Anago

The Back Bay's most popular new restaurant is the flagship for the new Boston cooking -- for better or worse.

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

65 Exeter Street (Back Bay), Boston; (617) 266-6222
Open for lunch Mon-Fri, 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m.;
and for dinner Mon-Fri, 5:30-10 p.m., and Sat, 5:30-10:30 p.m.
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Full bar
Access through Lenox Hotel lobby

No one will ever write an aesthetic history of Boston restaurants, and this is why: they all look the same. If you've eaten in a trendy bistro anytime in the last two years, you've been surrounded by sponge-painted walls, neoclassical molding, and vaguely modish wall sconces with parchment lampshades. How much can you say about this scheme? It's playfully traditionalist. It's comfortingly postmodern. It's identical everywhere you go.

Anago's special distinction is that it may be the largest-scale application yet of this particular design idiom. A year ago, Anago was the name of a bistro tucked into a tiny space on Main Street, in Cambridge. Now the Cambridge address is a little restaurant called Salts, and Anago has moved into the Back Bay -- and the big time -- by taking over the high-ceilinged space in the Lenox Hotel that once housed Diamond Jim's Piano Bar.

Anago may have dropped the Bistro from its name, and graduated from hole-in-the-wall status, but don't be fooled: this is still -- like Hamersley's and Providence -- a bistro in big restaurant's clothing. Given the choice between an extra ingredient and aesthetic purity, Anago will throw in the extra ingredient every time. There's something kind of affecting about this habit if you are inclined to see it that way; generosity always wins over pretension. There's also something kind of local about it. (The "Boston Glob" is how GQ's restaurant reviewer described this approach.) At any rate, if you're likely to feel ripped off when you don't get potato and vegetable and sauce with your steak, this is the high-toned restaurant for you.

Let's start with the soup. The potato bisque ($8) at Anago is terrific. In fact, I found myself getting hungry every time I saw someone else ordering it. The soup is thick and salty and has a distinct taste of bacon, though I couldn't see any bacon in the soup itself. It's also more than just a bowl of soup: not only are there ribbons of bright-green chive oil across the surface, but a whole salmon cake is set down in the middle of the bowl. I think this is the first time I've ever had a fish cake dropped into the middle of a plate of soup, and although I can't pretend the fish cake was exactly integral to the dish, it tasted just as good dunked in soup as it would have separately.

Or take the "trio of carpaccio" ($13). Carpaccio is one of those dishes that sounds Italian but isn't exactly; it was invented at Harry's Bar, an American restaurant in Venice. What Harry's gave the world was thinly sliced rare beef with a bit of tangy mayonnaise drizzled over the top, but you know you're not getting anything that simple at a place with parchment lampshades. The carpaccio plate here looks like something a caterer might use as a résumé. Yes, there is beef, two substantial slices of bright-red tenderloin seared around the edges and topped with a pungent black-truffle mayonnaise. There is also rare tuna ("tuna carpaccio" is a trendy dish in itself), with a bit of rouille across the butter-soft meat. And there's also a little pile of uncooked scallop meat, elegantly soft and pliant, with a chunky red-pepper relish as topping. By the time I reached the scallops, I was no longer sure why the dish was called carpaccio, except that every one of its components was more or less uncooked. Contributing to the profusion is a spray of baby greens, a long cracker soaked in very pungent balsamic vinegar, and a flamboyant abstract design painted in two sauces around the plate's rim. Everything tasted great, including the decorative sauces, but, I mean, yikes.

A plain green salad -- lightly coated with oil and champagne vinegar -- was eminently restrained by comparison, even if you take into account the serpent-shaped breadstick on top. That cost $7. Add some thick wheels of soft cheese, green and black olives, caper berries, and an uncuttable helix of cream-cheese bread and you've got the buffalo mozzarella salad ($10), also very nice. The one appetizer that didn't quite come together was the laganelle pasta ($12), a bowl of soft noodles topped with cooked clams and mussels; inexplicably, there was a bit of ground meat in the mix, as well as a salty broth.

Most of the appetizers make a pretty decent meal in themselves, as do the entrées. The problem is, when you order as you're expected to -- an appetizer followed by an entrée -- that means you're essentially getting two consecutive meals. The doggie bag would be our friend, we realized as we watched eaters around us receive sirloin steaks teetering atop layered stacks of potatoes and cheese, or salmon fillets with the volume of an outsize scone.

I hesitated to order the smoky pork tenderloin ($22) after the waiter told me they were out of tenderloin and had only sirloin. I love tenderloin and had never heard of pork sirloin; I got it anyway, and it was great. (Pork sirloin is, essentially, the meat of a large pork chop minus the bone.) The smoky taste lent a real depth to the meat, which was still very tender for pork. The meat came in a single large steak over a pile of spätzle, a kind of wiggly German egg dumpling that tastes as if it were invented to go with pork; also on the plate were thick onion rings, Anago's stab at downmarket fun.

Roast chicken is an important test of a kitchen: can you order the most boring meat in the world and still get a good meal? Anago passes the chicken test with flying colors, delivering a roast quarter-chicken ($19) with a flavorsome crust, a moist interior, and a glossy, salty jus the color of Assam tea. Surrounding the chicken were outstandingly sweet and tasty roast vegetables: carrot, parsnip, sweet potato, fennel bulb.

We liked both our desserts, but didn't exactly fall in love with them. One was a caramelized papaya served with a perfectly tart lime sorbet, topped with a ponytail's worth of spun sugar ($7). The other was a "coconut curry rice gateau" ($9), which actually tasted less like curry than like rice pudding, served beneath a dramatic four-sided tent of spun sugar.

In its consistent excess and goofy pan-cultural syncretism, Anago really is the quintessential New Boston Restaurant. The cooking is sharp, the flavors pronounced and satisfying, and the presentation totally unrestrained. Is it hopelessly indulged to fault a restaurant for cooking not too badly, but too much? Maybe. But to me, the prime consolation of paying more than $20 a plate for dinner is the tacit agreement with the kitchen that you're eating, with each dish, the one perfect combination of meat and sauce. The single best piece of beef you'll have all month. The plumpest scallop. The value may be illusory, but somehow, getting too much can dispel that illusion as easily as getting the wrong thing.

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