Local interest
A good neighbor in the South End
by Stephen Heuser
DINING OUT |
Rave 552
552 Tremont Street (South End), Boston
Open Mon-Wed, 7 a.m.-11 p.m.; Thurs-Fri, 7 a.m.-midnight; Sat.,
9 a.m.-midnight; Sun., 9 a.m.-11 p.m.
AE, MC, Visa
No liquor
(617) 426-0008
Sidewalk-level access
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The recent restaurant boom in the South End has serious
limits if you actually live there. It has become a neighborhood of
excellent $20 entrées, which does a lot to attract visitors but doesn't
necessarily improve your options on the average weeknight. The quick and
decisive success of the Dish, on Shawmut Avenue, attests to the need for a
corner joint that charges half the price for decent food served in a
gratifyingly trendy space.
Enter Rave 552, the new restaurant on the site of the coffee shop Mildred's.
The name sounds like a weekly club night; you expect to find a DJ behind the
sandwich counter, or at least a bartender in black vinyl pants. But it's
emphatically a restaurant, much more so than Mildred's was. There's still a
bakery case, but it's filled with prepared foods, and there's table service and
a whole menu of full-plate dinners available after 5 p.m.
The space is now a cozy mod-retro place, done in purple and leopard, with the
kind of Jetsons-visiting-Pleasantville love seats you see in trendy furniture
stores. I walked into about a three-quarter-full house for dinner a week or two
ago; most tables are twosomes, but there were a bunch of boys chatting at a
countertop and some folks lounging near the door. I'm not sure you'd call the
place a hangout yet; there's no beer or wine, and it's occupied but not quite
buzzy. We quickly got a table near the window on Waltham Street.
Everything in the food case looked good -- which has clearly occurred to the
management, since they offer a "taste of the case" special. This turned out to
be a heck of a lot of food for $10.95: a big plate laid like a roulette wheel
with wedge-shaped portions of cold salad. Some of the stuff was basic deli
food: yellow potato salad, cole slaw, "white bean" salad made with chickpeas
instead of cannellini beans. The chicken salad was simple but fresh, as was the
Greek salad. We especially liked the garlicky grilled shrimp with penne rigate
(this was a fragmentary version of a pasta dish on the menu), and the strips of
sweet soy-tasting tenderloin (ditto). In the center was a ramekin of what we
thought was sauce until our waiter went back for an explanation and we learned
it was soup: a roast-vegetable soup, chilled for summer, tomato-red in color
and very interesting.
A full meat-loaf dinner ($8.95) came with a pile of herbed mashed potatoes and
a piece of meat loaf so big it arced around the plate, covered in sweet gravy.
We also had a basic salad of "mixed forest greens" ($4.50) and drank iced tea
($1.67) with a difficult-to-place fruit taste; it's made fresh, and
differently, every day. A vanilla frappe ($4.50) came topped with whipped
cream. After all that, our check for two people barely cracked $30 -- even
including the tip.
I stopped in for late breakfast a week later; they were, sadly, out of the
"unbelievable cinnamon swirl," but I ate a nicely cheesy frittata (basically
two slices of warmed-up quiche, $6.50) served with sliced fresh fruit. A whole
meal for less than $10 is less exceptional at breakfast than at dinner, but
still. A couple more places like this and the South End might become known as a
bargain.
Stephen Heuser can be reached at
sheuser[a]phx.com.
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