Evoo

Eclectic, globalized American bistro food makes a bold leap into Somerville

by Stephen Heuser

118 Beacon Street, Somerville (617) 661-3866 Open Mon-Thurs, 6-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 6-11 p.m. Closed Sun Full bar AE, Discover, DC, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access

Seasons, in the Bostonian Hotel, is famous for having launched the careers of more well-known local chefs than any other restaurant in the city. The catalogue of alumni includes Jasper White, Gordon Hamersley, and Tony Ambrose. Seasons is also famous, inevitably, for not being as good as it once was, a complaint that probably dates from whenever White was replaced by that brash newcomer Lydia Shire.

For the past few years, the lucky/unlucky inheritor of the position was Peter McCarthy, a youngish chef with a pleasant mien and a thing for truffles. Like his more famous forebears, he has new American tastes and seems something of an omnivore. Also like his forebears, he eventually left Seasons to strike out on his own with a creative bistro more completely under his control.

But the world has changed since Jasper White began his bid to gild New England cooking and Lydia Shire began getting playful with "offal" and "legumina" on her menu at Biba. The up-and-coming chef of a decade ago had only a few models -- Mediterranean, Californian, nouvelle -- on which to build a stylish menu. The up-and-coming chef of today has many. Maybe too many.

You get the sense, in McCarthy's new Somerville bistro Evoo, that you're in the hands of an accomplished cook. You also get the sense that he's trying to check off a lot of boxes. One dish, tomatoes in olive oil with slices of summer truffle, is the model of produce-happy new Italian minimalism; another, chicken over a tropical cole slaw spiked with chili pepper, tastes like something out of the Caribbean repertoire of the East Coast Grill. And then there are hotel-restaurant touches, like a light-green cloud of chive whipped potatoes served with beef tenderloin, that are handsome but somehow generic.

In other words, Evoo (the name is an acronym for extra-virgin olive oil) is hard to pin down. That doesn't make it a bad restaurant; the cooking is too skillful for that. McCarthy made only one real misstep the nights we ate there: a pasta special, a messy dish of square-cut spaghetti in pesto with chopped tomato that never quite came together.

Evoo will have to iron out that kind of thing if it's going to persuade Somervillians to pay South End prices, but there are plenty of signs that the kitchen is up to the job. A lot of those signs come in the appetizer course. My favorite appetizer was an oyster dish ($7.50) that provided a little reminder of what New American cooking can do best: tease apart Old American cooking and reassemble it in more exacting ways. This one took the good parts of a hangtown fry -- oysters and bacon -- and gave them a different kind of showcase. The oysters were fried in a light cornmeal batter and stacked on top of a salsa of chopped bacon and apple chunks; the whole thing was set on a ring of warm and tangy "goat cheese fondue."

Another appetizer, "warm summer mushroom-roasted pepper cheesecake" ($9), came in a shallow earthenware crock. The "cheesecake" was a soft, melty flan more easily spread on bread than sliced; the flavors were mild and earthy and comforting. If the result wasn't as sophisticated as the experimental-sounding name would indicate, the halved black figs and curled piece of serrano ham on top did give it a Mediterranean edge.

An appetizer of roast quail ($9.50) had a balsamic-vinegar coating so tart and sticky it tasted like citrus. The meat had a falling-apart tenderness; a single rosemary biscotto, sweet and herbal, added a little crunch on the side. Crossing the globe in mere seconds, we moved to a sweet potato-coconut soup ($6) that used the hefty flavor of roasted sweet potato to supply the kind of full, oily body you might otherwise get from beef stock. With touches of cilantro and scallion, the effect was like a Malaysian curry, only more streamlined.

So the appetizers covered the waterfront, from comforting to hip. So did the entrées. On the staid side (or at least the staid-looking side) was a plate of beef tenderloin and whipped potatoes ($21); the steak was coated in a deliciously smoky sauce that flowed over a few shiitake mushroom caps into the salty whipped potatoes. The potatoes were at the far edge of saltiness, but the effect overall was swanky and adept, especially when a slice into the steak revealed soft garlic cloves embedded in the meat.

On the sportier side was a half-chicken with a sweet, sticky citrus glaze, served over a pile of spicy peach, cabbage, and red pepper slaw ($16). Erupting from a joint of the chicken was a spray of watercress; the plate was circled with three halves of broiled sweet plantain. The feel of the thing was electric, a spiky dish of exclamation points.

Split the difference between those two and you might end up with something like the grilled bass ($19). This was a foot-long fish served whole, with the head and tail on -- an excellent preparation I've seen more often recently, maybe as diners become less squeamish about seeing fish heads on their plate. At any rate, keeping the fish together does good things for its moisture and flavor; the result here was excellently delicate flesh and a distinct grilled taste. Topping the fish was a vinegary vegetable salsa ("cucumber sambal," said the menu), and loose udon noodles lay coiled on the side.

Two of three desserts hit the mark: a peach-basil crisp ($7), which modishly fused a light herb taste with sweet stewed fruit; and a tart ($7.50) in which fresh raspberries and more half-figs floated in a little pond of sharp lemon curd at the bottom of a crisp, billowy pastry shell. (Picture a sweet, golden-brown tostada and you'll have the idea.) A "triple-chocolate peanut-butter-pudding trifle" ($6.50), served in a martini glass, was undistinguished by contrast.

Evoo isn't far from pulling off the consistency it needs to compete with the other restaurants in its price range; whether it can manage that trick on this particular stretch of Beacon Street is another question. For all the success of the tapas bar Dalí, on the corner nearby, the space Evoo occupies has seen a number of previous restaurants struggle. The most recent was the Atlantic Sea Grill, a big, empty fish place that always made me wonder who would have opened a $15-per-entrée restaurant in a spot with so little foot traffic. Peter McCarthy is making a truly counterintuitive and radical move by opening a place even more expensive, naming it after a pricey condiment, and hiring trendy designer Sandra Fairbank to dress the space in fashionable blues and stainless steel. The result feels like a little island of downtown on the Somerville line: the eastern outpost of the empire of the foodies. It will be interesting to see if the natives welcome the gesture.

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