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[Dining Out]

Q-Vin
An Asian restaurant our critic doesn’t like!
BY ROBERT NADEAU

dining out
Q-Vin
(617) 375-0545
545 Boylston Street (Back Bay) Boston
Open daily, noon– 3 p.m. and 5 p.m.– midnight
AE, DC, Di, MC, Vi
Beer and wine
Access down full flight of stairs below sidewalk level

Readers imagine that restaurant critics are bribed with gifts of caviar and truffles, and threatened with death by chocolate or poisoned sushi. The story at this paper is more prosaic. Would it surprise you to know that the Phoenix has always pressured me not to review two Asian restaurants in a row? This is not because the management doesn’t like Chinese food, but because I do — so much. On my own with an unlimited expense account, I would review Asian restaurants five or six times in a row, and then maybe take in a French bistro or a Mediterranean place for comic relief. One compromise we have struck is that expensive fusion restaurants like Salamander and Blue Ginger don’t count against my Asian-restaurant quota. But Q-Vin, a “Japanese, Korean, Thai” restaurant downtown, will. And what’s newsworthy is that here’s a pretty ambitious Asian restaurant that I don’t much like.

It’s not hard to figure out that Korean food is what the kitchen wants to do, but even some of the Korean items were not well executed on either of my visits. A sushi sample was just fine, but other Japanese dishes were off-kilter in various ways. In short, I can recommend Q-Vin mainly for sushi, fried appetizers, and — figure this out — frozen pre-fab Italian desserts.

And now I can’t write about another Asian meal under $40 a plate for two weeks. Bummer.

Well, let’s start with those fried appetizers. One of the things I like about Asian restaurants is I can take my teenage kids to them, and Maurice and Stephanie have been giving me quite an education about these treats. At Q-Vin (which means “VIP” in Korean), the best are shu mai ($5.95), available with shrimp or pork. These are Japanese-type shu mai, minced shrimp wrapped in dough to the shape of large bay scallops, and lightly fried to a contrasting crisp. You get six, and they go fast. The four Thai rolls ($5.95) are very decent — the fat-cigar shape fries up crunchy, the Southeast Asian cellophane noodles put a little bounce in every bite, and it all works nicely with a sweet-hot dipping sauce. Bangkok wings ($5.95) were only six sections of chicken wings, but marinated in something sweet and fried sweetly.

Gyoza ($5.95) are folded like Peking ravioli around a filling of finely chopped vegetables and meat. We had them steamed, but pan-fried would have been better, since the wraps came out a little stale and dry. Appetizers like these come garnished with curly parsley and what looks like a cherry, but is actually a single grape tomato. Our only real clunker among the fried appetizers was a soft-shell crab (seasonal, ours $7.95), which was too fishy to eat.

Sushi is a big deal, and probably what most people go to Q-Vin for; cooked dishes are better at other restaurants in the neighborhood, such as Kaya and Typhoon. We checked out a special on toro (fatty tuna) sushi and found it fresh, sweet, and suitably rich, as well as cleverly cut — scored on the bias to give the appearance of fish scales (seasonal, ours $9.90).

Of the Korean main dishes, I enjoyed the Q-Vin special, kal bi ($18.95). Kal bi is short ribs of beef, usually barbecued with a strong ginger-soy sauce; but here it is cut off the bone, cooked in a sweet-hot red marinade, and served on a sizzling platter with some vegetables. One makes little wraps with lettuce leaves, a hot-sweet red-bean paste, a tin of gluey rice, and perhaps one of a number of small garnishes: two kinds of very hot kim chee, a little platter of fried dough balls, an octopus salad, and some stale pickled cucumbers. My approach to the garnishes was to eat up the octopus salad on its own, and take an academic taste of both kinds of kim chee. Kim chee, you understand, is fermented cabbage. I’m inclined to think that you have to grow up with Korean food to like it, but since it has a broader public in Hawaii I know it’s possible to develop a taste for it, and I keep trying. But a couple dozen Korean restaurants have yet to convince me that I can evaluate its freshness or intensity or whatever a connoisseur of kim chee is supposed to check for. They keep serving it to me, though, so some other Anglos must like it.

I can’t fault Q-Vin for the kim chee, but I’m sure there’s nothing authentic about the dishwater broth we had in an order of dumpling stew ($10.95). And we were underwhelmed by the menu’s chosen showpiece, the $39.95 “Q-Vin Moduem Gui.” This is a tabletop dish, so our server removed the metal plate that says “Han Back Roster” from the middle of our table and brought out a bucket of burning charcoal. This was pumped up with a bellows and topped with a cast-iron grill. The servers then brought out a large platter of raw foods and slapped them onto the grill. This was fun, but with many of the items the results were neither reliable nor delightful. Four head-on giant prawns grilled unevenly. Slices of lean beef crisped. Octopus turned to vulcanized rubber regardless of how much or how little it was grilled. Some of the best bites were onions and enoki and portobello mushrooms. That Korean red-bean paste is a fine sauce, but this platter saw a lot of activity for no real culinary advantage.

An order of tempura udon ($11.95), one of my favorite Japanese dinners, committed a number of errors. The broth tasted stale, although it may have picked this up from the cast-iron pot. The wide white noodles were good, but the two kinds of fish sausage were too fishy. I liked the straw mushrooms and shiitake mushrooms, as well as some of the other vegetables in the soup, but the tempura was all wrong. It seemed that it used the kind of crumb batter the Japanese use for tonkatsu. This picked up more grease than traditional tempura, and didn’t melt properly in the soup. The tempura (one piece each of shrimp, onion, green pepper, zucchini cut way too thick, and carrot) was served on the side, along with bottles of togorashi (seasoned chili pepper) and sansho (a Japanese pepper with a menthol flavor) — seasonings that usually go with other dishes in Japanese restaurants.

Pad Thai ($10.95) was a closer counterfeit of the great Thai noodle dish, but greasy — which suggests tentative stir-frying.

Q-Vin offers hot and cold sake and Asian beers, and serves an unusual hot tea that has a very dry flavor, slightly astringent, with a hint of vanilla. We were served a little complimentary fruit salad — chunks of apple in syrup. And again, the maraschino cherry turned out to be a grape tomato. As Anglo teenagers say, “How random is that?” But we did have a pleasant surprise with the frozen desserts, which are purchased from an Italian company, Bindi. The cassata ($4.95) is a rich slice of custardy ice cream with a chocolate swirl and a contrasting layer of hazelnuts, candied orange, and — at last — maraschino cherries. The pineapple ($4.95) is a hollowed shell filled with very vivid pineapple sorbet. The orange ($5.50) is sorbet stuffed into a whole frozen orange, with the top cut off and replaced like the lid of a tea pot. Unfortunately, the orange sorbet was not so nicely flavored as the pineapple, and came off as medicinal. Still, if your idea of fun is sushi and sorbet, this restaurant has plenty to explore in both categories.

Q-Vin is a full floor below street level, which was a serious problem for previous restaurants occupying the space. The surroundings are either exotic or weird, depending on how you regard big jars of preserved ginseng root, server call buttons (no kidding!) resembling purple computer mice on every table, and a vertical air purifier that might have worked for the late Gene Roddenberry. Black chairs and blond-wood tables are what you might expect, but the soundtrack is jazz vocals, a lot of it by Louis Armstrong, who has finally run the Gipsy Kings out of restaurant sound systems.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.