Saffron

Indian food goes naan-traditional

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Saffron 279A Newbury Street Open for lunch daily, noon-5 p.m.; and for dinner Sun-Thurs, 5:30-10:30 p.m., and Fri and Sat, 5:30-11 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar and patio (617) 536-9766 Sidewalk patio; indoor entrance down a full flight of steps

Ennui is no fun, but it's an occupational hazard for restaurant reviewers. Sometimes you feel that every new joint is a wanna-be Olives, or a takeoff of Jae's, or a worse and more expensive version of a place you once ate at in New York or San Francisco or Turkey.

And then you eat something totally different.

Saffron is not the first Nouvelle Indian restaurant in the world, but it is the first in Boston. We've waited years for chefs to start getting creative with Indian food -- to parse out the basic components of the cuisine and recombine them with fresh, striking raw ingredients -- but, to be honest, I wasn't even sure it would work. Indian cooking depends on all kinds of intricate culinary syntheses that, unraveled, might not make for a very good meal.

But at Saffron I was knocked out by the very first thing I ordered, something called "duck and potato bernasi" ($8). It was a tall mug of soup separated into two concentric layers: a purée of duck and potato nested in an outer belt of foamy coconut milk. Everything about it was a novelty -- the layered soup, the coconut-milk foam, the liquid duck, even the two little cranberry samosas on the side. And it worked, magnificently, the sweetness of the coconut mingling with the meaty, thyme-infused purée.

That was, it turned out, the most revelatory thing I ate. Other very good appetizers were a tongue-twisting "mille feuille of methi missi roti" ($12), basically a stacked arrangement of chickpea crackers, tandoori chicken, and mango chutney; and a fine mulligatawny soup ($5), which jumped off the spoon with a surprising tangy clarity of flavor and an unusual greenish color.

The chef, Olaf Neimier, has a background cooking in hotels (ignore the name; his last job was in Delhi), and it's telling that there really aren't any bad dishes here. The weak spots are plates that are cosmetically attractive without correspondingly eye-opening flavors. A bell-pepper soup ($6), for instance, had a clear pepper-purée taste, a smooth golden color, and two fine grilled scallops in the middle -- actually "coriander marinated" scallops, though it was hard to tell. Yet the ingredients didn't come together into something more than you'd expect. A "parmesan ring" salad ($7) was gorgeous, a tall cylinder of parmesan tuile embracing mesclun leaves, but the salad was heavily dressed and the tuile more than we could really eat. Still, these were well executed. The only real disappointment was an eggplant-mushroom tower ($7), basically a short napoleon of stewed eggplant and quartered mushrooms, surrounded by a "tomato chutney" that tasted like sweet tomato sauce to me.

Our entrées were solid but less conversation-provoking. Maybe a certain conservatism sets in when there's more food on the plate. In any event, a red snapper ($26) was served with a degree of panache, wrapped in grape leaves, its dense firm flesh steamed nicely. Its olive-green sauce reminded me of puréed chickpeas; under the fish were julienned carrot and zucchini. The braised chicken leg ($17) sounds pretty un-nouvelle, but then again dark meat has more flavor than white, and it stands up well to spicing. This was a leg and thigh, reasonably moist, served over couscous and a tasty beige sauce of peanut and coconut. The plate was garnished with pea pods and orange bell peppers -- the sort of thing that looks great in food photographs but doesn't necessarily do much for the dish.

For people uninterested in "contemporary Indian," Saffron offers a separate menu of traditional Indian dishes -- you'll recognize the names, if not the prices ($18 for chicken tikka masala?). A cold appetizer of chicken chaat ($8) was surprisingly unpretentious: a straightforward bowl of dark tamarind sauce with chunks of chicken, tomato, and cucumber. It was less yogurty than chaat often is, and extremely fresh, with a nice spicy kick to the sauce. As for entrées, our saag paneer ($15) was a class act, served on a white ceramic heating dish. It wasn't particularly creamy; rather, it had a firm chopped-spinach texture and a round, almost fruity flavor with lots of ginger. It was accompanied by rice, naan bread, a nice dish of tangy raita, and an earthy lentil stew.

To test the menu's other extreme, we tried the wild-mushroom risotto ($17). An odd dish for an Indian restaurant in summer, maybe, but it turned out very well: rich, joyfully gluey, and studded with all sorts of mushrooms, including button, shiitake, oyster, and little threadlike enoki. Chopped asparagus spears were scattered across the top.

Desserts were pretty without being overbearing. Three scoops of khulfi ($6), studded with pistachios, were less rich than you might expect. The "masala tea parfait" ($6) on the other hand, was just like classic khulfi: two teardrop-shaped pieces of rich, stiff ice milk with an intense citric sauce of peeled lemon wedges and floral extract. A "soufflé of rice and milk cake" ($5) was basically rice pudding with half-cherries and an edible butter-cookie spoon. In the "chocolate and rasmalai terrine" ($9), the same butter-cookie material was used to build a big elegant hamster wheel, which looped around three triangles of chocolate mousse cake.

The owners of Saffron went to a lot of expense to refashion the two-story space of the former Miyako into something dramatic, all cherry wood and stainless steel. Aesthetically it's not dissimilar to the cuisine: inside, banquettes are backed with high Indian-looking silk cushions; on the table are Euro-trendy egg-shaped salt and pepper shakers. Upstairs is a glass bar where you can sit and just look out on Newbury Street; outside is a generous patio from which to stare at whoever's eating at the patio of Kashmir across the street.

Some of the stares, by the way, may be turning dark soon: the owners of Kashmir plan to open their Nouvelle Indian restaurant, called Mantra, this fall. The Indian-food world is heating up. Watch this space.

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

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