Marché Mövenpick

Investigating the fine line between restaurant and theme park

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

Marché Mövenpic (617) 578-9700 800 Boylston Street (Prudential Center), Boston Open Mon-Thurs, 11 a.m.-midnight; Fri, 11 a.m.-2 a.m.; Sat, 9 a.m.-2 a.m.; and Sun, 9 a.m.-midnight Full bar AE, DC, MC, Visa Access from second floor of mall

In the movie business (and in the writing-about-movies business), certain films are said to be "critic-proof" -- that is, they're likely to open big and stay big, no matter how bad the advance reviews. Think of Godzilla, or a Jim Carrey comedy, or the Batman franchise, at least before the studio decided to pay Arnold Schwarzenegger the money previously earmarked for plot. The main ingredients in a critic-proof film are a catchy concept, a lot of advertising, a lot of special effects, and a big fat name on the marquee.

Minus the big fat name, those are pretty much the ingredients in a critic-proof restaurant, too, which brings us to Marché Mövenpick. The huge European restaurant chain Mövenpick (now that Travelers has been bought out, this may be the biggest company in the world named after an NBA violation) has spent the past year blowing out a three-story space in the back of the Shops at Prudential Center, installing mini-restaurants and a wine grotto and fake trees, for heaven's sake, and after what seemed like six gala opening parties last fall the place opened to . . . well, let's call it a crowd. Marché can seat 650 people and will add another 250 seats when the mezzanine opens in February, which means it's more than twice the size of the giant Legal Sea Foods at Park Plaza, and even so there's a line to get in at dinnertime. Critic-proof? You bet your alpenhorn. The mighty Globe could come out tomorrow with a scorched-earth review -- this is hypothetical, of course -- and the place would still do business on the scale of the Wang Center. (No exaggeration: Marché claims to serve 2000 customers a day.)

The word marché in the name means "market," and the concept is that we're in some sort of vast food bazaar. The uncharitable view is that we're in a very elaborate cafeteria, where every diner takes a tray and drifts from station to station, mövin' and pickin' (ha, ha) a bit here and a bit there. The catch is that every station essentially represents a different country, or at least a different kind of cooking: behind one counter are skillets of Swiss rösti potatoes and veal sausage on the grill; behind another, a headbanded Japanese guy named Johnny turns out seaweed salad and sushi on the fly. One station grills meat. One generates small pizzas. I've never been to Epcot Center, but when I imagine Epcot I think of something much like Marché: a goofy, pancultural theme park that in trying to capture every culture at once reduces them all (am I giving too much away here?) to a kind of jolly indistinguishability.

But first you have to find a seat. The line at Marché, when there is one, moves quickly; you're greeted by a greeter and guided to your table by a guide. (On less busy nights you can pick your own table.) The greeter and the guide are the only employees in the building not wearing the official Marché outfit, which is a greengrocer's apron and white shirt topped with a peppy straw hat (green band for girls, red for boys). People in this outfit clear your plates as you finish; they serve you food, and hand you knives and forks, and scurry to the side as you try to thread your way, with a full tray, through the bottleneck between the oyster bar (99 cents a pop) and the pasta station.

The advantage of a place like Marché, where each diner gets his own running tab, is that big eaters can go to dinner with small eaters, and adventurous appetites with conservative ones, and nobody ends up buying something he doesn't want. The disadvantage is that you can end up waiting in four or five lines for one meal: wait for your sushi, wait to get your pork chop grilled, wait for a salad, wait at the bar for a drink, and then -- once you've polished all that off -- wait for a scoop of ice cream or a decorated waffle. Just like at Disneyland, part of the genius of the restaurant is that you're kept amused while you're waiting: there's a lot to look at, with explosions of color and baskets of food and bustling people everywhere. There are little signs to read. There is your "passport," a piece of paper stamped by each food server, to puzzle over.

In a sense it would be uncharitable to judge Marché by the standards of a normal restaurant. If you are not a fussy eater, you'll be charmed by the place: the food is consistently fresh, and the "marketeers" make a show of throwing the meat and fish on the grill right when you ask for it, whipping up the caesar salad a few batches at a time, and so forth. And this approach no doubt does make a difference: a pork chop, even a bland one, pulled right off the grill tastes better than a pork chop pulled out from under a heat lamp. Pasta arrabbiata out of a skillet tastes better than pasta out of a steam tray. But pasta arrabbiata with some spice, or a little bite to the noodles, would taste better still, and the problem with Marché -- even if you don't see its syncretism as somehow sinister; even if sushi and sausage on the same tray seems more "fun" than "disturbing" -- is precisely that no particular dish really takes the trouble to be interesting. The arrabbiata was an okay plate of pasta, but what makes arrabbiata ($5) special is chili heat, and this is not a chili-heat kind of place. (Two popular cuisines notably absent: Mexican and Szechuan Chinese.) If you rarely eat sushi, Marché is a chance to try a piece ($1.19) without having to risk your whole dinner tab on it, but if you eat it regularly, you'll find the Marché version loosely rolled and indifferently cut. The same goes for bami goreng ($5), the Indonesian noodle dish; and though I've never had rösti potatoes anywhere else, I'm guessing that a real Swiss person would find the version here to be just a bit underwhelming.

Still, Marché is better than I expected. It isn't expensive, and the pure scope of the place is good for an evening's worth of amazement. Among the five themed eating areas, for instance, is a "bistro" ringed with gauzy half-curtains and decorated with what must be a hundred matted and framed black-and-white photos; through an interior window you can see over to the "Mediterranean garden," with illuminated fake grape bunches hanging from a trellis. Is Marché worth visiting? Sure. Just bring people with a sense of humor, and stick to the food that's not too prepared, if you know what I mean. The beer, for instance, is every bit as good here as in the finest bar. Fruit smoothies, blended on the spot, are excellent, thick with raspberry seeds and banana. Grilled sausages ($5.95 with rösti) were terrific across the board, as were the antipasti ($2.50) -- marinated tomatoes with basil, feta with pitted calamata olives, and a crisp, cold four-bean salad ($1.48). Then again, some of the simple items, like sherbet ($2.50), had all the gestures in place -- icy, crisp, vivid -- but fell short on flavor.

One little warning: I've eaten at Marché a couple of times now, and the second time I found myself in line with a trio of designer loafer-wearing French guys who not only cut in front of us, but proceeded to treat the place as a singles bar, propositioning every female unlucky enough to bump trays with them (and, of course, cutting in line when none of the females were looking). Anyway, these Mövenpickup artists didn't eat much, and they left unaccompanied, so maybe they won't be back to annoy you. But don't say you weren't warned.

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

---

The Dining Out archive

---