Marcuccio's

In the North End, an Italian restaurant breaks away from the pack with its energy, originality, and on-target freshness

by Robert Nadeau

125 Salem Street
(North End) Boston
723-1807
Open Wed and Thurs, 5 to 10 p.m.
Fri and Sat, 5 to 11 p.m.
and on Sun, 5 to 10 p.m.
Beer and wine
Up one step from sidewalk level

What pleasure it gives me to taste something new and delicious. So many of these reviews have to fall back on stories about the chef's career, essays on the business concept, potted anthropology of the regional cuisine, all this . . . perspective.

One could offer lots of perspective on Marcuccio's. It's just the kind of innovative, chef-driven restaurant that has moved into the middle stretches of Hanover Street in recent years, only it is located on low-rent Salem Street. And its postmodern décor sends up the very Italo-American dining scene that gave rise to it.

But let's start with the food, because a lot of the food has that immediacy, that "is-ness" that one ought to find this close to the markets, this close to the sea.

Things begin conventionally enough, with a basket of sliced Tuscan bread, and a plate of olive oil with alleged white truffle and ribbons of fava-bean paste as fresh and sweet as chestnut purée. The kitchen then sent us each a single smoked mussel -- as rich a flavor as exists -- in the shell, on radicchio.

The antipasti here ($7 per person) don't amount to a big course; rather, they tease and appetize with immediate bursts of flavor. Ours were thin slices of grilled parsnip, beet, zucchini, and sweet potato. Marinated roasted peppers were more copious but also more familiar, as was a paper-thin slice of salami and a nice cress salad with balsamic dressing.

Charred calamari ($7) was very lightly cooked, which makes for tenderness but a bland flavor. Here that was cleverly offset by a sweet-sour glaze sauce, almost like hoisin. Seared sea scallops ($8) were coated with black pepper and served in what was essentially a saffron broth with escarole. We also split up an order of salmon risotto ($9), which provided the starch part of our dinners. The chef's idea of risotto is much chewier than mine, but the dish was also creamy, and served with dabs of black-olive paste that made an excellent counterpoint to the mild salmon flavors.

A special on roast sturgeon showed off one of Chef Draghi's most interesting ideas: the use of unthickened, transparent, water-based sauces. With the sturgeon we had what the waiter described as "tomato water sauce," a kind of colorless tomato consommé as startling in its way as transparent beer. The sturgeon itself was a terrifically fresh slab of this dense but very mild-flavored fish, with a nice crust, resting on top of a sautéed escarole, red chard, and some dill, with those sweet fresh fava beans. And all of this was brought together by the tomato water sauce.

A different clear sauce, flavored with saffron and sundried tomatoes, worked almost as well with a sautéed salmon fillet ($16.50) on a similar mix of vegetables (but without the dill). We also found the tomato-water sauce on a special of fusilli pasta with bay scallops in the shell, but this kind of sauce isn't really sticky enough for pasta, so the ribbon-like spirals of fusilli had little flavor. Additionally, the five scallops arranged around the bowl were small and tasteless, despite being correctly undercooked. It may not have been the right season for these particular shellfish.

The chef also likes thin, but not radically thin, sauce for veal marsala ($15.50). There has always been a thin-sauce school of veal marsala in Boston, but there hasn't previously been a school of cutting the veal into thick, flavorful wedges (and doing the same to some portobello mushrooms). This treatment puts the meat into a better balance with the marsala wine sauce, giving the dish an almost Chinese complexity. Veal this good has a flavor, and can be left unpounded without becoming too chewy.

Wines are selected for gusto, and are mostly (but not all) Italian. A Portuguese white might not seem suitable for Italianate seafood dishes, but the Joao Pires 1995 muscat ($4 per glass, $17 per bottle) was flowery and just off-dry. Other bottles start at $14 and work up into the $40s; 13 selections (mostly red) are offered by the glass.

Now the odd dessert situation, which was even more confused by our waiter. The basic problem is that the management of Marcuccio's hasn't decided if it serves dessert or not. (Some very good North End restaurants don't, arguing that they can provide more value with appetizers and entrees; they urge their customers to nearby caffès for coffee and dessert.) Another problem, I suspect, is that Marcuccio's takes reservations, whereas most of the other restaurants on Salem Street do not. So there is the temptation to overbook, which turns a lingering dessert into a logistical problem.

The policy, we were told, is that sometimes tables are told that there is no dessert until 9 p.m. This obviously cannot last, and may already have been changed by the time this review sees print. On our evening, attempts to use this policy actually made things worse: our urge to linger for dessert started about 8:30, and our confused waiter told us he had made us a second reservation for dessert, at 9. We returned and eventually were given dessert on the house.

I hope the policy is resolved in favor of dessert, because we had several good ones (all $4), based on simple but novel recombinations of Mediterranean flavors. Chocolate pâté is heavily flavored with rosewater, and decorated with chestnut-flower honey -- quite striking. Vanilla ice cream with strawberries and the same honey was very good and very different. A poached pear was overly soft, but offset with an excellent caramel sauce.

The room combines a number of bistro trends to good effect. The windows are full-length and open, like those of a European café (or like Sonsie, if Newbury Street is your Europe). The semi-open kitchen doesn't cause too much noise, and the bare brick and faux-marble-painted walls are united with irregular panels of concrete, as though we were dining in a semi-excavated Roman ruin. The wall art makes postmodern fun of the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, Botticelli's Venus, and other greatest hits of the Italian Rennaissance.

Good food is good humored. Because we started early, with a reservation, I thought it was an interesting sensation to look out the window at the people lined up for LoConte's. I've eaten well at LoConte's, a red-sauce house with generosity and real savor, but I did feel privileged to have been easily seated for fully modern and inventive food while others waited in line for more prosaic feasts.