Bomboa

The Hub gets a dose of Nuevo Latino -- whatever that may be

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Bomboa 35 Stanhope Street (Back Bay), Boston (617) 236-6363 Open daily, 5:30 p.m.-midnight (bar open until 2 a.m.) AE, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar and bar tables Sidewalk-level access

For the past year or two, there has been something percolating through the food world called Nuevo Latino cooking, a cuisine whose definition seems to depend entirely on where you find it. In the West, Nuevo Latino is often upscaled Mexican cooking; in the East, it's a collision of Caribbean flavors and South American ingredients, or vice versa, mostly at New York prices.

Boston tends to find its own way in these matters, and the trend here is -- okay, there is no trend here. Bits of Latin cookery have been popping up in non-Latino-owned restaurants; over in Cambridge, Chez Henri has been doing a French-Cuban thing since it opened a few years ago, and you'll find some New Floridian ideas at the new Linwood Grill in the Fenway. Joey Crugnale, the guy behind Bertucci's, is launching a seafood chain called Naked Fish whose theme is purportedly Latin. But a series of gestures does not a movement make.

With Bomboa, however, it seems safe to say the trend has landed. The menu is basically Franco-Brazilian: in the smooth, clubby space that used to be Restaurant Zinc, you kick off dinner with a caipirinha or mojito at the bar, start the meal with ceviche served in a coconut, then dig into a cassoulet-style feijoada and finish with crêpes. Chef Michael Reidt (who is also a co-owner) was the last chef at Zinc, and he has kept "Zinc's steak tartare" on the menu, along with a few other bistro dishes.

If you ever visited Zinc, you'll certainly recognize the details here; you make your entrance through the same imposing wooden doors and belly up to the same imported zinc bar. But Toteau, I don't think we're in Paris anymore. For one thing, there's a wavy tubular light behind the bar that, if you watch carefully, subtly shifts color throughout the night. The upholstery is zebra-striped. And set into the back wall is a really impressive aquarium, with live coral, a giant clam, and periodic tidal surges.

With its sleek internationalism and late hours (the kitchen is open till midnight), Bomboa is clearly aiming to capture the clubgoing Armani crowd. The bartender one Tuesday was a friendly guy who also works at 29 Newbury and Avalon. "We get all kinds," he told me as the light behind him shifted from blue to green, green to red, red to white. "The Newbury Street crowd, older conservative people; the gay crowd; an international crowd." Just after he said this, down at the end of the bar I caught a conversation in progress: a well-dressed guy in his 20s said something about "BU brats" before pausing to turn apologetically to the woman next to him. She was wearing a black baseball hat that said BITCH. "Well you're, like, a nice BU brat," he said.

"You're a BU brat," she said.

"No," he said, "I work for a living." He wasn't lying. His job is co-owner of the restaurant, and a couple nights later I saw him there again, working the crowd, opening wine, kissing the rich. He seemed to want the restaurant to succeed.

It will almost certainly succeed if the chef can figure out how to make everything as good as the ceviche appetizer. Yeah, it's $12. But ¡ay! was it nice: little cubes of raw tuna and yellowtail and shrimp dressed with citrus on one part of the plate; a multicolored salsa of papaya, radish, and purple potato cradled in a crescent of coconut; a single oyster dressed with bright green cilantro purée. The whole thing was fresh, Caribbean, and lively; you could even eat the coconut if you weren't afraid to go at its flesh with a butter knife.

It would be nice if everything had worked that well, but it didn't. By and large the execution was pretty sharp; it was the ideas that didn't always gel. An appetizer called "aracaje" ($11) was three shrimp fritters set on some kind of mashed starch, garnished with beans and a kind of lime curd; the fritters were carroty things that exploded on contact with the fork, and although they had a nice smoky flavor that I found addictive, the plate as a whole didn't hold together for me.

Our more-conservative dishes were similarly back-and-forth. A very nice green salad ($8) made good use of cashews and hearts of palm cut into strips; the result was much more interesting than plain greens would have been. But another basic bistro dish, steak frites ($20), didn't benefit from meddling. It also didn't benefit from a less-than-$20 cut of beef -- the steak was fatty like sirloin instead of marbled and flavorful like ongelet -- and the accompanying red sauce was somehow too thin to do much for the steak-and-potato richness on the plate. We liked the fries, though, skin-on and dusted with sea salt.

I'm not sure what to think of the feijoada ($20), a soupy Brazilian stew of sausage and chicken that here was approached like a cassoulet, cooked with beans and served in a big two-eared iron pot. There wasn't anything wrong about it -- plenty of meat, nifty serving vessel -- but nor did it really take flight.

Bomboa's wine list is gratifyingly long but organized with a sort of brute-force approach: one big page of whites, one of reds, ordered strictly by price. This makes it hard to navigate if you don't know a lot of wine names by heart, although it's handy if you approach wine-ordering mainly by cost. (A wine writer I know takes a more cynical view: organizing lists like this, he says, encourages people to pay more so they'll be ordering from a more impressive place on the page.) We ordered the one half-bottle on the list, a very nice $15 bottle of 1995 J. Vidal Côtes-du-Rhône red.

Desserts are mostly classic non-Latino things, and they are cooked, interestingly, by Rebecca Esty, who was the opening chef at the Vault. I always liked her cooking at the Vault; here, the desserts are good but much more comfort-foody than the rest of the menu. Meaning wholesome crêpes maison ($7.25), with peel-on apple slices and a deep caramel sauce; and banana bread pudding ($7.25) with a puddle of chocolate and more caramel.

Service was slightly casual for a $111 meal; our waitress was good about getting us drinks but a bit here-and-there the rest of the night.

By and large, though, the flaws at Bomboa are interesting ones. When a restaurant is relatively new (in this case, six weeks old) and so conceptually ambitious, I find myself rooting for the kinks to get worked out, but also wishing I hadn't been the guinea pig. Right now I'll probably be going back for a mojito and an appetizer at the bar, as well as to wave to the giant clam.

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

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