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Gargoyles on the Square

Dissonant styles but excellent food in Davis Square

by Robert Nadeau

Gargoyles on the Square
215 Elm Street
Davis Square, Somerville
776-5300
Hours
Tues - Fri, 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Sat and Sun, 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Beer and wine.
Credit cards: AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Handicap access: street level

Early reviews of Gargoyles have concentrated on the incongruity of a fancy restaurant in Davis Square, a kind of capstone of yuppification. This is unfair to the restaurant, which offers a combination of quality and value that would be welcome in any neighborhood, and would certainly find a niche downtown. The issue for Gargoyles is not whether to be a moderately priced fancy restaurant, but what sort to be. And here there are some real decisions to make. With a background at the Seasons restaurant, the owners have brought quite a lot of the traditional, refined kind of fancy to their new place. Much of the food is subtly flavored in way that seems to reject decades of food fads. But the blues music, semi-open kitchen, loud-bar noise, and piled-high platters tend to overwhelm that subtlety. This is the new kind of fancy, which is informal, but requires highly flavored food to cut through the surrounding ambiance.

The tone of the food is set by a breadbasket accompanied not by olive oil but by a late '70s ramekin of sweet butter. The rolls are hard-crusted French and some kind of nut bread, both fine. But already there's a lot of clank and some frying aroma issuing from the open kitchen, a New Orleans piano piece playing on the sound system, and a lot of shoes tapping on the tile floors -- a good deal to contend with.

A butternut squash soup ($5.50), rich as bisque and spiced up like a combination of pumpkin pie and gingerbread house, is a contender. If the music rises to a gospel chorus, make sure your spoonful includes a fine, crunchy crouton and some chives. But a warmed mesclun salad with a chicken-liver pâté just got lost in the busy environment of Gargoyles.

Even a truly superb risotto ($7.50) in an acorn squash with confit of duck could be overlooked here. The greatness of the risotto was in its creaminess (a lot of fussing goes into that kind of effect, as well as butter and cheese). And it melded beautifully with the richness of the squash. I think the confit could have been saltier and spicier -- taking Madeleine Kamman's recipe instead of Paula Wolfert's next time -- and might make the kind of dish that fits the room. (Or the owners could acknowledge a competitive advantage with this refined dish, and switch to Mozart and carpets.)

A presentation of hand-cut smoked salmon with fried wedges of potato ($8.50) has been an early success, with its hearty flavor and refined trimmings of dill and sour cream. Another good appetizer for a crowd is grilled pizza ($6). The one I had would have appetized four completely, and was in the postmodern mode: a grilled flatbread with some char, topped with broiled white beans and tomatoes, and then with uncooked arugula. I think white beans are starch overkill in any pizza without anchovies, but that's a personal opinion. The execution was effective, and we grade on execution here.

Even in December, this is a really good restaurant for vegetarians. The "roasted, grilled, and steamed vegetables plate and starches" ($13.50) is one of the finest vegetable medlies around. In the roasted category, I was especially impressed with beats and mushrooms. The grilled winners included a quartered fennel bulb, pearl onions, and vividly flavored slices of parsnip and carrot. The steamed list included excellent asparagus, baby carrots, and wings of frisée. The starches were a fry of spätzle and mushrooms and another great risotto in acorn squash (this one with a tomato flavoring). A pumpkin pappardelle with seasonal vegetables ($12.50) was almost as good -- particularly good if you're a fan of the wide ribbon pasta. I couldn't locate the alleged sauce of "arugula pumpkin-seed pesto."

About the only great vegetable item that didn't show up on one of those two dishes was the fennel mashed potatoes, which came under the terrific leg of lamb ($17.50). It should be no problem to recruit a designated carnivore to take care of the meat, which combines a braised shank with a few roast slices from higher on the leg. Meat doesn't get any better than those two cuts.

I have noticed that health concerns are overcoming gender stereotypes. In our party of five, men ordered the vegetable and poultry entrees; women ordered the red meat. Thus, we depended on female leadership to discover the medallions of tenderloin of beef ($19), two slices of what we used to call "butter-knife steak" layered with a rich blue cheese (Stilton? Gorgonzola?). A brilliant accompaniment, witty even, was onions two ways: grilled and French fried. And asparagus. Yes, the mother of all cheeseburger platters, and the consensus was that the cheese was just too much of a good thing.

Grilled duckling ($18), one of the men's choices, consisted of lean slices of breast with a cranberry garnish, fried spätzle and fried kale leaves.

There is a good little list of wines and microbrews. On a winter night, with red meat and hearty vegetables, we sampled the house reds by the glass: a velvety and fruity merlot ($4.25) and a chianti with a little more backbone ($4.75). Coffee and decaf were quite good.

Dessert is the course where the management has gone more consistently to the postmodern ideal of fancy dining, with satisfying results. The winner our night was an apple-walnut cake ($5), chosen for its contrasting virtues of light texture and considerable flavor, enhanced with a hazelnut pastry cream below and a heap of julienned granny-smith shavings on the side.

We had a friendly waiter, which was fortunate since there is a certain creepiness to be dispelled at Gargoyles. One enters through heavy velvet drapes, which exclude drafts but add a feeling of Dracula's castle.