Fire & Ice

Who knew that being batch processed could be so much fun?

Dining Out by Robert Nadeau

Fire & Ice (617) 547-9007 50 Church Street (Harvard Square), Cambridge Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-1 a.m. Full bar AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Lift access Smoking allowed at bar and in courtyard

In a poem I used to know, fire and ice are the options for the end of the world. In this restaurant, they are desirable features. The fire is easy enough to figure out: it's the giant (eight-foot) circular griddle upon which your food is stir-fried to order. The ice must stand for drinks, including more than two dozen kinds of martinis. This isn't the end of the world; in fact, it's a lot of fun.

I had guessed that Fire & Ice would not be a lot of fun because the format seemed so calculated, and the owners were involved in the Dukakis administration, but I was wrong. Here's the deal: for a flat $13.75, you fill a soup bowl with your choice of about two dozen vegetables and about a dozen kinds of seafood or meat. Then you fill a smaller bowl with two ladles full of your choice of 14 sauces. You then advance to the circular counter around the huge griddle, and a cook dumps out the contents of your large bowl and tosses them around a few times. After a while, the griddle has a lot of piles of food around the outer edge; you know that yours is the one with a lot of snow peas and two cubes of tofu among the beef chunks, but you wonder how the cook will keep 'em straight. He does it by sequence, probably, because after a few minutes the cook takes your small bowl, dumps it over your snow peas and tofu, gives it another couple of turns, and sweeps it onto an oval dinner plate that you carry back to your table.

At the table is a bowl of rice and another bowl of warm wheat tortillas. Dinner also includes a salad bar. You can go back to the griddle or the salad bar any number of times. Drinks and desserts are extra.

Not much can go wrong with this, which was one reason I was initially -- and foolishly -- skeptical. Foods do cook unevenly, no matter how precisely cut, and so you'll get some charred snow peas and carrots and a few rare chunks of lamb. But the speed and fun of it more than make up for that. The other thing that can go wrong is that mixing too many elements leads to muddy and dull dishes. A sign warns you not to mix the sauces, and I will give you some more advice a little further down. But first I want to make some excuses for not having reviewed Fire & Ice earlier.

The first word that came to mind, when I saw the publicity materials for this new restaurant, was Benihana. In particular, I was thinking about the famous Harvard Business School case study about Benihana. You might not think that Harvard Business School would teach a recipe for steak teriyaki, and you'd be right. What they were teaching was "Production and Operations Management," and the case examined how a Korean named Rocky Aoki made a lot of money with a chain of Japanese steak houses that applied assembly-line techniques. By "batch-processing" the guests at tables around a grill, Benihana assured maximum efficiency of seating and cooking, and eliminated the labor cost of waiters.

Fire & Ice takes this a step further by having the customers assemble their own dishes, thus speeding up the action even more. I thought, in reading about this, that such a restaurant would have no soul at all. But in fact, choosing is fun, and the waiters are actually very much present and helpful, both in negotiating the system and in selling drinks (the other profit center) and desserts. More than just a punk/crunchy version of Benihana, Fire & Ice has a humor and a jumping rhythm of its own. Like the New Wave group Devo, it enjoys the joke of animal spirits in a mechanized world.

Now, some advice. One of Nadeau's old laws is, "Never take more than three things from the buffet." This is particularly valuable counsel in restaurants, where buffets are loaded with inexpensive fillers; if you take time to look over the choices, you can usually pick out a few really good things that go well together.

At Fire & Ice, you can do this by reversing the restaurant's advice to start with the meats and veggies. Think about your sauce first: "Greenberg's teriyaki" is canonical, since the idea of Benihana still lingers, and the cooks here wear T-shirts that say LIVING THE DREAM OF GREENBERG'S TERIYAKI. Some others are rated by chili peppers, but remember that there is an assortment of interesting hot sauces back on the tables. They want to sell drinks, so salt and pepper are big.

Now, with some sauces in mind or maybe even in hand, advance to the protein station and decide on one or two forms of seafood or meat. You may not want to start your big bowl yet, but keep thinking about your sauce and protein ideas. (Vegans can go directly to the vegetable station, where there are cubes of seitan and tofu.) Our night, the seafood included chunks of swordfish, tuna, and mako shark, as well as squid rings and calico scallops. I'd suggest the tuna, since scallops and squid tend to toughen up on the griddle. Among the meats were sirloin tips, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey, and andouille sausage. The sausage didn't make much of an impression.

Now, with your protein options in mind, pick a vegetable or two. Your choices might include snow peas, mixed sweet peppers, onions, baby corn, water chestnuts, portobello mushrooms (take these), thinly sliced carrots, minced garlic (this will burn a little), minced ginger (careful here -- remember your sauce), cilantro (most of its flavor gets lost in the cooking), Chinese cabbage, and lots more.

Remember: you can always go back for more. You can follow up beef and peppers in teriyaki sauce by having a second round of tuna, snow peas, and onions with mango-ginger-roasted pepper.

Back at the table, the tortillas were warm but rather dull. The rice, however, was excellent, better than in many Chinese restaurants. Salads our night were caesar, garden with blue cheese, and mesclun; dressings were a bland caesar, an over-the-top raspberry vinaigrette, and a respectable Italian. Again, the joy and speed and quantity overcame any complaints about the dressings, and the salads themselves were terrific. (I have no objection to mixing any number of green salads.)

There were only four desserts our night, and Key lime pie and ginger-banana pudding were sold out by 7 p.m. Chocolate-pecan pie ($5.25) was only fair, with an undistinguished scoop of vanilla ice cream. A chocolate-hazelnut torte ($5.50) was flat and heavier than fudge, with hazelnut brittle scattered around it. Decaf coffee ($1.75) was good, but tea ($1.75) was served as a cup of hot water and a container of wrapped tea bags -- a guarantee it won't brew.

Our waiter was surprisingly good considering that waiters here have much to explain but not much to serve. Fire & Ice is loud, too -- so loud that I could barely make out the background music, but the hurly-burly seems to add to the enjoyment.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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