vault's intentions. The excellent and imaginative wine list goes on for two pages along with a loose page of reserve list wines. The waiter bobs up asking about drink selections as soon as our party sits down, and we have to have directions to find the food menu sandwiched on the left-hand third page before another full page of selections of wines arranged for tastings.
Chef Esty, who previously was at Dakota's, has an appealing way with cuisine, mixing Mediterranean influences, a few Southwestern elements, and classic saucing to fashion a thoroughly American menu. Her boldest efforts are the best, with clear flavors and straightforward intentions. Grilled lamb loin is topped with ancho chili and lime butter, giving the meat a smoky essence rather than strong heat. The accompanying sauce of prickly pear is an astonishing shade of pale pink, but, spiked with lime juice, it has pleasant piquancy against the lamb. A sweet and sour pepper relish and a mound of spaghetti squash round out the plate. Another lamb offering, a sausage studded with tart dried apricots, offers strong, savory flavors. This is perhaps the most playful appetizer, the plate crowded with a bistro array of cornichons, pickled onions and watermelon, smooth-grained and coarse-grained mustards, all making a good backdrop for a first glass of wine or beer.
A sugar pumpkin filled with mushroom-flecked risotto is a perfect picture of autumn, flanked by a whole roasted quail. The quail is very good, the risotto delicious, and the dish suffers only from too much exuberance in the veal stock, so strong as to leave a flavor coating on my tongue.
The menu is slanted carefully toward the crowd Esty is feeding, and the selections lean toward hearty. Almost every meat dish is bolstered with pasta, potatoes, or rice of some kind, and there's no scrimping on the portions or much fretting about lightness. One of the most appealing dishes is baked halibut wrapped in braised leeks and apple-smoked bacon, keeping the fish moist while infusing their lively flavors. It's delicious, but by the time those ingredients plus a little cream in the sauce are added, the halibut wouldn't qualify as diet food.
Big, thick grilled pork chops over risotto drizzled with basil pesto carry the hearty theme along, and a hefty portion of sirloin buttressed by a generous mound of whipped mashed potatoes and wispy fried onion rings continue the beat.
Putting large bowls of soup on both the appetizer and entree list begins to make sense after one has studied the other entrees - a lighter alternative at last. Deeply colored and flavored chicken consomme is studded with chunks of chicken and thick noodles. A roasted butternut squash soup is priced $5 less, but its smooth, full taste and copious portion could have been an entree, too. There's just enough curry in the soup to cut the sweetness of the squash, and dried cranberries give it a swirl of color and some texture.
I liked Esty's way with salads, exemplified by one of romaine hearts with Caesar dressing, the greens left whole, the vinaigrette assertive but not too creamy or overpowering. The effect is simplicity without timidity. Another winning salad is one of the last of the season's tomatoes, big red and yellow slices, sandwiched between buffalo mozzarella, all sitting in a shallow pool of thinned pesto.
Risotto, the pasta-substitute darling of the moment, spills into too many of the dishes here. Lobster is handled deftly so that it's firm and clear-flavored, but the risotto with it is gummy and thick and didn't seem to have much of the promised lemon-scented nuances. There's risotto with the pork chops as well as risotto in the pumpkin - after a while, one can't help envisioning big vats of the stuff in the kitchen being ladled around indiscriminately. Like risotto, or even more so, gnocchi relies on seemingly defying physics: carbohydrates that seem to float in the mouth. Unfortunately, on one tasting, the house-made gnocchi in brown butter with grated Parmesan did nothing of the kind. Instead, they just sort of lay on the tongue, lumps of whipped potato that never reach the ethereal state of gnocchi.
The desserts by Dan Morley float much better: a warm chocolate cake, small and molded, is a lovely, light treat with chocolate just bitter enough not to be cloying; a fudge brownie concoction is much more adult than its title suggested. An upside-down pear cake tasted more like a sponge pudding cake but the sauce with poached pears lilted on the tongue, and an apple tart hits all the right notes of tart and sweet.
The wine selections, by wine director Steve Hewins, are not only lengthy and interesting but arranged cleverly by character, such as ''Sauvignon blanc and aromatic white,'' ``big and spicy reds, Rhone-style.'' This is extremely helpful, both for those who need help in deciding on wines and those who know more but want to match them to the food or the mood of the evening. In a phone interview, Esty said she and Hewins are working on prix fixe menus in which wines and dishes will be paired. Since the wine program is such a focus of the restaurant, this should be a most interesting evolution.
All in all, Esty's talents show through in spots but seem to be hidden in others. The menu is too long and needs some lighter offerings, plus a pruning of risotto, which is becoming as ubiquitous as mashed potatoes on local menus. But the Vault has potential for a multifaceted eating place, much beyond a post-stock market watering hole. It will be fun to watch it grow.
Tips & hits
