The Boston Phoenix
August 17 - 24, 2000

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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

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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