Strong seconds

In restaurant-rich neighborhoods, even the lesser-known spots can shine

by Robert Nadeau

Il Villaggio Ristorante
230 Hanover Street (North End), Boston; (617) 367-2824
Open Sun to Thurs, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 4:30 to 10 p.m.;
Fri and Sat, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 4:40 to 11 p.m.
Beer and wine
AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Up a bump from sidewalk level

Pho Hòa
46 Harvard Avenue, Brighton; (617) 787-4585
Open Tues. to Sun., 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.
No liquor
AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa
Sidewalk-level access.

So many new and exciting restaurants are opening that some very good places aren't even being reviewed. This is especially true when a restaurant is a neighbor of a previously reviewed favorite. Yet Pho Hòa is a useful alternative to the jam-packed Pho Pasteur, around the corner, and the popular Ducky Wok, down the block. And Il Villaggio is much more than a clone of Il Baccio, next door, or Vadopazzo, across the street.

Sometimes the alternatives outnumber the "originals." I believe we are up to about four Pho Pasteurs in various neighborhoods, but Pho Hòa is one of more than 50 associated franchises across the United States and Canada, the nearest on Dorchester Avenue's "pho row."

Il Villaggio is one-of-a-kind, but its basic setup -- open kitchen, top-shelf Italian ingredients, 10 tables -- would make it an easy concept to franchise. Like actors in a provincial Shakespeare company, ingredients play several parts on this menu. Bresaola, an air-dried beef as intense as prosciutto, appears in a sandwich at lunch, and as parts of two different appetizers at dinner. Fresh basil turns up in almost everything -- starting with the initial saucer of virgin olive oil, which also has red pepper flakes. Somebody doesn't like fresh basil? I didn't think that would be a problem.

If it ever is, Il Villaggio has another secret weapon: a truly great tomato-wine sauce that doesn't depend on basil. I encountered it in a dinner special of salmon with lobster ravioli ($20.95). The ravioli were prefab but pretty, ribboned like the Italian flag with green and red stripes, and filled with stringy lobster meat. The salmon was a large chunk, and there were a couple of giant shrimp as decorations, but the key to the platter was the tomato sauce, studded with chopped fresh garlic and lively with fully cooked-in wine and maybe some lemon juice as well. It was as different from the usual North End red sauce as a real tomato is from a freight-car tomato.

Weak tomatoes were the only real downfall of an appetizer of bruschetta ($4.95), the original garlic bread. Bruschetta can also be toasted to a chewier turn before rubbing on the garlic, but from there it was all strength -- strong garlic and strong flavors of fresh basil, black olives, and red onions transcending the tomatoes in the topping. Insalata Villaggio ($5.95) is, you know, field greens and goat cheese with a balsamic vinaigrette, the original part being "grilled" vegetables -- actually semi-sautéed zucchini, bell pepper, mushrooms, and summer squash.

Another special, seafood risotto ($20.95), had a simple and effective cream sauce, and plenty of scallops, shrimp, and squid, but I felt that the use of long-grain rice made it a false risotto. Long-grain rice makes a nice pilaf with chopped red pepper, onion, and mushroom, but it never generates the starchy creaminess of the short-grain Italian rices more usually used for risotto. I also like my rice less chewy than this, but I recognize the validity of chewy centers in real risotto.

At lunch, Il Villaggio is mostly a matter of sandwiches and little pizzas, but there are some entrées; I had an enormous and deliciously fresh dish of linguine with calamari in a light, almost watery, marinara sauce with plenty of, yes, chopped fresh basil ($6.95, dinner $9.95). Ordinary coffee ($1) is served in a cup we'd use for a soup bowl at my house.

Since dinner specials aren't priced, and ours were well above the usual entrée prices of $9 to $15 at night, I would suggest sticking to the regular menu unless strongly tempted. This also leaves room for a short list of wines by the glass, of which I would pass on the sweet white zinfandel unless you like that sort of thing.

Il Villaggio is a long, narrow room dominated by the open kitchen, but if you look around you will see tasteful yellow walls, teal chairs, tin ceilings, and framed photos of food that might be from Italy, as well as random hanging culinaria. Incredibly, this is the 15th consecutive restaurant playing the Gipsy Kings at dinner; I guess Italy lacks a musical tradition of its own.

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Pho Hòa is named for its specialty, the North Vietnamese beef noodle soup called pho, served in more than 20 variations. The English-language explanations on the menu are exemplary, but if you are still bewildered I would suggest jumping right in with one of the "fortifying combos," and not worrying too much about which ingredient is "book tripe" and which one is "soft tendon" or "well-done flank." What you are going to get is this huge bowl of exquisite beef broth, spiced with anise, aromatized with scallions and cilantro, and loaded up with noodles, slices of meat, and oddly textured things the names of which are much less appetizing than the actuality. You also have some bean sprouts and Asian basil on the side, and you might as well toss that in with as much of the lime juice and hot sauce as you like.

A particular success at Pho Hòa is the chicken-based pho gà ($4.15/4.65/5.65 for small, medium, and large), which is spiced rather like the beef classic -- a restrained anise treatment that doesn't obscure the natural flavor. I generally have pho gà heavily dosed with cinnamon, which is nice enough, but this is better.

For those who cannot abide soup, Pho Hòa has a considerable array of noodle and rice plates, of which my favorite was a kind of curried lemongrass chicken, gà xào sàót ($6.50), on the spicy side and stir-fried with peanuts. Somewhere in the middle is the house's unique specialty, mì khô, of which I had the seafood mì khô hài sàn ($5). This is both a small bowl of chicken soup and a noodle bowl of dry, fine, chewy, egg vermicelli over bean sprouts and covered with a little sweet-salty sauce and an assortment of broccoli, scallops, surimi crab-leg chunks, slices of fish sausage, shrimp, pea pods, and straw mushrooms. As mì khô is translated "dry lo mein," I take it that you aren't supposed to pour the broth over the noodle bowl. But no one stopped me.

Of the many tempting appetizers, I recommend the fresh spring rolls ($3.50) or the Vietnamese salad ($5.50) but not the stuffed boneless chicken wings ($3.50) or the roasted quail ($6.75), both of which are fried in an overly greasy way. In fact, I think you will find a medium bowl of pho to be a complete meal.

Pho Hòa is a pretty place with some disco mirror decorations and perhaps one too many colors: red, gray, and white walls, green tile floor. On the other hand, here is a restaurant with the courage to play its own music: Vietnamese-language pop songs, mostly cha-chas and tangos, a few throbbing tenor ballads. No Gipsy Kings here, thank you very much. One problem: the nonsmoking room gets secondhand smoke from the adjoining smoking room, and incense smoke from the front alcove as well. A little work on the ventilation could solve this.