Angelo & Sons

Some restaurants just make you feel more alive than others

by Stephen Heuser

297-299 Chelsea Street (Day Square), East Boston (617) 567-2500 Open Mon and Tues, 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Wed and Thurs, 11 a.m.-10 p.m.; Fri, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sat, 4 p.m.-midnight; Sun 4-9 p.m. Beer, wine, and cordials All major credit cards Sidewalk-level access

Ever eat a periwinkle? It's a little saltwater snail in a black shell, and you pick the meat out with a pin. Tide pools in Maine are full of periwinkles. So is the chilled shellfish plate at Angelo & Sons Seafood Restaurant, which is why I found myself last week sitting under a green-and-white Peroni umbrella with an icy little snail in one hand and a dressmaker's pin in the other, stabbing away at an organism my sister wrote a college biology paper on, with a bucket of Rolling Rocks beside me, a big-ass dude in a Harley vest at the next table, and enough chilled oysters, littlenecks, mussels, crayfish, and periwinkles in front of me to make me feel as if I'd walked into a still-life painting.

Some restaurants just make you feel more alive than others.

Angelo & Sons is a total sparkplug of a Sicilian seafood restaurant on a quiet corner in East Boston, near Day Square. Go there. I mean, yes, you have to walk through the kitchen to get to the patio tables, and sure, the only real view is of your car across the street, and okay, the nearest municipal amenity is Logan Airport. But I've just said every bad thing I can think of about this place, and the list wasn't too long. Here are some of the good ones: no line to get in, free bruschetta, three bottles of Rolling Rock for $6.25.

Angelo's isn't the world's biggest secret -- it has a listing in the Zagat guide and did business for 14 years in another part of Eastie before moving to this new spot -- but what we have here is still a real, quiet treasure, a restaurant dedicated to one thing and stripped of all pretense. Eastie isn't exactly the hail-fellow-well-met capital of the Northeast Corridor, so it also helps that once you're inside the confines of the restaurant, the waitresses laugh at your jokes and Angelo himself checks up on you now and then.

Plus, it's cheap. That huge arrangement of shellfish? $9.95. Soft-shell crab, broiled with garlic and bread crumbs? $6.95. A stainless pot of steamer clams too big for two people to finish? $8.95. There's a lobster dish that costs $17.95, which is getting up toward Back Bay prices, but that's the exception.

The two staples of Sicilian cooking are pasta and seafood, and chef Angelo Ravesi doesn't stray far from those. (You can order six things that aren't seafood: roasted peppers, Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, sautéed broccoli, and three kinds of chicken.) Appetizers are shellfish; entrées are either pasta with seafood or fish. Everything is heavy on garlic and olive oil. Everything comes with a side of linguine marinara.

The big plate of mixed shellfish ("seafood aioli") had two dips, both chilled: one was a traditional red cocktail sauce, the other a clear green dip that I'd guess was a mix of drawn butter, olive oil, and garlic. It was served on one of those raised silver platters that make you feel as if you're on an ocean liner, and everything was arranged on a bed of crushed ice, which added to the effect. The periwinkles, by the way, eventually yielded tiny little curls of meat with a briny, slightly nutty taste and a firm, not-quite-chewy texture. (As of last week, they've been replaced on the platter with whelks.)

The soft-shell crab special was a standout among the appetizers, a single crab coated with garlic and bread crumbs and broiled. Once we finished it, the oil left on the plate was so good, so garlicky and toasty and salty, that we spent the rest of the meal mopping it up with bread. The steamer clams were heavy with minced garlic -- kind of unusual in New England, where they're usually just steamed -- and also, unfortunately, kind of sandy. The butter-oil dip helped a little in rinsing off the sand.

To me, the best thing about Angelo's food was its fleeting, just-off-the-grill quality. It felt as though we were buying just-caught fish at an outdoor stall and waiting while it was prepared. Maybe it's because we ordered mostly specials; maybe I was just looking for that kind of spontaneity after eating too many assembled, kitchen-prepped meals in the city.

Aside from the seafood aioli, which really did look like it had been arranged for a painting, most dishes arrived simply, unadorned. A steak of striped bass (special, $13.95) came from the kitchen steamy-hot, brushed across the top with olive oil and garlic, moist and mild inside. The fish was served on a little oval plate just big enough to hold it, with a huge plate of linguine on the side. (The marinara sauce is straightforward and good, the right complement to the heat and garlic elsewhere.)

A "combo" special ($13.95) -- swordfish, tuna, and grilled shrimp -- was a little more fancified, with some mesclun greens laid around the edges. But the fish was simply prepared, with no sauce, cooked through in a proudly nontrendy way. The char-grilled shrimp wasn't quite the deal that the other dishes were: $14.95 brought eight grilled prawns, which may be enough for dinner (especially with a plate of linguine) but somehow seemed a little skimpy compared to the rest.

Angelo's handful of pasta dishes are all variations on the theme of seafood with noodles. Penne allo scoglio ($11.95) was pasta quills with scallops, clams, and chunks of lobster, dressed in a garlic-and-oil sauce spiced up with crushed red pepper. Fusilli al castello ($12.95) is a traditional recipe from Naples and was pretty similar: subtract the crushed red pepper and scallops, add crab and shrimp, and toss in an unusual homemade fusilli shape. (Americans are most familiar with short fusilli that spirals around like an auger; this looked like a ribbon curled with the edge of a scissors.)

If you don't order the Bucket of Rocks, there's a beer list and also a small and slightly pricey wine list. Specials are definitely the way to go here; one wine was discounted 50 percent the night we went, and we drank Fisher d'Alsace beer for $3 a bottle, which is probably less than it costs in the store.

Desserts weren't nearly as special as dinner and were totally unnecessary given the quantity of food we'd eaten. Torta della nonna ($4.50), the standard little custard tart, tasted fine (if a little light on pine nuts); there were also those sorbets-in-fruit-shells ($4 to $5.25) that have now completely taken over the Italian dessert world.

Oh, and you can eat inside at Angelo's, too. There's a dining room and a bar with booths along one side, and no doubt the food's just as good in there. I'll be waiting till the fall to find out.

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