Bristol Lounge

Damn the tournedos! Bring on the comfort food.

by Stephen Heuser

Four Seasons Hotel 200 Boylston Street (Back Bay), Boston (617) 351-2053 Open Mon-Thurs, 11 a.m.-11:30 p.m. Fri and Sat, 11 a.m.-12:30 a.m. and Sun, noon-11:30 p.m. Full bar All major credit cards Sidewalk-level access

The most famous hamburger in New York is the one served at the "21" Club. The burger is famous not because it's so fabulously good -- I mean, it's a hamburger, after all -- but because it's so fabulously expensive. For years it has cost exactly $21, a price that has nothing to do with value and everything to do with New Yorkers' relationship to money.

This city's most famous hamburger seems positively thrifty by comparison, at a mere $14 -- and, this being Boston, it is famous for its quality. Hmm.

The burger is served at the Bristol Lounge, which is where you go if you want to eat at the Four Seasons Hotel but don't want to spend, like, $36 for halibut, which is what happens upstairs at Aujourd'hui. (My predecessor, Charlotte Bruce Harvey, reviewed that restaurant in this space a few years ago.) The Bristol isn't exactly Mamoun's Falafel Hut -- I mean, there's lobster this and Aged N.Y. that, and the burger does cost 14 bucks -- but the prices are about on par with those at any other nice restaurant, and the service is better than at most of them. So is the view.

Whoever planned the Bristol Lounge had a good time with the idea that this was the poor downstairs cousin of one of the city's gastronomic palaces. For instance, just like a roadside diner, the Bristol has a nightly blue-plate special -- okay, they don't call it that, but every night there's a different home-cookin' meal. Monday is meat loaf, Tuesday is fried chicken . . . you get the idea.

Of course, we're still in the Four Seasons, with brocade curtains and giant potted palms and so much space between the tables that you're not really sure anyone else is there at all. So of course you don't have to eat home cookin'. You can, instead, order a mixed-green salad ($8.75) with an "aged sherry vinaigrette" that wouldn't be out of place in a South End bistro. The greens were fresh, the vinaigrette was applied lightly, and the thing was scattered with enoki, the rare, stalky little Japanese white mushrooms. You can also order the clam chowder ($7), which wouldn't quite have done a chowder house proud: it looked terrific, with herbs and plenty of clams in there, but somehow it wasn't quite rich and buttery enough for the surroundings. (To give you an idea of the surroundings, the oyster crackers were delivered in a small silver ewer.)

The Bristol wins big, big props for its breadbasket, which includes not only crusty white rolls, seeded oval rolls, and trendy tall sheets of flatbread, but also dried apples and apricots. There are two kinds of butter on the butter plate: sweet unsalted butter and even sweeter herbed butter. Leave it to the Four Seasons: we've already got three food groups on the table and we haven't even ordered yet.

Time for the meat group, in the form of Boston's Best Hamburger. In addition to stellar service and a nice street-level view of Park Plaza, $14 buys you about a half-pound of meat cooked exactly medium-rare (a precise, even pink inside) with very sharp aged cheddar cheese melted softly over the top. It's on a poppy-seed roll with all the toppings in place: red onion sliced translucently thin, a beefy slice of disarmingly ripe tomato, and lettuce. The burger really was good -- between the cheese and the excellent grilling, it was so flavorful I was halfway through before I realized I hadn't even put ketchup on.

Is this the best burger in the city? Hard to say. I mean, hamburgers aren't rocket science, and I made a pretty good one last Friday in my friend Chris's back yard -- but I'm prepared to deliver the medal for best French fries whenever it's ready. The fries that came with the Bristol burger rocked. There's a whole technique to making perfect fries -- it involves getting the size just right (thin but not too thin), and frying them twice at different temperatures to create a perfect half-crispy outside -- and these were the whole package.

After the fries, it felt kind of pretentious to taste-test angel-hair pasta with scallops ($17), but that was on the mark, too. The pasta was really delicate; the sauce was a restrained combination of tomato and basil, reduced till quite thick; and the scallops weren't cooked in the sauce; they were grilled and added at the end.

The fried chicken ($16) was four not-quite-identifiable pieces of chicken (my best guess: thigh and wing sections of a baby chicken) coated in a nice, tight herbed batter, served over a plate of -- oh yes -- those fries again. They weren't quite as good the second time (not as freshly cooked, I think), but still, you could tell they were überfries in disguise. The chicken, though, pointed to the one problem with serving down-home food in a House Beautiful setting: you really need to get your fingers greasy to eat it right, and this just ain't a greasy-fingers crowd.

Regardless, there are also sandwiches on the menu, and very good ones at that. The one made with portobello mushrooms ($11.75) was excellent: two or three thin grilled portobellos on a whole-grain bun, with cheddar cheese and roasted red pepper and -- drum roll here -- truffle mayonnaise. Truffle anything with portobello mushroom is a match made in fungus heaven, and this was achingly rich and earthy. It came with quinoa tabouleh (quinoa being a bulgurlike grain from South America), which would have been even better without the little bits of sand that kept crunching between my teeth.

Desserts, which vary daily, were fine: a soft strawberry rhubarb pie ($8.50) with woven crust, and a passion-fruit sorbet ($7.50) in a tall silver dish that looked and tasted more like raspberry sorbet to me. We didn't try coffee, but after-dinner tea service was elaborate, with a pot of hot water and loose leaves and a strainer that rested in its own silver cup. The Bristol is as famous for its afternoon tea as for its hamburger, and it's not hard to see why: it's fun to drink tea with so much equipment, though a little tricky. Anyone know a trick for getting tea stains out of khakis?

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