Vox Populi

The people speak, sort of

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Vox Populi (617) 424-8300 755 Boylston Street, Boston (Back Bay) Open Mon-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun, 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5:30-11 p.m. Full bar Valet parking available Sidewalk-level access

I suppose it takes a certain amount of nerve to replace a brewpub with a French bistro and call it Vox Populi. Maybe the people's voice was expressed in declining beer sales? Maybe the populace clamored for a revival of foie gras custard and blanquette de veau rather than constant bread and circuses? Maybe the proprietors are being ironic, as they try to move the ale-ites up to nine-dollar glasses of wine. Of course, with peasant bread selling at five dollars a loaf these days, why shouldn't French food be a populist gesture? Everything else is upside down.

In fact, Vox Populi is sort of upside down, with a posh, non-smoking dining room on the second floor, featuring a view of the Prudential Center. You can smoke at the bar; and while the warm weather lasts, you can eat on the sidewalk and pretend you're in the Roman forum. The French food is pretty well camouflaged on a typically eclectic menu, but what we could find was rather good. Vox Populi will please a broad spectrum of the public, prices aside.

Tamarind-glazed quail ($10) could be a signature item. The bird is tiny, about a four-bite quail, but kept rare and tasty, with good use of the tangy tamarind sauce. The quail is displayed on a bed of over-salted and -peppered tabouleh, which will be a good foil once a few holes in the salt shaker clog up. Spring rolls ($8) are elegantly elongated in the Vietnamese manner and served with dips of both fish-sauce and hot, fresh "Chinese" mustard.

A salad of tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil ($9) had very passable slices of red and yellow tomato, with red and yellow cherry tomatoes as a garnish. This salad is all in the marketing, and it's quite difficult to bring off in the winter, but it should be good for another month or so. Gazpacho ($8) is tricked up with fresh avocado and real crab meat, as well as leaves of basil. Again, the presence of good tomatoes is crucial, and successful here.

Now, about that blanquette de veau ($21). This is really French comfort food, the sort of thing one sees on the menu in a country roadhouse rather than in a Michelin-starred Paris dining room. At Vox Populi, chef Michael Burgess gives it the old cooking-school deconstruction. The veal is in discrete chunks, neatly arranged around the rim of a giant platter, alternating with similar chunks of carrot and potato. In the middle are the noodles, with a buttery sauce that could convert anyone to French cuisine. But the French idea of this dish is a stew in a lot of white glop (the blanquette part). Here we have individual bites, and even a different (and orange!) sauce on the veal. Still, this blanquette de veau is certainly the peak of the evening, and certainly something different from dishes served by most of the other young-thinking restaurants in the Back Bay.

The "aged sirloin" ($24) doesn't have much of the gamy taste of aged beef, but it's good meat, and well set-off with a heap of ultrathin green beans and a cake of sliced potatoes au gratin. Another high point was salmon ($18) served with roast potatoes on a bed of corn relish. Although salmon and corn relish are old New England specialties, I don't think I've seen them together before. The combination works well with today's richer, farmed salmon, here beautifully crusted with spices. The roast potatoes had some crust, too. On a dish of braised halibut ($22), the same potatoes were underdone. But the halibut was an excellent piece, reminding us what a light-yet-flavorful dish one can make from these giant flatfish. (Overcooked halibut steaks like wooden boards were a bane of my childhood.) Leaves of watercress were a nice garnish, glazed with an overly subtle sauce of fennel and orange.

The wine list is long and rather pricey, but includes some half-bottles for smaller parties or for tables where not everyone is having wine. We tried a Murphy-Goode '99 fumé blanc ($20 per half-bottle), which had the bracing acidity and hay-like aroma that Robert Mondavi intended when he coined the term "fumé blanc" for a California sauvignon blanc with the style of a French Sancerre or Pouilly-Fumé. Those are great food wines, and so was this. Our waitress smoothly sold us soda water ($3.75) with the phrase "We are featuring Saratoga water," but not so smoothly poured our entire half-bottle of wine into two glasses. This got the bottle off the table right away, but too much wine per glass concealed the aroma and underlined the fact that we hadn't saved much over the per-glass price.

Desserts were adequate but not overwhelming. A chocolate terrine was very good, and even better with cappuccino ($3.75). The peach Melba trifle was one idea too many, served in a tall parfait glass, but tasting more like apples and whipped cream. A slice of lemon cake with blueberry sauce was my personal favorite, because the blueberry sauce was so good - the dessert was like blueberry shortcake.

Vox Populi is in a pleasant, modern space without distracting features. The walls are a color between adobe and salmon (which would be a good description for modern bistro food), and the lamps are clever without going too far. Service is generally good, better than the surroundings would suggest. The system still has servers going up and down the stairs with some items. A surprising lapse on an early (pre-theater) Saturday night was that the women's bathroom was a mess.

The atmosphere on the street level was already crowded and loud, although we had no trouble getting a quiet table upstairs. The challenge is to get those bar customers interested in dinners like blanquette de veau by the time the bar popularity cycle is coming to its natural close. That puts the deadline sometime in early winter, right around the time you might want a hearty French stew.

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

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