Temple Bar

The restaurant business isn't always about food

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

One of the most spirited responses I've ever received to a restaurant review came, almost exactly a year ago, from the owner of Grafton Street, a woody neo-Irish bar in Harvard Square whose food I found less than electrifying. Grafton Street had "often been accused of fine dining," he wrote, before thanking me (facetiously, I assume) for setting the record straight.

Temple Bar (617) 547-5055 1688 Mass Ave (Porter Square), Cambridge Open daily from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Full bar AE, DC, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access Smoking in bar and lounge

Reviews pass into dust, and well-run restaurants in prime locations thrive, and Grafton Street these days is thronged, even busier now than when it was the newest bar on the block and I was being disturbed by its vegetable quesadilla. It has now spawned -- well, not quite a scion, more a rich cousin: the Temple Bar, located on the slightly quieter stretch of Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares. Like Grafton Street, this is named after a popular Dublin neighborhood; also like Grafton Street, it replaced a down-at-the-heels local fixture -- in this case, the much-loved but little-patronized Nick's Beef and Beer House -- with something more velvety and upscale. If you ever dropped three bucks on a pitcher at Nick's, you know the place was cavernous and featureless and dark; here they hired designer Peter Niemitz to make it something quite different (though still dark). Niemitz has achieved considerable success creating a series of spaces (Capital Grille, Clio, Aquitaine) that feel flawlessly urbane but not in the least risky, and Temple Bar is right in that line: you'll recognize the heavy entry curtains of Grafton Street, and the oak wine racking of Aquitaine. As at Grafton Street, a low wall divides the bar area from the main dining room, but the feeling here is plusher: dark red leather booths line one wall, under a series of giant oak-framed mirrors. Instead of Grafton Street's collection of Irish memorabilia, there's a single mural on the back wall evoking the street life of Dublin. The tan-and-chocolate light shades match the awning outside. Without being exactly a clone of anything else, this follows a precise, clever urban formula.

And boy, does the formula work. With barely any publicity, Temple Bar had a line to get in on weekend nights a month after it opened. In the winter. The customers seem to be in their late 20s, 30s, early 40s: busy, employed people who haven't yet settled into suburban isolation. My apartment is nearby, and to me it felt as though the Temple Bar just willed into existence a whole Cambridge demographic. (What really happened, no doubt, is that the owner was smart enough to realize the demographic existed -- and, more important, that it needed somewhere to go for a drink.) On a recent Friday night at 7:30, the wait for a table for four was an hour and a half.

Most people wait at the bar, but though that's clearly the focus of activity, Temple Bar is most emphatically a restaurant. The menu is enormous; the portions are enormous too, and to judge by the amount of lobster on the menu, so are the ambitions. Unlike Grafton Street, Temple Bar can fairly be accused of fine dining, or at least a nod in that direction.

It doesn't exactly succeed at fine dining, but then I'm not sure that's the goal. The menu is an astute application of the shibboleths of modern cookery (obscure greens, fresh tuna, pasta) to a series of dishes that, in practice, turn out as comfort food. The idea, I think, is to convince the clientele that they're being modern and upscale without actually putting them in any awkward positions.

In doing so, the menu loots traditions from Ireland to Japan. The results include some successful dishes such as fondue of local blue cheese ($9.95), served with cubed bread and fruit and nuts, and lobster maque choux ($8.95), a pleasantly rich stew of corn and diced red pepper served around a mound of rice and a curled lobster tail. There is also an excellent clam chowder ($1.95 cup, $2.95 bowl) that uses, as one of its spices, lemon thyme. This is an ingenious touch, a way to bring the seafood-friendly tang of lemon into a creamy soup without curdling it.

Then there are crazy ideas, like "rabbit tenders" ($7.95), in which slices of rabbit meat are battered and deep fried, totally steamrolling the pleasant, delicate flavor of a fairly expensive meat. Or a "tuna summer roll" ($8.95), essentially a raw-vegetable burrito around a piece of second-rate sushi. Salads were perfectly fresh but a bit disappointing: a caesar ($5.95) was big and underflavored; "field greens" ($5.95) seemed to mean torn red-leaf lettuce with a bit of frisée tossed in for that high-end look.

Entrées were generally more conservative and hit the mark more reliably, although it was a cream-sauce kind of mark. "Gaelic filet" ($15.95) was a straight shot down the middle, a steak cooked medium rare with a sweet demi-glaze and sautéed mushrooms. A bowl of orecchiette ($13.95) with chicken, mushrooms, and sherry cream sauce was accessible, not too heavy, and large enough for dinner and the next day's lunch. The extraordinarily named "nephin peg" ($13.95), apparently a traditional Irish treatment of rabbit, wasn't a drastically more interesting use of this meat than the tenders: a loin breaded and pan-fried, served over cubes of potato and ham, all in a salty oyster sauce. Not a lot of finesse, but excellent winter food.

Seafood was treated a little loosely. We tried quite a strange bouillabaisse ($15.95), a very dense and salty tomato broth filled with fish and shellfish. The proper composition of bouillabaisse is a favorite hobbyhorse of traditionalist food writers; to my taste, the nonstandard salmon was a perfectly fine addition to the mix, but the smoked oysters were so strongly flavored they took over the operation. Our table disagreed about the honey-glazed salmon ($14.95), a slightly undercooked piece of fish served over excellent pan-roasted potatoes, with a tall sprig of rosemary planted in the middle like a flag. I thought it worked reasonably well, but the person who ordered it found the fish overpowered by its sweet sauce.

Desserts were modest and serviceable: a light chocolate mousse given a fruity flavor by various liqueurs, a so-so variation on crème brûlée, and a very nice warm pear cake.

A week after a couple of over-the-top dinners at Temple Bar, I headed back for a final reconnaissance. Only on a slow Sunday night, with no one at the bar tables, can you just show up and drop into a seat in the lounge. I ordered a Guinness and the very first appetizer on the menu: "The Dungiven Spud." I sat under a giant French champagne poster. The conversation to my right was about research funding; black leather jackets were distributed evenly about the room, one or two per party. The Guinness came in an Imperial pint class. The potato arrived on an amazing custom potato plate, with little wells around the perimeter for chopped bacon, scallions, sour cream, mushrooms, and grated cheese. The spud itself was a tour de force, flaky baked flesh inside a just-crispy crust. It was far better than a potato needs to be, and at $6.95 it was far more than a potato needs to cost. But if you want a Guinness and a potato -- well, all those people ordering lobster might be missing the point.

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

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