Delux Cafe and Lounge: French-Trained Cook Brings Elan to Funky South End Cafe
Type: American, eclectic, café
Hours: Mon.-Sat: 5:30-11:30 p.m.
Good Choices: Quesadilla of the day, Delux roast chicken sandwich, beef brisket, chocolate-chip cake.
Credit cards: Cash only.
Access: One step up at entrance.
DELUX CAFE AND LOUNGE
100 Chandler St., South End. Boston
(617) 338-5258
Restaurant reviewed 12/01/94 by Sheryl Julian
The music is Brenda Lee, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra; the look is Christmas tinsel year-round; the food is hometown diner. Delux Cafe and Lounge is a tiny, quirky, South End neighborhood bar where the entrees are dished out in huge portions, the bill is real small, and the theatrical clientele light up the place.
Opened in January by Kevin Sheehan, Delux replaces the downtrodden Chez Joie, a bar nearly forgotten by its neighbors. In its spot at the corner of Clarendon and Chandler, the rehabbed Delux is easy to miss unless you know about it. When Sheehan took over, he put in a new entrance and changed the decor. But you would hardly call Delux decorated -- the piece de resistance is a shrine to Elvis; the wallpaper is fashioned from record jackets stapled side-by-side.
Last July Sheehan brought in Didi Emmons to put a little food on the menu. In a kitchen the size of a closet, with no professional ranges or equipment, Emmons produces a selection of appealing homey dishes.
The best is the braised brisket of beef with ancho-chili cream sauce ($8.25), for which she caramelizes onions in butter and garlic, makes a thin sauce with chicken stock, heavy cream, ancho-chili powder and dried chipoltes. With a heaping spoonful of russet potatoes mashed with lots of butter, the dish is divine. First presented, it looks like much too much to eat -- until your find yourself with a clean plate.
Emmons is awfully good at ordinary food. Her quesadillas with black beans($3.95) were wonderful one night. ''It's 'of- the-day' '' she says, which means that she uses what's around. That might mean Jack cheese or smoked mozzarella. ''Maybe I'll get fancy and roast some onions,'' she muses one day.
With stints at the Blue Room in Cambridge and Hamersley's Bistro down the street from Delux, Emmons is an accomplished cook. She even did an apprenticeship in France, at L'Ecole de Cuisine La Varenne, the bilingual cooking school.
A sensible chicken sandwich on Portuguese bread with homemade chutney ($5.95), a savory chicken pot pie with flaky crust and big chunks of white meat ($7.25), a memorable chocolate-chip pound cake with whipped cream ($3.50) -- delectable as these are -- will never put Emmons in the culinary forefront. But perhaps she would rather make her mark quietly.
She does all her own shopping, which is how she can sell food at such low prices. She gets Portuguese soup bread from a fish market in East Cambridge, pita bread from an Armenian bakery in Watertown. Then she sees what's priced right at Tony's Produce, the Shawmut Avenue vendor who supplies neighborhood restaurants. That's when she decides what chutney will go with the chicken sandwich (now it's apple cranberry) and how she'll do the slaw on any given day.
Delux does beat to its own drummer. Every dinner plate is different, flatware doesn't seem to match, coffee comes in the same half-pint glasses beer is served in, there's no decaf, and the room is smoky. No one here is looking for a P. C. award. They're having too much fun.
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