Bubala's by the Bay

Munching ostrich at a Provincetown perennial

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Bubala's by the Bay 183-5 Commercial Street, Provincetown Open daily, 8 a.m.-11 p.m. AE, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at outside tables only (508) 487-0773 Street-level access

With seasonal restaurants you have to check in each year, but the eight-year-old Bubala's has moved from strength to strength,

becoming popular first for brunch, then for al fresco lunch, and now for fine dining. Despite a name that reeks of New York, Bubala's has become accepted as a Provincetown landmark. (The décor suggests that the name has less to do with Jewish grandchildren than with breasts.)

The food certainly emphasizes the sea, and it sticks to some classics. But there is room for some innovation, including this reviewer's first ostrich steak. Bubala's also has a very good wine list, with a lot of strong selections for less than $20.

Things start well with fruity virgin olive oil, a breadbasket, and a head of roasted garlic. The breads are a usefully bland Portuguese white and a gritty focaccia with some rosemary. Clam chowder ($2.25/$3.50) is highly creamy, but with plenty of clams and a few potatoes. Caribbean fish cakes ($7.25) are quite spicy fried patties, but the fresh tartar sauce with them is cooling. "Famous fish soup" ($8.95) is the rare famous dish worth a taste. It's tomato-based, with a lot of fresh white fillet and some cooked tomato, carrot, and celery, and a fair amount of hot pepper. Buttery toasts topped with cheese float in the broad, shallow bowl.

A gorgonzola salad ($9.95) works the contrast of excellent blue cheese and fresh grapes, laid out on a vast bed of romaine and field greens. Salads at Bubala's are served on such large plates that the expression "bed of greens" takes on the proportions of the honeymoon suite at a '50s Catskills resort. People in Provincetown have whole condominiums smaller than these salads. Tuscan salad ($9.95) is built around a mound of white-bean hummus that lacks garlic. It does have some remarkable cured black olives, and very nice sun-dried red and orange tomatoes, and an artichoke topping.

West Indian roasted lobster ($25.95) is made with our superior Northern lobsters, not the Caribbean kind with no claws. It's also what Yankee menus would call "baked stuffed." And the stuffing is the West Indian part, with quasi-jerk seasoning livening up the usual bready stuff. If you like hot pepper and baked lobsters, this one's for you. If you prefer boiled lobsters, as I do, you will notice that the claws can dry out with this treatment.

Seafood scampi ($17.95) is mostly penne pasta, and again the garlic is light, with a lot of nice cheese to the sauce. (Did you know that in most of Italy it is considered wrong to put cheese on seafood pasta dishes?) The seafood is real scallops, lobster meat, and fresh shrimp -- which excuses the modest portion.

Now, about that "grilled pepper crusted ostrich" ($19.95). Pepper is a good hedge, and so is the sauce of caramelized onions. Ostrich really is dark meat, but extremely lean, so the effect of a sliced "steak" on the plate is that it looks like beef, but tastes like a very lean, medium-rare duck breast, or a very rare piece of red meat, perhaps lamb. It really doesn't taste like chicken. It also has a residual fibrous quality that I noticed on my only previous ostrich experience, a piece of biltong (soft, jerky-like smoked meat) from South Africa. I think I'm going to have my next ostrich well done to see what it actually tastes like. I'm pretty sure it won't taste like chicken. It may be as close to roast dinosaur as we'll get this side of Jurassic Park.

The wine list is broad and covers a price range from $14 to $90, with a handful by the glass and a couple of half-bottles. We had the Lucien Crochet "La Croix du Roi" Sancerre ($24). It's grassy and flinty, but with none of the weird grapiness a Sancerre sometimes gets. A perfect wine for ostrich, although Parisians are more apt to drink it with seafood. A list of specialty martinis includes a "chocolate martini" ($5.95) made with Absolut, crème de cacao, and a sprinkle of cocoa. What's next, no-risk gambling? Exercise while you sleep? T-shirts that say SURF ANTARCTICA? We had pretty good decaf cappuccino ($3.50) and thin, burnt decaf coffee ($1.25).

Desserts keep up nicely, other than an apple pie ($4.95) that might have come out of a box. Crème brûlée ($5.95) is correctly creamy with a touch of cinnamon, although not so silky as the very best. A flourless chocolate torte ($5.95) is a New York dose of bitter chocolate, leavened with whipped cream on the side. But the winner is an almond-amaretto tiramisu ($4.95). I'm really not a fan of creamy, foamy desserts, but this one had just the right degree of sweet pleasure to carry me along.

Service at Bubala's is slow by Boston standards, but fine for the unwound time schemes of Provincetown, other than the increasingly common long pause before dessert. The atmosphere is everyone on Commercial Street -- gay and lesbian couples and groups, tourists from Quebec and points south, oddly mixed families that keep you guessing, and beachy-looking people in between. The restaurant is unusually designed in that the patio is toward the street, with the beach outside the windows of the indoor dining rooms. This makes for two kinds of desirable tables, and a tone focused more on people than the sea. The long wall mural is Cubist, but again features human figures. Maynard Ferguson- like jazz can be heard at times. Maybe this is another side of the '50s revival, or maybe Ferguson has finally found his niche as the appropriate background music for a round of chocolate martinis.

Note: Bubala's is open May 1 through November 1.

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

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