Naked Fish

Buena Vista Diners Club

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Naked Fish 16-18 North Street (opposite Quincy Market), Boston (617) 742-3333 Open Mon-Thurs, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri-Sat, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun, noon-9 p.m. AE, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar No smoking Sidewalk-level access

Everyone remembers the Naked Fish advertisement with the muscular guy holding the fish like a fig leaf. So whatever the marketing plan is, it works. The actual restaurants, judging by the one opposite Quincy Market, don't have naked people in them, or even whole fish on display. So the ad must be, uh, symbolic. But what does it symbolize? That eating fish will make you like young men with muscles but no clothes?

At any rate, if you go to restaurants for the food, Naked Fish is rather good, and much more consistent than Jambalaya, that other high-concept launch by Joey Crugnale (founder of Bertucci's, builder of Steve's Ice Cream, non-savior of Bailey's Ice Cream). And if you go to restaurants for the concept, the concept of Naked Fish isn't nudism or fish: it's Cuba.

Cuba?

Yup, and not the Cuba I expected, that time-capsule Cuba of '50s American bulgemobiles cruising past decaying buildings and the Buena Vista Social Club. Nor any radical-chic Castro Cuba, nor any plastic-deco Miami Cuba. No, this is a reasonable kind of restaurant-concept Cuba, consisting of strong side dishes, solid background music, and what once would have been modern décor, but now has to be seen as pre-postmodern décor. I refer here to blue Plexiglas waves and wrought-iron sculptures. An old-style fan in a metal cage was the only period reference I could spot.

We started with a crispy seafood platter ($12.95), which established that the coconut calamari ($7.25 on their own) are going to wipe out the popcorn shrimp ($6.95). The former got an addictive hit of flavor from a sprinkling of toasted coconut, but the latter tasted too much of the freezer. Fried oysters ($6.95 on their own) are the third element here -- they're dipped in cornmeal and rather excellent. The big platter comes with four dipping sauces, of which one chili mayonnaise has a quick heat that fades (like a jalapeño), and the other chili mayonnaise has a slow heat that builds (like Buffalo-wing sauce). The tartar sauce (which usually goes with the oysters) has a nice scallion lift to it. And the cocktail sauce is the ketchup-and-horseradish kind, and goes with everything.

Black-bean soup ($2.50/3.75) is supposed to be "traditional Cuban style," and it rather is. The least traditional thing is the postmodern oversize bowl, a mile wide and an inch deep. These types of bowls look great, but they don't hold heat. The soup is also spicier than real Cuban black-bean soup, but not annoyingly so. (When you put hot pepper in a Cuban black-bean soup already seasoned with cumin, you have something a lot like Texas chili.) Grilled-vegetable antipasto ($6.25) features underdone broccolini, green beans, and snap peas, but also strips of sweet plantain, grilled eggplant and yellow squash, and a big toast topped with a lot of salsa, like a Caribbean exaggeration of bruschetta. That's a lavish platter, and it will keep the vegetarians from worrying about the fish for sure.

The main entrée form is wood-grilled -- eight kinds of fish, four types of steak, some chicken, and a lobster -- and the treatment isn't especially Cuban. In the "Cuban spicy chicken" ($12.95), all the spice is sprinkled on the skin. It's supposed to be "jerk style" (different island, guys), and it has a little musty allspice along with the salt and pepper, but it's basically just a well-made broiled chicken. The best fish we tried, roasted Chilean sea bass ($19.95), is done in a distinctly Italian style, with a winey-sweet tomato sauce toned up with garlic, capers, and Greek kalamata olives (different peninsula, guys, but the spirit is right). No one's found a way to ruin Chilean sea bass yet, but this is the kind of complementary fish sauce that's long overdue in the hub of eating fish broiled or fried plainly. A baked haddock ($13.95) from the "Not-So-Naked" column is, in fact, pretty basic, with another dusting of spice powder and a limp side dish of sliced onions and potatoes.

But other sides dishes are good, and, fortunately, you can order two side dishes with almost everything. In fact, some of the best ones are impressively Cuban. The black beans and rice, what Cubans call Moros y Cristianos (or "Moro" for short), has the real flavor of Cuban rice, a trick you can do at home by reducing the water and adding oil. The pan-fried plantains are super-sweet, a style favored on no other island. The mashed-banana sweet potatoes are not specifically Cuban, but so delicious that no Cuban would say no. Snap-pea salad is an expensive treat, but our peas were cold and undercooked, and didn't start out fresh enough to justify such treatment. Maple-glazed carrots were likewise better in the concept than the execution. But garlic mashed potatoes are always a good idea.

There is a bit of a wine list, and some beers, and a list of Cuban drinks that didn't really twirl my umbrella, but again, the kind of people who like that Naked Fish ad may respond to them differently. Desserts need some work, but the potential is there. Mango fruit cup ($4.25) was all mango our night, and that's always a good idea too. Mango Key-lime cake ($4.95) is a cupcake with Key-lime cream filling, too sweet and too mixed up. The best part of it is the guava coulis. Save that and try it on something simpler, like the Cuban bread pudding ($4.95), which is made from the Cuban bread that's like French bread, so it's a regular bread pudding that just needs a little guava coulis to make it sing.

Service, the bane of concept restaurants, seemed to be reasonably in order on a slowish cold night downtown. Our servers knew about the food and brought what they were supposed to bring in good order. The space is long and narrow, but reasonably functional and pretty. If it is typical of what Naked Fish restaurants will be like, they won't waste your money on square footage when they can show off with broccolini and snap peas.

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

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