A Waltham hot spot with food worth a wait - and wait you will
Type: Italian
Prices: Appetizers, salads and half portion of dinner-size pastas $4.50 to $8.25; entrees and pastas $12.95 to $17.50; desserts $5 to $6. Typical cost of three-course dinner for two with a carafe of house wine, with tax and tip, between $80 and $90.
Good choices: Pureed fish soup with bruschetta; carpaccio with white truffle oil, parmesan, and arugula; risotto with duck sausage, wild mushrooms and Chianti; any pasta dish; sauteed veal chop; grilled pork loin with rosemary.
Restaurant reviewed 03/19/98 by Walter V. Robinson
Small neighborhood restaurant. Squirreled away in Waltham. A suburb so overlooked that Boston television newsreaders sometimes mispronounce it. A place so difficult to find I needed a guide for my first visit. Nonetheless, I got lost en route to my second.
Why then, I wonder, is a dinner reservation at the Tuscan Grill such a precious commodity, so sought-after that the restaurant takes reservations like an overplayed municipal golf course? No bookings for the week are taken before noon Monday.
Who would have suspected? I called Friday for a Tuesday night table. I was advised to call Monday at 12:30 p.m., because at noon sharp the phone lines are jammed with people booking all the upcoming weekend time slots.
Dutifully, I called Monday at 12:30 with my request: Tuesday night, 7:30 p.m., table for five. Sorry, I was told, but the only openings were at 6:30 or 8:30. On a Tuesday? Easier, I thought, to book a visit to Tuscany.
I pleaded that 6:30 is too early for my working crowd; 8:30 is too late for a weeknight. We haggled. They relented. But not without a struggle.
I still wonder whether the struggle was worth it. Given the weekday reservation hurdles, I expected that we would be overwhelmed by the experience. Mostly, we were overwhelmed by the wait. But there is something to be said for waiting.
Like many crowded restaurants, the Tuscan Grill can be frightfully noisy. By the time the entrees had arrived that Tuesday night, 75 minutes after we sat down, the crowd had thinned. We could hear one another. For the most part, the food is worth waiting for - but not for that long.
Given the menu, we had a lot to talk about: Some dishes are so exceptional they may even boost home values in the neighborhood. Without exception, the pasta dishes are extraordinary. With some exceptions, the entrees are excellent. Appetizers range from quite good to excellent.
But among the really excellent choices on the menu lurked a few that should not have left the kitchen, and desserts that needed attention. The citrus sorbet had icy lumps in it. The chianti poached pear upside down cake with dried fruit compote was remarkably dry. Was it overcooked or overly old? Maybe both. One guest put out an all-points bulletin for the dried figs in an ordinary rice pudding before finally corraling one.
All in all, I am of two minds about the Tuscan Grill. They've recently expanded, adding a beautifully designed bar area with additional seating that enhances the feeling that you've stepped into a fine, rustic restaurant in Tuscany. If the service was as predictable and as good as almost all the food - could the service be better on weekends, I wonder? - I might become a regular.
Indeed, it's no wonder that a table is so hard to come by, I thought, as I savored a fish soup pureed with fresh fennel, basil, parsley, white wine, tomato, and garlic, with bruschetta. A soup worth getting lost for. After reviews of four other fine restaurants, including the high-priced, elegant Ritz-Carlton, this soup trumps anything else in a bowl.
I savored every bite of an appetizer of risotto with duck sausage and mushrooms, rich and dark after being cooked, perfectly, in Chianti. Among restaurants that offer risotto - and given the difficulty of getting this temperamental dish right - this is the Gold Standard.
No surprise. Bonnie and Jimmy Burke, who started out in Waltham with Allegro in 1980, and opened the Tuscan Grill in 1991, have always featured risotto on their menu, long before other Italian restaurants dared to.
The entrees, for the most part, are also appealing. A center-cut pork loin, two thick chops rubbed with fresh rosemary and grilled over an oak log fire, was perfectly cooked. But a standard on the menu, grey sole with caponata, was disappointingly mediocre. My high hopes for the wood-grilled Angus sirloin were dashed. It was overcooked, gray inside, rather than the medium rare I had asked for. Too bad: Cooked correctly, it probably would have been a memorable dish. Still, any pasta entree is likely to be splendid. The wine list is quite good, and the house wine, by the carafe, is of excellent quality and value.
One of my guests, who knows a thing or two about food, thought the menu a tad unimaginative. But that, as she noted, is also its strength: simple ingredients, well prepared. You're not likely to find competing and conflicting tastes in Tuscan Grill dishes.
But the contrast between the food and the service was unsettling. For the first visit, the wait staff seemed confused about who was to wait on us, leaving our table unattended several times.
The second time around, it took 15 minutes to get a glass of wine, longer to get a basket of bread. We had to remind the waitress to tell us about the specials. The entrees arrived much too late. And the waiters began to clear the dinner plates early - before everyone had finished. At our first visit, the waiter assured us that the bottle of Italian wine was ``a good chardonnay.'' Good it was, but it was a sauvignon blanc.
Bad luck for Burke and for us: The restaurant was in the throes of a management change for our visits. A new manager, Burke's son Derek, has now taken over, and the owner says any service shortcomings from the turmoil have been resolved.
He is probably right. With all the dining choices available in Boston's affluent western suburbs, the phone lines are still jammed at midday Monday. So take my advice: Call at 12:30 p.m. And get yourself a good road map.
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