Sidney's Grill

Hotel restaurants don't have to be boring

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Sidney's Grill (617) 494-0011 University Park Hotel, 20 Sidney Street (Central Square), Cambridge Open daily for breakfast, 7-11 a.m.; for lunch, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; and for dinner, Sun-Thurs, 5:30-10 p.m., and Fri and Sat, 5:30-11 p.m. Full bar AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access No smoking

Okay, I admit a slight prejudice against hotel restaurants, which tend to be too expensive and sterile for my taste. With a couple of exceptions, even the well-publicized ones with trendy chefs still seem to be designed more for the comfort of out-of-towners than for the comfort of a city guy like, say, me.

So I was all geared up to be skeptical of Sidney's, the eight-month-old ground-floor restaurant in the University Park Hotel. But I just couldn't manage it. Maybe because the place is so inexpensive for what it delivers; maybe because it's actually kind of neat and stylish inside; maybe because a valet at the front door parks your car for free. (Call me lazy, but I don't mind skipping the great Cambridge parking derby for a night.)

The University Park Hotel is kind of an odd animal, plunked down in the no man's land between the NECCO factory and the Central Square business district. You know that funny attempt to build a suburban industrial park off Mass Ave in the middle of Cambridge? Where there's a fairground-style arch onto a grand avenue that leads nowhere? Well, Sidney's is on that avenue. You certainly wouldn't confuse it with a genuine Central Square neighborhood joint; for one thing, it doesn't serve Indian food, and for another, it holds as many people as every Central Square neighborhood joint put together.

You walk into Sidney's through the quiet anonymity of the hotel lobby and are greeted by tall potted plants and a chipper hostess. The floor is a deep cherry-wood color; above the enormous open kitchen, a dramatic copper roof flares skyward over an almost completely empty room. I ate there on a couple of weeknights, on one of which ours was the only table occupied at 8 p.m. In all fairness, the room did start to fill up later, and our waitress assured us that the place veritably buzzes sometimes. It looked to me as though the clientele is probably high-tech types coming through Cambridge on business; by the time we left, two different parties were running notebook computers on their tables.

As with a lot of newer hotel-lobby restaurants, the idea of the menu is to remind guests that they're in New England without drowning them in bad old New England food -- but without giving them anything too weird, either. This isn't necessarily a recipe for excitement, but Sidney's carries the whole project off with aplomb. There's flair in the little things. The breadbasket, for instance, is excellent: chewy sourdough buns, whole-wheat olive bread, and butter molded into a sphere. Water came not from a pitcher, but out of a snazzy little square-sided bottle labeled "Sidney's," as though the restaurant were tapping its own spring. The basic salad, the "farmer's field greens," wasn't the apex of crispness, but it was quite generous for $4.50, and the lettuce was the real deal: radicchio, dandelion, and all those little mesclun greens in a just-slightly-fruity vinaigrette.

After all that, the "three-cod chowder" ($5) really had me excited. The idea is a fish chowder made from the trio of salt cod, smoked cod, and fresh cod. It's very clever: smoke tastes wonderful in chowder, and so does salt. The soup was attractive and rich looking, decorated with chopped scallions -- but it wasn't quite as interesting as we had hoped. There was neither much smoke nor much salt in evidence. I ended up salting it myself and wondering why I couldn't taste more richness from the fish, or from the cubes of salt pork in the bowl.

Underflavoring, however, wasn't a problem in the grilled-mushroom salad ($5.75) -- really something of an antipasto plate, with bulbous king oyster mushrooms marinating in vinaigrette, along with radicchio and watercress. Another salad -- "Sidney's house salad" ($6.50) -- also reminded me of antipasto: slices of roast tomato and colossal olives on rounds of grilled mozzarella.

The appetizer I liked best was hardly an appetizer at all: grilled venison sausage ($5.75), a dish that included three food groups and was large enough to make a decent dinner in itself. This was a basic sausage with excellent pungency, grilled and sliced into three or four pieces, served around a cake of grated potatoes and a sweet-onion marmalade. The plate, with the bulging triangular shape of a Viagra tablet, was colored a deep crimson that set off the bright green of the accompanying watercress. Everything worked except the potato, of which more later.

Every New England-themed menu has to have its go at seafood, and Sidney's tactic (chowder excepted) seems to be grilling fish and laying it over highly flavored accompaniments. An appetizer of "Jonah crab cakes" ($8), for instance, was two middle-of-the-pack crab cakes, flavored with curry powder and served over a very gingery slaw on a glossy black plate. There's a daily oyster special ($8.50): our night, the oysters were supposed to be grilled but tasted more like raw oysters to me (no complaints here); five of them were served, in the shell, on a mound of sea salt with a spoonful of herbed mustard sauce on each.

Two fish entrées were quite smoothly executed. One of them, a long salmon fillet ($14.50) broiled to a rosy pink, was served on a lovely succotash of corn, beans, and bacon that had all the saltiness and richness missing from the chowder. The other, a fillet of scrod ($12.50), was a generous piece of thick-flaked white fish with a salty herbed coating, served in an intensely flavorful broth with curls of lemon zest.

The one part of the scrod dish that looked better than it tasted was the accompaniment of purple and yellow potatoes. Potatoes seem to be something of an Achilles' heel at Sidney's; that grated-potato cake with the venison sausage was the blandest fried thing I've eaten in a while, and the mashed potatoes served with the filet mignon ($15) -- a nice piece of meat in a slightly bitter demi-glace -- were stiff and uninteresting. The best-tasting potatoes I had at Sidney's were the mashed ones alongside the hanger steak ($15), and I suspect those were good because everything on that plate was good: a very flavorful piece of meat with a bit of char on the outside and a bit of red on the inside, topped with roasted red and yellow peppers. The potatoes, absorbing flavor from the peppers on top and the deep, sweet sauce on the bottom, were carried along with the momentum of the thing.

For dessert, a fresh passion-fruit sorbet was sticky-dense and had a marvelously tart-around-the-tongue feeling. An apple-rhubarb pie tended more toward the sweet of baked apple than the bracing tang of rhubarb; it could have stood some of the sorbet's tartness, which would have made the scoop of mellow vanilla-bean ice cream on the plate a better complement.

The art on the walls here deserves at least a mention. The hotel décor in general plays on its proximity to MIT, with little science gestures -- an antique microscope in the lounge; an atomic nucleus woven into an elevator floor. Sidney's walls are hung with huge, quasi-scientific paintings: one wall has a vivid rose superimposed over a very loose approximation of a periodic table; another features random hand-scrawled words like SPACE, ENERGY, and POLARIZATION. The techies this hotel is designed for, if they glance up from their computers, might have a good chuckle about what science looks like to an artist.

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

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