The Vault

A restaurant dedicated to wine has no business serving food this good

by Stephen Heuser

105 Liberty Square (Downtown); 292-9966
Open for lunch Mon - Fri, 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.,
and for dinner Mon - Wed. 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.,
Thurs and Fri, 5:30 to 11 p.m., and Sat, 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.
Full bar
AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa
Up several stairs from sidewalk level

You can tell a classic downtown restaurant by its oak-paneled walls, by its white linen tablecloths, by the waiters who voted for Eisenhower and the food that Eisenhower might have eaten. As a boy I was thrilled to eat lunch with my father surrounded by bankers and oak, but now I rarely review such places; they tend toward overpricing and overcooking, and the businessmen are mostly there because the prime rib hasn't changed a bit since their days in the Fly Club.

The Vault is a very different sort of downtown restaurant. It has the look down pat, with the dark wood and the linen and the white aprons on the servers. The ceilings are toweringly high, and the building -- a grandfatherly flatiron on Liberty Square -- fits like a limestone wedge into the crazy pie of Boston's downtown. Somewhere along the line, though, someone forgot to add the ridiculous prices, inedible food, and crusty waiters.

The Vault opened just this summer, and it has not only a polished interior and a very well-executed menu, but also a mission. The mission becomes clear as soon as you open the menu: the first thing you see isn't salads, or appetizers, but two pages of nothing but wines. One hundred twenty-seven bottles, give or take a few.

If that sounds intimidating, keep in mind that the owners of the Vault, like the more redeemable souls in the wine world, regard wine more as a pleasure than as a social weapon. So the menu also offers tasting flights (a flight is a series of small pours), which sound fanciful but are really quite basic. One flight consists of four wines made in New England; another is three wines made from the pinot noir grape. My favorite flight was the one called "A.B.C." -- anything but cabernet. For $9.50, I got four red wines whose touchstone was that none was cabernet sauvignon. Each was substantial and distinctive, and one of them -- a barbera from the Easton winery, in California -- was a real find.

Wine people aren't known as great budgeteers when it comes to food, so it's pleasant to discover that the Vault's prices almost qualify it as a bargain venue. My first dinner started with two knockout appetizers, each of which cost $6. First was a chilled melon soup, light and substantial at once. The taste and color suggested honeydew touched with cantaloupe; a raspberry coulis bled across the surface, set off by a spoonful of crème fraîche and a scattering of ground pistachio.

Hitting a complementary savory note was an appetizer of sautéed chicken livers. On each liver, a jacket of crushed hazelnuts cloaked the lovely, mild taste of a country pâté. Filigrees of dark-brown sauce -- reduced balsamic vinegar, the waitress told us -- spun across the plate, and tasted like sweet marmite with an acid bite. Among the loops were dollops of a sweet peach jam, tiny cubes of thick bacon, and half-cherries. Yes, that's a lot of elements, but they were doled out with precision, and the effect was more playful than excessive.

If our two salads didn't stand out in quite the same way, it was still hard to find much fault with them. A caprese ($7) alternated slices of ripe, sweet red and orange tomatoes with slices of soft white mozzarella cheese and whole basil leaves. A romaine salad ($6) was one of those linear caesars, with a series of crisp inner leaves laid parallel along the plate, decorated with parmesan slices, and just a bit overdressed.

Come entree time, the sense of style evident in the appetizers seemed to be sublimated into a kind of perfectionist classicism -- probably a nod to the conservatism of the Boston banker's palate. The most curious result of this was the oyster stew ($15), a spectacular treatment of a dish that predates the Colonies. The bowl was white china, straight-sided, and piping hot; the oysters were absolute gobstoppers, served in a milky broth studded with potato cubes and leeks. The soup tasted as buttery and tangy as the perfect autumn clam chowder, the oyster crackers were homemade flying saucers, and the oysters themselves -- well, this was the first time I'd had to eat oysters by cutting them into thirds.

A vegetable risotto ($14) arrived at the table with a flourish. The waiter lifted the lid from another white china dish to reveal a still-steaming arrangement of vegetables on top of firm, lightly lemony rice. Fresh peas and diced carrots were stirred into the risotto itself; the vegetables on top were three colors of bell pepper, plus zucchini, carrot curls, and a scallion sliced carefully on the diagonal.

From light to rich: a plate of clam fettuccine ($15) had just the right al dente bite, and was tossed in a thick cream sauce that suggested sybaritically vast quantities of butter and garlic. Around the dish were arranged sprigs of oregano and open littleneck clams in the shell.

Along with the pasta we tried the deceptively named "petit filet," ($25), a thick filet mignon served on the bone. The meat veered a little close to well-done on the outside (I ordered it medium rare), but next to the bone it was perfectly rare, and the dark seared outer crust was delicious. It came with a sweet brown gravy and a pile of mashed sweet potato, a classic upper-crusty meat 'n' potatoes dish but for one note of New Boston excess: a single ripe fig on the side, rolled in prosciutto and stuffed with gorgonzola cheese.

Full after both our dinners, we tried only two desserts. The "goat cheesecake" was mild to a fault, memorable only for the nice lemony skin on top. A plate with three citrus sorbets had one scoop each of sticky-good grapefruit, orange, and lemon, garnished with peeled sections of fruit.

Our servers were formal but helpful; one waitress steered me away from the pinot noir flight and toward the "A.B.C." -- a better value (four glasses instead of three) and, she said, better wines. The room itself is divided by a stately wine-storage cabinet into a small dining room (complete with fireplace) and a larger bar area, with very comfortable booths. The eponymous vault, by the way, is located downstairs from the bar: it's a magnificent, thick-doored old bank vault of the sort that you see in a lot of downtown buildings. The door is left slightly ajar, so of course I stuck my head in; but disappointingly, all that steel was guarding not wine but a supply closet.