KingFish Hall

Putting more English on the local restaurant scene

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

KingFish Hall Faneuil Hall Marketplace South Open Sun-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m., and Fri and Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m. AE, DC, MC, Visa Full bar (617) 523-8862 Smoking on patio only Elevator access to second floor and downstairs restrooms

A couple of years ago, after Todd English had started to expand nationally, I took my girlfriend to Olives. We ordered the famous foie gras flan, which took ages to arrive. When it did, I inserted my fork, took a bite, and found it hot on the outside, chilly in the middle -- pre-made, and not even heated through. Uh-oh, I thought. The sun is setting on the English empire.

Not quite. I haven't been back for the flan, but two years later, there's now an Olives DC, an Olives Aspen, and (soon) an Olives Manhattan. The Todd runs hotel restaurants in Connecticut and South Carolina, plus the four local Figs branches. And his latest venture is, in a way, the weirdest yet: a two-story theme restaurant right in the heart of Boston. KingFish Hall -- actually, the full name is Todd English's KingFish Hall -- is a grand, wacky, impressive room at the south end of Quincy Market, done by a New York decorator and decked out so flamboyantly that for all the brown bread and lobster on the menu, it doesn't feel Bostonian at all. What it does feel like is a local guy gone national, a general reconquering his own city from the outside. It feels totally contrived.

And yet. And yet, KingFish, for all its lavish fakery, is fun. I mean, in your heart of hearts, aren't you a little tired of the minimalist Legal approach to seafood? And of the earnest parade of French-Italian bistros that makes up the city's restaurant scene? (There's a reason, after all, why a middling theme park like Jasper White's Summer Shack can open its doors and start minting money.) KingFish Hall is loaded with gimmicks, but they're smart gimmicks: a huge, steaming lobster pot luridly illuminated by colored lights; a lavish raw bar on ice, situated under a mirror so it's visible throughout the restaurant; and the strangest cooking device I've ever seen, a ring of rotating spikes around a wood-fire pit. This object, the "dancing fish" grill, looks like a thrill ride at an S&M fairground. It was designed by English himself.

In terms of the food, this is far and away the most ambitious seafood restaurant in the city. The menu has more divisions than the Israeli parliament. It offers chilled shellfish, hot soup, Asian grilled appetizers, sandwiches, salads, and entrées. There's a list of daily specials. There's a special section just for ceviche (four varieties).

You look at a menu like this one, with its length and complexity, and you think you're being bluffed; you don't seriously expect anyone to pull it off. But this is English's great trick: to let a major-league imagination romp through a field of ingredients, attempting one over-the-top maneuver after the other without ever quite tripping. KingFish Hall is a busy place, and service wasn't perfect, but we never once encountered the equivalent of the chilly flan. In three visits we had one little service lapse, one too-spicy sauce, and a few dishes that were more okay than amazing. But mostly we ate terrific food, and we had fun every time we went. We were also consistently surprised.

Example one: the tuna "baton" ($12.50), which was several deep-pink sticks of raw tuna. Instead of being set on something quasi-Japanese, they were stacked on a round cake of curried potato salad with a crispy crust on the bottom. The dish was lavishly accessorized with curling green onions on top and a sauce of bacon and chopped haricots verts around the outside. It sounds like too much -- everything here sounds like too much -- but it came off more cleanly than you'd expect.

English's chef here is David Kinkead, who last worked at Brasserie Jo. You can see a French influence -- at least I think you can -- in dishes like the asparagus-endive salad ($10.50), in which a picnicky toss of chopped endive and crab meat in mayonnaise dressing is surrounded by a circle of upright endive leaves, each nestling the head of an asparagus spear. The grilled-quail appetizer ($11), by contrast, wasn't French at all: it had a yummy but slightly bogus Asian quality. It consisted of two halves of a grilled quail stretched along skewers, blackened, and served over a celery-onion-carrot slaw with peanut sauce.

We had two genuine showstopper entrées, both specials. One was a fillet of sturgeon ($23) served with a bright-red langoustine presiding over the plate, its flamboyant claws pointing right at us. Sturgeon isn't on many menus, but it has become just about my favorite fish: hefty and meaty without being too oily. This had a nice spice crust and was cooked neatly through on the S&M grill; accompanying it was an excellent risotto with chunks of lobster and peas. At the end of dinner, we turned the langoustine over, twisted off the tail, and ate it like a pint-size lobster.

The other eye-opening entrée was a whole fried sea bass ($23.50), served head-on, balanced somehow on its belly so that it arrived at the table in a swimming position. (It's very popular, and on a busy night you see bass after bass schooling across the dining room.) We dug a fork into the flaky chestnut-brown batter to excavate some of the best fish I've had in ages -- moist, white, and steamy. My only disappointment was the miscalculated sauce: a red-bean relish so spicy it totally overpowered any meat it touched.

Non-specials were solid, if not as gorgeously executed. A baked "Captain's cut" of cod steak ($18) came with a mustardy crust and some pine nuts, accompanied by excellent whipped potatoes green with basil. A steamed salmon fillet ($18.95) was thick and moist, served over a hash of quinoa and cubed potatoes, with a few mussels. (There were always more accompaniments: the salmon, for instance, was topped with a cucumber-cilantro salsa, and on the plate were two sauces, brown and green, swirling like wasabi and soy.)

Desserts were a little simpler. A smooth-textured cylinder of banana bread pudding ($6.25) was balanced on a disk of custard. Chocolate-
pudding cake ($8.50) was really a hot chocolate soup with a top crust. I confess I drank mostly beer with this food, but the wine list is loaded with quirky varietals and handily organized by style rather than region.

KingFish Hall is a crowded place, but we sat down on two out of three visits without waiting. The overload showed up in the service the one night we did have to wait: our second appetizer arrived after we'd finished the first, and the entrées came before those plates had been cleared. It's an expensive enough restaurant that it really needs to work the kinks out, but it'll have a chance to tighten up this fall, once the outside patio closes. At least you're not forced to wait: unlike Olives, KingFish Hall does take reservations.

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

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