Maurizio's

Staking out a middle ground between innovation and the old North End pile-on

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

364 Hanover Street (North End), Boston (617) 367-1123 Open Tues-Sun, 5-10 p.m.; closed Mon. AE, MC, Visa Beer and wine Restroom access via a spiral staircase

Maurizio's has been receiving a quiet kind of notice since it opened a couple of years ago, but this spring I began hearing the name enough that I looked it up in the new Zagat guide to Boston restaurants. The Zagat army of eaters give a fat, unblushing kiss to what sounds like a restaurant both charming and fabulously innovative, especially for Hanover Street.

Well, Maurizio's is innovative for Hanover Street, where tourist-trap pasta houses cluster as thick as the red sauce they all serve. (Most of the North End's real sparkplug kitchens, like Sage's and Marcuccio's, are hidden on the back streets.) But it doesn't quite escape the local traditions of weight and sauciness. When you see pork medallions with apple-chickpea salsa on the menu, you expect the color and crispness of New American cuisine rather than the usual North End pile-on, and what you get splits the difference.

The atmosphere splits the difference in another way. At street level, Maurizio's is a tiny, modern trattoria with ecru paint and abstract expressionist art on the walls; it gets cramped with 18 people and full with 22. Down a narrow spiral stairway is a roomier space with a back wall of stone and brick and stacked wine bottles. So you can actually pick your mood: trendy and urban upstairs, intimate grotto below.

Either way, Maurizio's starts on the right foot: a free glass of nice, light sparkling wine, delivered even before the menus arrive. No wonder everyone around us was so cheery. The breadbasket mixes crusty whole-wheat bread with a serviceable white Italian loaf and flatbread; the olive oil provided for dipping is ladled out of a big glass jar filled with actual olives.

The caesar salad ("insalata romana," $6.75) stood out mainly because of the four fresh white anchovies laid over the top, plump and tangy and a world away from the canned anchovies that give the fish such a smelly little reputation. A plate of fried calamari ($7.75) was big; the squid here was coated with what I'd guess is a semolina batter, not too heavy, and the cocktail sauce had a nice bite of horseradish and vinegar. Another marine appetizer, this one of littleneck clams and mussels ($7.75), was mostly mussels (the four clams were the littlest littlenecks I've seen) in a light tomato broth.

Finally, a curious appetizer called "focaccia caprese" aimed to blend two favorites: rich, cakey focaccia bread on the one hand, and caprese -- the salad of tomato, basil, and fresh mozzarella -- on the other. Here, tomato, basil, and cheese are laid on the focaccia, which is then put under the broiler, and the result is very fancy pizza bread: tastes good, in other words, but I wouldn't call it synergy. The pieces of focaccia were underlaid with greens dressed only with truffle oil.

Maurizio's has a long menu of pasta, meats, and seafood; I'd guess one reason the cooking showed a little less focus than I'd hoped is that Maurizio's is trying to compete in a neighborhood where most patrons expect an endless menu. But at least the food here isn't ever boring; even with a conventional dish like ravioli, there are quirky variations. We tried one special of raviolini, which was little ravioli stuffed with soft roasted garlic and served in a "pesto cream sauce" that tasted like a garlicky alfredo sauce with torn-up basil leaves.

A more intriguing dish was swordfish stuffed with a crumbly mixture of bread crumbs, raisins, pine nuts, and black olives. The fish, a thin steak, bulged up on one side where it had been split and filled. It had the feel of something rustic and traditional, like a feast dish you might read about in an Italian cookbook. The swordfish itself had the softness of braised meat; a tomato sauce was poured over the top, and a plate of roasted vegetables (carrots, red cabbage, beets) came on the side.

Another night my girlfriend and I managed to order a pair of main courses that were almost entirely orange. Her dish was a plate of penne al salmone, which combined chunks of salmon with sun-dried tomatoes in a tomato cream sauce; the sauce wasn't subtle, but achieved a nice, salty density of flavor. My dinner was three pork medallions in an orange sauce accompanied by an apple-chickpea salsa, which I took as a play on the idea of applesauce with pork. The salsa, which also included tomatoes, wasn't precisely orange -- really more khaki in color -- but it was served over mashed sweet potatoes, which were very orange indeed. Chickpeas don't have a lot of flavor on their own, so they were kind of a placeholder here, but the apple chunks were a nice idea, and the sweet potato was flavorful. I expected the pork "medallions," though, to be round slices of tenderloin, and this was thinly sliced pork-chop meat. A tall sprig of green thyme, planted in the middle of the plate, struck its blow for chromatic diversity.

Desserts are a few cakes and several flavors of that gelato-in-hollowed-out-fruit that seems to be everywhere in the North End right now. A slice of chocolate cake with chocolate frosting topped with chocolate-dusted chocolate chips was not quite as chocolatey as you might expect; of the sorbets, we found the coconut (served in half a coconut) more vivdly flavored than the mandarin orange (served in a whole orange peel, wearing the last bit of peel as a hat).

The by-the-glass wine selection at Maurizio's is limited to five wines and white zin; the by-the-bottle list is about 40 wines long and pleasingly affordable. Service was friendly and reasonably prompt, considering the amount of business Maurizio's does, even on weeknights.

[Note: Maurizio's introduced a new menu as this review was going to press, so I've given prices only for dishes still available. The price range for entrées is $14.50 to $24.]

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Okay, this week's weird restaurant story: I ate cow's foot last Saturday in Waltham. The place is called Taqueria Mexico; you find it by driving down Charles Street from Waltham Common and looking for the strings of colored lights. Inside is a riot of sombreros and velvet paintings and the usual Mex-American kitsch. We waited in line for a while, were seated out of order, and eventually got a meal that was equal parts tasty and confusing. All the food, appetizers and entrées, came at once; everything had the same topping (shredded lettuce and chopped tomato); and when an ingredient wasn't available the kitchen substituted something else unannounced. We might have complained, but the language barrier was looming pretty high.

You should go anyway. For one thing, Taqueria Mexico is dirt-cheap; most dishes are between $4 and $8. For another, the salsas are terrific, there are a number of unusual meats on the menu, and there are these excellent blended-fruit drinks that I haven't seen anywhere else locally. And finally, what's not to like about a place that serves cow's foot? (It wasn't bad -- kind of glutinous, clear and firm, though without much flavor of its own.) Bring your own beer.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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