The Dish

A perfect neighborhood restaurant, as long as you can walk to the neighborhood

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Dish 253 Shawmut Avenue (South End), Boston (617) 426-7866 Open daily, 5 p.m.-1 a.m., and for brunch Sat and Sun, 10 a.m.-3 p.m. AE, MC, Visa Beer and wine No smoking One step up from sidewalk; some tables a step up from floor

If you don't live in the South End and you try to drive to the Dish, you'll have a lot of time to think about dinner. You'll also, as you circle the block for the third time, have a lot of time to ruminate on the South End's bizarre street layout and how nice it would be to live here so you could just roll out of your apartment and walk to the Dish. It's just the kind of restaurant you want to live near, a tiny place with a friendly buzz and a small bar and not too long a wait for the tables. The food's okay, but the best part is the idea: a corner joint with decent bistro cooking where nothing but the wine costs more than $13.95.

So far the Dish has had great word of mouth and not much official publicity. It doesn't need any. The place is just full enough to be convivial but not so mobbed that you spend an hour crammed against the wall waiting for dinner.

It's a storefront space in a classic South End building that's now under renovation, with boards over some of the windows and a brand-new silver Audi A4 parked in front of the black garbage bags on the curb. Like the nearby Franklin Café, which it resembles in clientele and buzziness, it's all but unmarked; I had to drive by both restaurants twice before I spotted them.

Unlike at the Franklin, it's not an unreasonable prospect to get a table here on a weeknight. On one visit I sat right down, and the next Tuesday I had a 15-minute wait at the bar, over a glass of Anchor Steam, before a table for two opened up. When it did, my friend and I wedged our feet under a tiny deuce against the Dish's one bare brick wall and tucked into the excellent basket of sourdough bread. The olive oil, noticeably fresh, came in a pour-it-yourself spout bottle on the table.

The place looks and feels much more expensive than it is: the sage banquettes, the cylindrical parchment light fixture, the oak-framed chalkboards listing specials, the granite bar, the stylish clientele. That said, this is not exactly a "foodie" restaurant. To put it a different way, you leave satisfied but you wouldn't rush out to buy the cookbook. To put it yet another way: Cajun meat loaf with green beans and mashed potatoes, $9.95; romaine salad with chopped sun-dried tomatoes and a couple shingles of romano cheese, $4.95. The antipasto plate costs $6.95 and covers the basics: sliced, lightly grilled zucchini; a handful of olives; a slice of prosciutto wrapped around a twisty breadstick.

There is a whole mid-menu list of wood-fired-oven pizzas, which aren't huge but are big enough to split with someone as a smallish dinner, especially if you eat a salad first. We tried only one, a sausage pizza from the high end of the list at $12.95. It was densely topped with sausage meat, a few roasted red peppers, and chunks of ricotta cheese. The crust was good, though it didn't have that memorable bubbly crispiness that wood-oven crust can achieve.

Among the entrées, the Cajun meat loaf -- basically, spicy meat loaf with chunks of red bell pepper inside -- was a solid update on a retro standard, though I couldn't really taste the ricotta in the ricotta mashed potatoes that came with it. Two cod cakes ($10.95) came with a mesclun salad for a nice complete meal, but the outsides of the patties were slightly burned. A pork tenderloin with "pistachio goat cheese crust" ($13.95) was three medallions of pork; I couldn't taste the pistachio or the goat cheese, but the crust was there, a nice seared exterior with crisp bits of fragrant rosemary. The medallions were cooked just a touch dry, at least by contemporary standards of glisteningly moist pork, but the plate's various relishes -- baked apples, sautéed onion, and sour cream -- restored plenty of juice. Wherever green beans showed up, they were bright green and crunchy to the point of undercookedness. (Then again, I don't like green beans cooked soft, either, so I shouldn't complain.)

The vegetarian entrée was quite successful, though nothing a competent cook couldn't make at home: two pale green peppers (cubanelles, according to the menu), their soft skin stuffed with tomato rice and flavored with tomato chunks and intense little capers ($8.95).

Sometimes at restaurants like this it's smart to stick to the basics, but at the Dish my favorite item was proportionally the most expensive: a shrimp appetizer for $7.95. Three big grilled shrimp were served on a soup plate framing an open-topped tomato, which was broiled with cheese and garlic on top. The tomato was pure housewife gourmet, the kind of thing you'd see on the cover of a Time-Life cookbook circa 1970, and it was wonderful. So was the highly garlicky wine broth that lined the plate and made for addictive bread-dipping after the shrimp was gone.

Wine isn't quite the same bargain as the food. Although there's nothing dizzyingly expensive among the six whites and 10 reds, there's also not much under $20, and even a mass-market wine like Los Vascos Cabernet is $6 a glass.

Desserts are all $6. An apple-walnut crisp wasn't fully warmed one night, but another night it was piping hot. Chocolate pot de crème, which our waiter described coyly as "denser than mousse, but not yet pudding," was actually somewhere between mousse and icing in texture, a rich and heavy chilled chocolate in a stark white bowl. All our desserts were topped with whipped cream overlaid with a caramel lattice, like the Starbucks caramel macchiato you see on billboards.

The Dish isn't a perfect restaurant, but if I could wave a wand and incarnate a dozen more restaurants like it, I would. Boston's fin-de-siècle restaurant boom has occurred mostly in the upper reaches of affordability, and only recently have we started to see good places opening up that try hard to price themselves for regular diners instead of tech millionaires and suburban lawyers. If you're lucky, you live near one of these restaurants yourself. I'd tell you about the one near me, but parking's bad enough in my neighborhood as it is.

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

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