The Boston Phoenix
June 22 - 29, 2000

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Prezza

On a North End side street, a scene is born

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT
Prezza
24 Fleet Street (North End), Boston
Open Tues-Thurs, 5-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 5-10:30 p.m.; and Sun, 5-9:30 p.m. Closed Monday
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Full bar
Smoking at bar
(617) 227-1577
Sidewalk-level access

I love the North End, but I wouldn't exactly say the place had buzz. In its tangle of streets you can find restaurants with good

food, with crowds, with high prices and low prices and all kinds of fabulous fake grape arbors, but when you want buzz -- that sense of being among a crowd of people who know where to eat right this minute -- you usually go somewhere else.

Last Tuesday night, I walked into Prezza without a reservation and I felt the buzz. Prezza was nine weeks old and full to capacity, and the people waiting around me were in spiffy suits and new ties and generally seemed like a livelier version of the kind of crowd that might drift over from the bar at Radius. I learned later that one large group was a birthday party and the table across from us was the father of the owner, so the deck was stacked. But still, a full house on Tuesday is a full house on Tuesday.

It took about 15 minutes for a space to clear, during which I drank a very tall gin and tonic and listened to the guys next to me talk about real estate in London. Like its clientele, Prezza is attractively turned out and not self-consciously Italian: beige paint, wood trim, Abstract Expressionism on the walls. Foodwise, it's in company with a handful of other good North End restaurants: the menu is Mediterranean, mostly Northern Italian, with clean flavors and generous portions, a lot of white beans, a lot of grilling.

Unlike what you find at a lot of new restaurants, the appetizers aren't categorically more exciting than the entrées. Three zucchini flowers ($10) were heavily battered in cornmeal, fried to a quite light crisp; they had a delicate taste almost like eggplant. They came on an irregular mound of polenta decked with an intense, sweet red sauce of stewed tomatoes.

On a plate of grilled octopus and squid ($10), a white-bean sauce flecked with green parsley served as a base for a few tubes of delicately grilled squid, still tender, scored with a knife in the sort of hatched pattern you see in Asian restaurants. The octopus was two purple tentacles curling around the plate; grilled octopus is less tender than the more traditional marinated-and-stewed version, but it has a beautiful purple color and nice bite. Another appetizer was thick slices of heirloom tomatoes sweetened up with balsamic vinegar and topped with a "parmesan flan," a light cheese soufflé on top of the tomatoes ($10). The tomatoes were not only heirloom but organic -- I know this because someone left the sticker on before slicing them.

There was a cook out sick the night we ate at Prezza, which may explain the sticker and also the wait between appetizers and entrées. Like the appetizers, the entrées didn't break new ground so much as work hard to cover the existing ground well. A dinner of seared tuna ($22) was quite simple: two steaks, sliced thinner than the ones you see at the fish counter, grilled until golden brown around the edges of the peppered surface. Inside they were an impressive tender-rare, a delicate operation with a thin piece of tuna. Underneath was, again, a white-bean sauce, this one with tomato chunks and a lemony tang.

My friend described the rabbit lasagna ($18) as the best lasagna he's ever had. It was a big sloppy cake of al dente pasta and cheese; the cheese acquired that yummy browned chewiness on the bottom, and it was all held together with shredded rabbit meat, which is light-tasting enough to make a lasagna seem summery, if that's possible. Our waiter said the best thing he'd had was the "double-thick pork ribeye" ($23), which looked to me like a double-thick pork chop. It was coated with a tomatoey sauce; the sugars in the sauce had been seared to a nice caramelized crust on the meat. The pork was tender inside, not electrifyingly flavorful, but it had a way of surprising me with bursts of salty, penetrating richness.

We watched in awe as the birthday party across from us ordered the dessert sampler, an array of sweets that looked like a Southern church at Easter: a war of one-upmanship being waged with hats. We ordered our desserts based partly on the hats. An apple-orange tart ($9) had a hat like a big wavy sunflower; it was an apple chip cut into a kind of doily and then fried, taking on a perforated bowl shape, set on top of a sweetly tart crumble in a very alcoholic caramel sauce. The chocolate soufflé ($9) had a different hat: a huge curling ribbon of chocolate across the top that my friend described as a water slide; the soufflé itself was a chocolate-on-chocolate affair, a cakey cylinder so heavily sauced I could have finished off the plate as
chocolate soup. Like the appetizers, the desserts are flavorful and generous, the kind of thing you should plan to share.

But in a sense, this all takes a back seat to the wine list. The owner of Prezza, it turns out, has a wine nut for a father, and when I finally opened the wine list partway though dinner I was floored: page after page after page, nearly 500 bottles. This is a wine compendium, a thing of scale and breadth, like a phone book or a museum basement. It is also much more likable than the list at, say, the Federalist, which has famously made a fetish of amassing more trophy wines than anyplace else in the city; here there are lots of bottles under $40. There's also a full page of half-bottles, and 28 wines by the glass from $5 to $16. (Most expensive bottle here: 1982 Pétrus, $2700. Most expensive bottle at the Federalist: 1907 Heisdieck Monopole, $12,000.)

So we ordered the 1998 Ridge Lytton Springs Zinfandel, a half-
bottle for $29, and enjoyed it. You can bet that when the Wine Spectator gives out its next excellence awards, Prezza will be on the list, and the place will be mobbed with wine freaks from all over America, searching for a different sort of buzz entirely.

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


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