Atasca

279A Broadway, Cambridge; 354-4355
Open Tues - Thurs, 4 to 10 p.m., Fri and Sat, 4 to 11 p.m.,
Sun noon to 10 p.m. Closed Mon
Full bar
AE, MC, Transmedia, Visa
Sidewalk-level access

By Stephen Heuser

From the outside, it looks like the kind of hole-in-the-wall you wouldn't visit if you weren't from the neighborhood -- brick, flat-fronted, with a single high-mounted window. But the sign looks welcoming enough, and if you angle a look in the window, you may catch a glimpse of a brick hearth, a short bar, and a couple of shanks of presunto (hint: looks like prosciutto) hanging over the fireplace.

Atasca is indeed inviting. It's also warm, and busy, and surprisingly sophisticated. Its butcher-block tables are almost the size of picnic tables, but you may actually need all that space. We did, passing around an open copper clamshell and a split cornish game hen and an appetizer of octopus . . . but I get ahead of myself.

Portuguese food has the straightforward, powerful flavors we associate with Mediterranean "peasant food." Only in Portugal's case, the land the peasants work is the Atlantic Ocean. (It is said that the Portuguese have a salt-cod recipe for every day of the year, and I'd be willing to bet the same thing is true of shellfish.) The cuisine that comes closest to Portuguese is Spanish, which is similarly seafood-heavy and reliant on olive oil and garlic. But there are differences. For one, Portuguese dishes are much more difficult to pronounce. (The s in the name of the restaurant is pronounced sh, the s in ananas is pronounced zh, and the s in presunto is pronounced z. There's a regular hard s, too, but that's for the next lesson.) Portuguese food also has the reputation of being more intensely flavored than Spanish food, although the garlic-heavy tapas at local Spanish favorites like Dalí certainly set the bar high.

Here, a meal starts with a sliced loaf of Portuguese bread, dense and a little crumbly, and a dish of olives. The olives are on the small side, bigger than niçoise, and addictive despite being a little bland. It's not a bad idea to start with a bottle of vinho verde, or "green wine," which is the staple Portuguese tipple. A bottle of white will run you $10, and -- light, low in alcohol, and almost effervescent -- this is stuff you can keep drinking the whole meal.

Linguiça, or garlic-spiced sausage, appears on a lot of menus in Cambridge and Somerville, but the dish here -- linguiça with grilled pineapples ($4) -- is unusual. It's identified as Azorean in origin -- sort of the high-flavored version of melon and prosciutto. I would say it's the Portuguese version of melon and prosciutto, but that slot is taken by the presunto da casa ($5), chunky slices of dark, home-cured ham served with cantaloupe. A dish of poached littlenecks ($5), about a dozen, was conventionally prepared in a rich, salty broth of white wine, parsley, lemon juice, and garlic.

Beyond those three offerings, every appetizer seemed a novelty. The queijo fresco ($4) sounds like a cheese plate, but it arrived with quite a bit more: grilled white cornbread, which you spread with a smoky paste of chorizo and red pepper and then top with a fresh white cheese. The pasteis a tasca ($5) were fingerlike croquettes, two each of bacalhau (salt cod), pulverized shrimp, and veal purée, all served over a light, lemony-tasting salad of black-eyed peas. But galloping (or squirting) to victory in the appetizer stakes is the polvo na caçarola ($5). It's described as "a cold salad of tender bits of octopus," but don't be fooled: this was an explosively flavored raw salsa of diced red onion, cumin, vinegar, and sliced marinated octopus tentacles. I've had whole grilled tentacles at a Portuguese restaurant before, and marveled at the tenderness that can be achieved with this notoriously chewy meat; this was just as easy on the molars, and much more lively.

Our second visit to Atasca, we watched an animated bar scene unfold, with men crowding for beer and wine and appetizers around the six or so barstools, in a reasonable simulation of an actual tasca in Portugal. The seated crowd seemed decidedly less Portuguese; although we're a little far off the usual circuit out here in East Cambridge, both Harvard and MIT are within a short drive. The décor is standard North Suburb Modern: white walls, tan wainscotting, acoustic tile. The walls are hung with photographs of Portugal and with decorated ceramics. The plates one eats off are an exhibit in themselves: heavy, glazed terra cotta, they remind me of the tableware at Dalí and Tapéo. (Must be an Iberian thing.)

If Atasca isn't the only restaurant where you can find terra-cotta dishes, it must be the only one where you can eat a cornish game hen for $10. The garnizé á tasca ($10) easily satisfied two of us, each taking half of a rather large game hen and half of the accompanying "tomato rice," which had the texture and stock-cooked flavor of a light tomato risotto. The only really expensive entrées were those designed to be shared: arroz de mariscos a valenciana ($18), for instance, which Spanish-food fans will recognize as paella: shrimp, mussels, clams, calamari, pork, and chicken in saffron rice.

Walking off with the novelty award was a specialty from the southern Portuguese coast: the amêijoas na cataplana ($13), which was served in sort of a meta-clam: a hammered-copper bivalve steamer (the cataplana) that arrived scalding hot. The waiter opened it up to reveal a steamy profusion of clams, peppers, sausage chunks, and presunto, all in a rich, salty broth not unlike that which came with the littlenecks.

Other entrees were more predictable, if not entirely conventionally prepared. The bife a tasca ($10.50) was a marinated sirloin steak, served with a fried egg across the top. Pork medallions ($12) came thin and quite tender, with a sauce that was almost sweet and hinted at citrus.

Desserts were fine, if perfunctory: a serviceable rice pudding with cinnamon ($2.50), and pasteis de Nata, a pair of little custard tarts ($2).

Most people associate Portugal with its most widely exported product, port wine. There was one glass of port offered on the wine list, and we probably broke some cardinal law of restaurant reviewing by not ordering it. But port you can get anywhere. For the cataplana, you have to trek to East Cambridge.