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The Palm

A New York steakhouse brings steak and N.Y. prices to Boston

by Robert Nadeau

The Palm
260 Dartmouth Street (Westin Hotel), Copley Place
867-9292
Hours
Mon - Thurs, 11:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m.; Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.; Saturday, 5 to 11 p.m.; and Sunday, 5 to 10:30 p.m.
AE, DC, MC, Vi
Full bar
Street-level access

Boston has a sad history of letting New York steal its cultural treasures, from Babe Ruth to Jane Curtin, but we have usually shown some resistance to letting that other city take over on our turf. We may be a farm team, but we've usually refused to become a suburb. The leading newspaper had always been a domestic product, and until this year no Boston television station had ever been owned by a New York network. In the restaurant field, we've had a long string of failed attempts to open a Boston branch of New York franchises: Mama Leone's, the Stage Deli, and Nathan's Famous hot dogs. Bostonians will accept Chicago pizza, Morton's of Chicago steaks, and a Disney store in Quincy Market, but as long as Charles Laquidara outdraws Howard Stern we're holding the line against Gotham.

Now comes the Palm, with a big plan to become a New York steak house in 16 cities. The New York Palm has both reputation and baggage: there is a history of sawdust on the floor, hokey caricatures of celebrities, no printed menu, no reservations, outlandish prices, giant portions, and wheeler-dealer waiters. The Boston Palm takes reservations and has a printed menu -- à la carte, overpriced, and underwhelming. The sawdust didn't make the trip, and the new Palm has a spattering of Boston semi-celebrities up on the wall.

Our waiter was over the top on discussing specials, asking us how things were, lingering to sell us other things (when reviewers order too much to begin with), and then demanding that we give up the table -- "Only kidding," he said, "and I mean that." He wasn't kidding, and this is a cultural difference Palm management will have to come to terms with: Bostonians are unlike New Yorkers in that we won't pay New York prices to be insulted. Bostonians are cheap, and we can get insulted in our own accents at Durgin-Park.

The food at Palm is not an insult, but it is overpriced, and it isn't the best available in Boston, which is not so provincial a place as the Palmists must think. The prime aged porterhouse steak ($30) is very good and came cooked medium rare as ordered, on both the sirloin and tenderloin sides of the bone. But the aged flavor was barely evident relative to the same steak at Morton's or Capitol Grille, though the "prime" tenderness was certainly there.

I did admire the breadbasket, with four kinds fresh including sourdough, focaccia, and a pumpernickel-raisin bread. I also liked the Gigi salad ($9.50), which is chopped-up shrimp, tomato, green beans, and bacon, with a simple vinaigrette dressing. The soup of our day ($3.50) was an honest, clear-broth chicken vegetable. It wasn't overwhelmingly chicken-flavored, but it didn't taste of bouillon cubes either.

Our other main dish was veal marsala ($19). Again, the veal was not powerfully flavored, but thin and fork-tender. The winey sauce could have been cooked down further with the mushrooms; there are many superior versions at lower prices in the North End. If you eat steak only once a year (and already had that one somewhere else), liklier bets are the lamb chops, almost always a steakhouse best buy ($25), or the giant lobsters (market price). Three pounds and up are my favorite size, yet no Boston restaurant has made a specialty of these big guys. The New York Palm has a reputation for them.

The celebrated side dish of the New York Palm is cottage fries ($3.50), which we tried with french-fried onions in a mammoth "half & half" ($6). I was not convinced. The cottage fries here have too much crispness and not enough flavor. The onions are better, but a little greasy.

The vegetable section of the menu looks a lot bigger than it really is, with three kinds of string beans, three kinds of spinach, and one kind of broccoli. Our waiter told us the creamed spinach was the specialty ($4); it was an old-fashioned dish of overcooked spinach in a nice creamy sauce, the sort of thing that delights me on the steam table of a southern cafeteria. And it was enough to serve four, but my final advice is to get your roughage from the salads.

The desserts at Palm are what you might expect: cheesecake, apple pie, chocolate mousse cake, and a couple of sorbets. Tom Wolfe could probably draw the entire social structure of Manhattan out of that dessert tray. We drew a brownie à la mode ($7) and a key lime pie ($5). The former was a truly superb example of its kind, the brownie powerful and melty as though overloaded with chocolate and undercooked.

The key lime pie was the classic yellow color, and delicious, but the sourness was so muted that I couldn't identify whether it was made from key lime juice or Persian lime juice. Both are good, but a neutral flavor between them is a demerit. Coffee and tea, both $1.75, are good (again, not great), the former clean-tasting but thin, and the latter served as hot water in a china pot, a Lipton bag on the side.

The wine list is outrageously priced; the multiple on bottles is inflated past the usual double-retail, with a per-glass price of $6 to $10. I had a glass of Beautour Merlot for $6 -- almost twice what it ought to cost.

This odd space under the Westin Hotel has been redone since the previous concept restaurant here, the Brasserie. The new space is larger, and divided so that the smoking section gets the window. I guess if you're dining on steak and cheesecake, what's the worry about smoking? The decor is nice enough, but in imitating age and informality with wood floors, wainscotting, smooth walls, and tin ceilings, it makes for a loud evening.

The New York Palm has been described as a kind of club, but it's hard to transplant a club to 16 cities. So they've watered down the experience, which was a New York experience anyway. One response to the price structure of Palm is to declare it a palace for expense accounts, or wealthy in-laws. Another strategy is to stick to steak or lobster, salad, brownies, and coffee, and still expect to pay too much. My real advice is to save your steak money for a place with truly memorable steaks. I am afraid Bostonians will not pay these prices just for a steakhouse experience -- what used to be called "selling the sizzle."

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