Le Midi

The business-lunch crowd gets a splash of the Mediterranean

by Stephen Heuser

Two International Place (Financial District), Boston (617) 439-9292 Open for lunch Mon-Fri, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., and for prix fixe dinner Thursday by reservation only AE, Visa, MC, DC, Disc Beer and wine Sidewalk-level access

The North Africian-born chef Moncef Meddeb is a genre surfer. He's used his polished Mediterranean cooking style to open more different types of restaurants than most chefs open restaurants. After founding the haute temple L'Espalier in the Back Bay, he opened the suburban bistro Aigo, in Concord; the Harvard Square foodie hotspot 8 Holyoke; and even a café at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. (Not all of these are still his, or even still open.) Now he's going after the business-lunch trade with a new venture, Le Midi, located in an office-building lobby and open only for weekday lunch. Or rather, as of two Thursdays ago, open for weekday lunch and for dinner one night a week, when Meddeb "will personally prepare dinners."

That last piece of information tells you something about Meddeb: he has been successful enough at starting restaurants -- even if only one at a time -- that he doesn't necessarily need to cook at them anymore. I saw him only once lurking around the kitchen door of Le Midi, and he certainly wasn't wearing a chef's apron. He was, however, clearly having some influence on the food: lunch that day was precise, pretty, and consistently flavorful. Lunch the other day I ate there was . . . less so.

Then again, Le Midi isn't exactly geared toward a foodie crowd. It's geared toward an expense-account crowd, a segment of the market not famously finicky about technique. Perhaps as a result, some perfunctory stuff mingles with otherwise sharp, high-flavored cooking that stands out in the conservative Financial District.

I don't imagine that any other downtown restaurant serves marinated white anchovies, for instance. (These are the soft, plump, fresh kind, not the salty fillets you see on pizza.) White anchovies seem to be a kind of fad lately -- they've popped up at three restaurants I've reviewed in the last four months. Here they were lined up side by side on a plate, sprinkled with green scallion rings and tart red currants, and dressed with lemon juice for bite and balsamic vinegar for a touch of sweetness ($7.50). Sweet-and-tart is a nice combination in candy, and even better in a decidedly savory dish like this one.

Among other appetizers, the "Salade du Midi" ($5.50) felt perfunctory, big pieces of lettuce dressed with vinaigrette and garnished with what my tablemate called "marginal" tomatoes. The warm goat cheese ($7.50), on the other hand, took me all the way back to my revelatory first taste of goat cheese years ago at a "Mediterranean" restaurant in California: a cake of warm, fluffy cheese, grilled on top and bottom and flavored with a squeeze of lemon. The full dairy tang of the cheese is nice alone, but even better against the sharp accent of lemon and the deep throatiness of the grilled crust; it was served over warm spinach and walnuts, with a sweet balsamic glaze scribbled around the plate.

There was one other dish that hit that level of flavor, and not surprisingly we also had it the afternoon I spotted the Man himself around the kitchen. That was a plate of asparagus with shiitake caps, which clearly came out of Meddeb's haute-cuisine repertoire. Even at $14 (that's $2 a spear), it was in some sense worth the money, if only because unusual things are worth whatever people charge for them. What made this special wasn't the vegetable itself -- though the asparagus were tender enough for "jumbo" stalks, about as thick as my index finger -- but the sauce, a sweet glaze made partly from foie gras. Foie gras. For lunch. It's one of those ingredients, like truffles, that give a profound depth to sauce without making it feel heavy at all. Applied to a simple grilled vegetable, it tasted luxurious but not excessive.

Even so, the grilled-chicken sandwich ($14) is probably what I'd order if I went back on my own dime: several slices of grilled chicken breast topped with marinated red peppers and a chunky chopped-olive tapenade, all laid on decent French bread. It was handsome and solid, a good balance between chicken and topping, the kind of thing a glossy food magazine puts on its cover when it wants to look "fun."

Maybe it's coincidence, but the two entrées I tried when Meddeb wasn't lurking around were much less worth writing about. One was a pasta special ($16) -- linguine topped with seafood and pesto -- and while it tasted good (nicely grilled scallops, chunks of lobster, shiitake caps), the whole thing was coated in an unprepossessing brownish-green sauce. The other was a salad of marinated grilled tuna, served cold ($12). Chunks of tuna were tossed with sautéed onions and peppers, black and green olives, and marinated carrots. The most interesting thing on the plate wasn't the tuna but the stewed half-tomatoes flavored, fascinatingly, with mint.

As for dessert, I don't want to belabor this, but quite a few of the berries in our dish of fresh berries ($5.95) were moldy. Our waiter -- who was sort of creepily ingratiating, and kept referring to his customers as "my friend" -- was apologetic, almost crestfallen, to learn that we'd had to pick out most of the raspberries. But hey. We were paying for it. A special of chocolate bread pudding ($5.95) was a much better idea, rich and sweet, with a few little cherries scattered around.

Wines are served by the glass, and the selection is limited. Among the whites, Cartiledge and Brown is a decent chardonnay, buttery in the California style; the pinot grigio is spare; and the viognier, to my mind at least, is the best match with the food.

Finally, a word about the space: Le Midi really is in the lobby of an office building. It's not in the middle of the lobby; the middle of the International Place lobby is a fountain that operates like a 40-foot-high shower and is ringed by an upscale food court. Le Midi is a cordoned-off area east of the elevator block, with the absolute highest ceilings you will ever eat under, and the tallest windows you will ever eat next to -- which unfortunately look directly onto the side of the Expressway. Since businesspeople are notoriously finicky about views, it may be a couple of years before the real crowds come.

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