Eating locally

We are living in the age of the bar-restaurant. Our critic ventures inside three.

by Stephen Heuser

Joshua Tree
256 Elm Street (Davis Square), Somerville; (617) 623-9910
Open Mon - Sat from 11:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., and on Sun from 10:30 a.m. to 1 a.m.
Full Bar
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Street-level access

Julia's
386 Market Street, Brighton; (617) 782-5060
Open daily from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Full bar
AE, MC, Visa
Street-level access

Wonder Bar
186 Harvard Avenue, Allston; (617) 351-2665
Open daily from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m.
Full bar
AE, MC, Visa
Street-level entrance

Hotel restaurants and flashy new bistros may hog all the press coverage, but most of our nights out are more modest -- dinner at local pizzerias, sushi joints, or bars. Particularly bars. In neighborhoods with a big twentysomething population, the sort of place you used to go to toss back a few beers and watch a ball game now has table service and a full menu, sometimes a pretty good menu. Herewith, three places that have been drawing crowds lately.

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Joshua Tree is the newest and most carefully styled bar in booming Davis Square, with tall windows onto Elm Street, waitstaff in black T-shirts, and a modish decorating scheme heavy on ducts and dark wood.

Joshua Tree, which isn't named after the U2 album but doesn't exactly seem named for the tree, either (though there are feints at an Old West motif near the restrooms), serves the sort of food that's quickly becoming American Bar Standard: burgers, quesadillas, and a few entrees, washed down with one of a zillion beers on tap.

What comes out of the kitchen at Joshua Tree isn't bad for bar food, and has moments of real spark. My favorite dish was the most elaborate one I tried, the "mojo roast pork loin" ($11.95), grilled and sliced into thin rounds, served with a squeeze of tangy lime and a pile of crinkle-cut sweet-potato fries.

A crab and corn fritter ($6.95) had an elaborately irregular shape ("fractal hush puppy" is what I wrote in my notebook), but tasted more of cornmeal than of crab. Like a lot of the appetizers at Joshua Tree, this one came with a couple of salsas: one made of black beans and corn kernels, one a standard pico de gallo of chopped tomatoes and green and red onion. A chicken-and-avocado burrito ($10.95) was by-the-numbers (flour tortilla, cooked under a broiler, chopped green chile on top), but the pinto beans and rice on the side were really tasty -- the beans, in particular, had a smoky, dusky taste that put me in mind of New Mexico. Maybe the place is more about the Southwest than I was giving it credit for.

One word about Joshua Tree on weekends: with all hard surfaces and no acoustic tile, a good-size crowd can make it awfully hard to hear -- even across a table for two.

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Think Brighton Center is a culinary wasteland? You've got company. A couple of years back, when I lived within walking distance of Washington Street, Steve's Doughnuts and a single decent Greek grocery pretty much described the limits of the food scene there.

The owners of Julia's have aimed to change that, with a menu that gets as ambitious as crème brûlée and lobster ravioli (not on the same plate, mind you). I'm not sure they're succeeding on the culinary front, but as a local hangout Julia's has taken off. On a midweek visit, I found the bar packed.

The building used to be Rosie O'Grady's Blind Pig Saloon, which was, to be charitable, a dive. But Julia's may have gone too far in the other direction: inside it's sort of neo-Applebee's, all tan and green and squeaky-clean blond wood. The bar, which is pretty distinct from the dining room, draws a solid crowd of Brighton twentysomethings, but that crowd doesn't seem to flow over into the dinner tables.

Why not? Well, we worked our way around the menu and were underwhelmed; good ingredients were generally prepared without much sensitivity to flavor or texture. Fried lobster ravioli ($6.95) came out very oily (a problem I've encountered elsewhere) and without much lobster taste; an appetizer of sweet-potato gnocchi ($5.95) was chewy and similarly greasy. Even a simple house salad ($2.95) was served indifferently, with dressing plopped in the middle of the bowl.

Straight shots like chowder (heavy on cream and clams; $2.50 for a cup) and sirloin steak (cooked just rare enough, with a lump of tasty bourbon butter; $14.95) worked out better. But vegetable lasagna ($9.95) was overbearing and sloppy, with an ocean of tomato-cream sauce surrounding a square of lasagna groaning under the weight of its own vegetables. Julia's sure isn't skimpy with ingredients, but it doesn't take a food snob to wish the kitchen handled them with a little more respect.

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If you live in Allston, you're probably very cynical about the Wonder Bar, which has brought Newbury Street polish and air-kissing to a proudly grungy stretch of Harvard Avenue. To the skeptical, the first sin of the Wonder Bar is that it replaced the grotty club Local 186 (which itself replaced the even grottier Bunratty's). Its second sin is not allowing tennis shoes. But the main thing setting it apart from the rest of the neighborhood is that Wonder Bar actually looks pretty nice. It has a high ceiling, an austere and stylish brick wall. The eponymous bar is one of the longest in Boston, and it's the only place between the Pike and Newton where you could order a martini and not be looked at sideways. In fact, ordering martinis (or cosmopolitans, or small-batch bourbon) seems to be encouraged by the two-page catalogue of call liquors.

It's no surprise that the menu at Wonder Bar is a little flashier than at your average neighborhood joint. You can get a plain salad, but you can also get a plate of baby romaine and frisée ($7.50), tossed with big chunks of blue cheese and tasty walnuts coated with caramelized sugar. A plate of sweet-potato fries ($4.75) was okay, roasted till crisp on the outside, though the wedges were a little too thick to avoid mushiness. Grilled shrimp ($6.50) came with a very spicy chipotle sauce and a smooth, fresh avocado dip that would be called guacamole anywhere else in Allston.

The gimmick at Wonder Bar is "terra cottas," which are small round earthenware dishes filled with various ingredients and served hot. The main function of a terra cotta, as far as I can tell, is to give a little coherence to a combination of flavors (kind of like sticking them between bread and calling it a sandwich, only way more stylish). One terra cotta we tried, goat cheese and roasted peppers and eggplant (they're all $6.75), was classic, and tasted especially good once we spread it on bread. Another -- Italian sausage slices and balsamic-marinated grapes -- had nice tastes, but wasn't more than the sum of its parts.

Probably my favorite dish at Wonder Bar came free, after I'd ordered a sausage, tomato, and mozzarella terra cotta and they prepared the one with the grapes again. (Wonder Bar, incidentally, is extremely gracious about offering free food when someone messes up.) I chose instead a portobello-mushroom sandwich ($7.25), which came on a flamboyantly tall half-dome of crusty bread. The mushrooms, plum tomatoes, and fontina cheese added up to a delicious pile that was impossible to squeeze into my mouth without going at it sideways. Did I look at it and exclaim "Wunderbar"? I did not. But I'm not saying I wasn't tempted.