The Boston Phoenix
February 3 - 10, 2000

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Masa

Mexican food gets the high-end treatment

by Stephen Heuser

dining out
Masa
439 Tremont Street (South End), Boston
(617) 338-8884
Open Sun and Tues-Thurs, 5-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 5-11 p.m. Closed Monday.
AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa
Full bar
Smoking at bar only
Sidewalk-level access
A couple years ago you couldn't swing a catfish in the South End without hitting a brand-new bistro. The land grab has calmed down since then, and Masa is the first serious new restaurant in more than a year to open on Tremont Street's restaurant row. It replaces the South End Grill, which was owned by the same people, who also own next-door Appetito.

The word "masa" refers to a simple Mexican corn dough used to make tortillas; steamed masa is also the basic filling of a tamale. It's a staple of rural cooking, pure peasant food, and you won't find much of it here. Nothing about this restaurant is peasant; this is clear from the moment the waiter arrives with an amuse-bouche -- two little ovoid bits of chili cornbread dusted with grated cheese, set on a pristine white plate. Peasant restaurants do not offer an amuse-bouche. They also do not have linen tablecloths, or beautiful heavy knives and forks, or dark wood booths with cushioned beige headrests. Masa has these things. To balance the sense of luxury, the room is actually kind of airy and casual, with beige-and-white walls, and weathered, whitewashed planters dividing the dining room from the bar.

Much has been made of chef Philip Aviles's experimentation with Nuevo Mexicano cooking, or whatever you want to call it, but he's not exactly a slave to his theme: the Mexican touches here are used more for accent than for substance. A typical dish is the caesar (césar?) salad ($6), which consisted of torn romaine, a tangy caesar dressing, and strips of blue corn chips standing in for croutons. It was clever without messing up a good original. Then there was the smoked-corn-and-crab chowder ($6), which had nothing observably Mexican about it at all. But it was terrific, peppery and so thick that the soup didn't really flow: you could eat it right to left, spoon creeping toward the pile of crabmeat in the center.

The menu descriptions at Masa are such detailed catalogues of ingredients that you can't always figure out what your food is going to be. The issue was especially acute with "grilled calamari and seasonal oyster" (subtitle: "blackened corn relish, vine ripe tomatoes, avocado and chile lime vinaigrette"; $9) -- a description that doesn't really hint that you're going to get three thick curls of grilled squid sitting atop a pretty cylinder of rough-ground guacamole. (The seasonal oyster is almost incidental.) I wouldn't have minded a little more squid, but it was a very good appetizer; the calamari had an excellent grilled flavor, and the guac was great. But the menu could just as easily have been describing a pile of tentacles in an upscaled tomato sauce.

Masa Then again, "lemon marinated shrimp and charred tomato salsa" ("with crisp yucca chips"; $13) pretty much covered it: there were the chips, there were the three giant grilled prawns stacked up, there was the interesting-tasting salsa (was that horseradish?). There was even a surprise: a little tangle of pickled white onions dancing across the top. Again, it all worked very well, although paying $4.33 a shrimp seems almost perverse if you're not on an expense account.

The roasted salmon ($19) was an excellent dish. The idea works like this: start with a fillet of salmon -- pink, lush, thick-flaked, and shaped into a disk -- and set it on a cloud of salty diced cucumbers. Give the salmon a little cap of oven-crusted horseradish cream, and top it all with a few glistening orange salmon eggs. The horseradish is a "hot" taste, the cucumber is "cool," and the salmon is big and flavorful enough to mediate the tug-of-war. It is a wonderful combination, and gorgeous to look at, and if you have eaten down the street at Metropolis Café you will probably notice the eerie similarity to the salmon pavé served there. It's a distinctive dish, and the resemblance is no coincidence: Masa's Philip Aviles and Metropolis's Seth Woods are old friends who used to work together on Nantucket. Either version is worth a trip to the South End.

One idea that struck me as neat and original was "ratatouille salsa," which was served with a monkfish fillet ($19). The monkfish had a nice pan-seared crust along one edge, but it was the ratatouille that stood out; chopping up the vegetables really small, and keeping the flavors lively with peppers and vinegar, avoids the trap of soft goopiness that ratatouille can fall into.

A couple of nice cold-weather dishes made only the slightest nod to south-of-the-border cooking. A tenderloin ($21) served with a cloud of mashed potatoes was a fairly modest-sized piece of meat, tender and cooked to the rare side of medium-rare. There was a bit of chili in the sauce around it. A "skillet-roasted Muscovy duck breast" ($18) had a striking presentation, with the duck breast fanned tightly around a pile of garlic mashed potatoes, piled with braised greens and topped with a haystack of deep-fried green-onion straws. It was lovely, the meat nicely cooked and the "cranberry chile sauce" betraying not a hint of pepper taste.

Desserts (all $7) are another area where the Mexican influence came on subtly, if at all. "Chocolate mousse tacos" were actually small crêpes, filled with tasty mousse and served on a plate densely crosshatched with vivid red raspberry sauce. "Coconut parfait" was surprisingly compelling and, like all the desserts, quite arranged: picture a little cup formed from dark chocolate, filled with a sweet-tart cream, and topped with ground pistachios and toasted coconut. Scatter some berries around the plate. More flamboyant was the goat-cheese rice pudding, which was served in five dollops around a highly decorative plate, surrounded by a virtual abstract painting of sauce. The goat cheese had a very subtle effect on the pudding, mitigating the sweet edge and giving it a little more substance. Again, it wasn't especially Mexican. And, as much as I love Mexican food, that wasn't particularly a problem.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.


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