Taranta

Mario Nocera's song of the south

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Taranta 210 Hanover Street (North End), Boston Open Mon-Sat, lunch 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m., and dinner, 4:30-10:30 p.m.; Sun, dinner only, 1:30-10:30 p.m. AE, MC, Visa Beer and wine (617) 720-0052 Sidewalk-level access

Taranta is the third North End restaurant for chef Mario Nocera, and it's big enough to combine the elegance of the first, Terramia, with the earthy baked dishes of the second, Antico Forno. But his latest venture also adds a third element (along with a line of serious and innovative desserts). Named for the tarantella, the emblematic wedding dance of southern Italy, Taranta is dedicated to "cucina meridionale," which implies everything south of a meridian across Naples and Sardinia. That means that Nocera, who is from Salerno, can follow his nose into nostalgia and family history.

If you want to go along, he has organized a three-course meal called La Tradizione ($32). The appetizer is zuppa di cierchie cozze e piedini di maiale, translated unappetizingly as "Cicerchia bean soup with cultivated Stone Island mussels and pigs' feet gelatin." It tastes like a strong chowder, with chickpeas replacing the potatoes. There's some pepper in it, too, and gumbo lovers will enjoy it. We arrived early, and so the chickpeas were still a little crunchy, but this is a splendid bowl of peasant soup.

The second course is a clay-pot roast of goat with tubular pasta. This is simple food as well, the goat as mild as European veal and the pasta having the perfect mixture of bite and melt. The third course is beef tripe in a tomato sauce with a little red pepper. The tripe has no flavor at all; it's like gelatinous pasta as a medium for a meaty tomato sauce.

More-orthodox meals begin with a breadbasket (excellent focaccia with cherry-tomato slices, and small slices of an oily wheat loaf), along with good virgin olive oil. Insalata di rinforzo ($6.50) is a New Year's salad of escarole with olives, capers, whole anchovies, pickled mushrooms, and tomatoes. Or you can put yourself in the chef's hands with the "tavolozza sfiziosa di antipasti meridionale" ($16 for two), one of the most impressive antipasti around. Four of us worked our way through paper-thin curls of grilled zucchini and eggplant, a slice of quiche, grilled onion, Italian tuna, glorious fresh mozzarella between slices of very good tomato, pickled mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, and prosciutto -- unusual and highly appetizing morsels all.

Another novel appetizer is tortino con melanzane, gamberi, e scamorza ($10). Yes, we're now into double digits for a garlicky square of eggplant layered with shrimp and cheese. But this is so good, we almost wanted to pass up entrées and go straight to dessert.

Instead, we dived into another daunting heap of food that turned out to be my favorite entrée: the zuppa di pesce con sapori del tirreno (market price; ours was $46 for two). There wasn't much soup, but the shellfish was heaped into a copper pot some people would use to make spaghetti in. I was more impressed by the freshness and correct cooking of a heap of diverse ingredients: squid, half a lobster, scallops, shrimp, mussels, cockles, and littleneck clams. What soup there was, was reduced to a salty and peppery sauce, better on the shellfish than soaked into the homemade crackers provided.

Of the other entrées, linguini in the style of scampi with clams and mussels ($16.50) was a simple matter of fresh shellfish, garlic, and a little oil, topped with a giant crawfish. Cornish hen ($19.50) was done up in a sauce of cherry tomatoes and olives that added a medieval complexity, but the hen itself had an ashen aftertaste. This treatment might as well go on a proper chicken, or even duck.

The wine list features the provinces below those that produce our most familiar Italian wines. The good news is that winemaking has really advanced in southern Italy, and traditional red and white grapes are getting modern treatments to make some fascinating wines. I knew that the aglianico grape, which may have been introduced from ancient Greece, was capable of great things in the hands of the pioneering Avellino winemaker Mastroberardino. But here are a handful of new aglianicos, taurasis, and primitivos. We tried a bottle of 1998 Rubrato ($33), a proprietary name for an aglianico-based red by Feudi di San Gregorio. As Butch Cassidy said, "Who are these guys?" How can a food writer get along without knowing about a wine this great? Rubrato, at least in 1998, isn't a heavy wine, but it has a delightful aroma of cherries and strawberries and a dusty elegance in the mouth. Like Beaujolais, it seems to have the crispness of a white wine in a red-wine flavor, making it quite good with seafood-tomato combinations. We also had the fizzy DiBenedetto spring water ($5.75), and didn't regret it.

Desserts are big news for this chef, and he's promoting grandma's chocolate eggplant parmesan ($7.50). No, that isn't a misprint. But it's not the next big thing, either. You can imagine you're eating a somewhat chewy chocolate cake with sloppy layers, but you'd rather be eating the "composition of chocolate mousse" ($8.50) with a cherry sauce, which is layered neatly and topped with a chocolate truffle. But, in fact, most of our table preferred the cassata siciliana ($7.50), a ricotta cheesecake wrapped in a purse of delicious almond-pistachio marzipan. My own choice was "la pastiera" ($6), an Easter cheesecake from Naples with rose water, little grains of wheat and candied citrus, and a haunting flavor similar to Strega liqueur. Il baba e crema al rum ($6.50) was light of baba and heavy of rum, just as it is served in chef heaven.

Taranta makes a good decaf espresso ($2), and if you eat as much as we did, they might give you a taste of homemade limoncello liqueur, which looks like pastis, tastes like lemon peel, and sneaks up on you. I want the recipe.

The space is three floors of a townhouse, with most of the front opening to the street, which unfortunately means the construction zone at the mouth of Hanover Street right now. Décor is down to bare brick, with some very large tambourines. A background music track of tarantellas gives you an idea of what they're for. The restaurant isn't too loud, however, perhaps because a plexiglass barrier blocks off the sounds of the semi-open kitchen. Some things are evidently cooked or assembled on the second floor, since waiters career up and down the stairs. All our food came quickly and accurately, but you will have to ask prices on the specials to avoid bills mounting up unexpectedly.

One of the pleasant features of the North End is that people can just stroll around among all the restaurants until they pick one that looks good. It discourages me, though, that people line up at the old favorites and look dubiously at new places. My guests wanted to urge them in to Taranta, but I hissed that those sheep don't deserve to know about it yet. Let them wait for the rave reviews, and then elbow their way through the crowds.

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

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