Full Moon

Family eats for the Learningsmith set

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Full Moon 344 Huron Avenue (Huron Village), North Cambridge (617) 354-6699 Open Mon-Fri, 11 a.m.-8:30 p.m.; and Sat and Sun, 9 a.m.-8:30 p.m. Beer and wine Visa, MC Sidewalk-level access No smoking Crayons on request

Twenty years ago, when I was in short pants, my parents would sometimes tote my brother and me to Shakee's, a pizza parlor that mesmerized kids with games and music and a species of animatronic puppet. We felt as though Shakee's was a circus built just for us, but looking back I see it mainly as a place where our parents could eat a restaurant dinner, even a restaurant dinner of cardboard pizza and orange soda, without feeling that they were spoiling the night for the rest of the diners.

Now imagine I'm a kid in Cambridge, 1999. Mom and Dad are accustomed to eating in quiet bistros, and they live in a shingled house off Huron Avenue, and they subscribe to the Utne Reader and generally feel kind of guilty about subjecting their kids to video games and automated puppets. Oh, yes, and they have liquidity. In this scenario, Mom and Dad wouldn't go to Shakee's even if it were still in business. They would go to Full Moon, a little bistro in Huron Village that has a generally Mediterranean menu and the coolest Brio train set I've ever seen.

The really delicious fact about Full Moon isn't just that it's a bistro with toys, but that it's the only full-service restaurant in this whole stretch of North Cambridge. So, kids or no kids, if you live in Huron Village and you don't want to drive to dinner, you sit at a green table and black chair on indestructible carpet and order from a menu that lists, among its European sodas and boutique wines, plain milk for $1 and "sippy milk" for 50 cents. (Sippy milk comes in a covered cup with a built-in straw.) Chocolate milk costs a quarter extra. Grown-ups can also order sangria, although -- trust me, I asked -- you cannot get the sangria in a sippy cup.

You can, however, order off the kids' menu if you ask nicely. Full Moon intelligently realizes that taste in restaurants is acquired, not inherited, and that even the children of bistro people are likely to pass through some hideous phase where they spit out everything that isn't Jell-O. So the macaroni and cheese ($3.50) is unadorned: a plain bowl of elbow noodles in white-cheese sauce that needed a few shakes of salt and pepper to taste like anything at all. If I were five again, I would have been bothered only by the fact that the kitchen was obviously in league with my parents, since a row of cooked carrots -- carrots! -- was tucked along the side of the plate.

Well, enough of that. I was a little more interested in Full Moon as an adult restaurant, anyway. You can tell Full Moon isn't really intended to be a kiddie restaurant because a real kiddie restaurant wouldn't have Abstract Expressionist paintings on the walls. It also wouldn't have white-cheddar macaroni and cheese; it would have lurid orange macaroni and cheese straight from the box. This is a restaurant for adults who just happen to have small children.

As an adult restaurant, Full Moon manages to be better than Shakee's without really living up to the promise of its menu prices. Let me put it this way: there was something on the menu called a lamb pita, consisting of spiced ground lamb spread over quartered pita bread. If it sounds familiar, that's because this is basically a lahmejun, an Anatolian snack food that you can buy a dozen of at the nearby Eastern Lahmejun Bakery for a few bucks. I know, I know, it's never fair to compare a restaurant to a grocery store. But when you eat out, you always want something fresh, something better, and this didn't even taste as if the onions on top had been diced in the last 24 hours. I couldn't help thinking that the $8 for a lahmejun was, for most of the crowd here, a kind of rent on the play corner.

Not that Full Moon is a bad restaurant. It is extraordinarily likeable. Our servers treated us well, and nothing we ate gave us fits. Some of it was quite good, like an appetizer of calamari coated in cornmeal batter ($8.95), tossed with cute little cornichons for garnish. The squid meat was tender and warm; the batter had a satisfying rough texture and didn't even verge on greasy. No complaints about the very basic dinner salad ($5.95), lightly dressed, with sprigs of watercress thrown in for variety. The sangria, too, stood out for tasting quite fresh, if a little light on the wine.

Beyond that, though, the dishes started to blur together. They all tended toward an indistinct, domesticated Mediterranean-ness. This was probably most evident on a cold tapas plate ($7.95), which changes from night to night. Ours had a pat of goat cheese -- can't go wrong with goat cheese -- along with long, soft slabs of roasted red pepper, a tumble of plain quartered beets, and a soft sauté of chickpea and onion that didn't quite graduate from adequate to flavorful. The niftiest bit was several spears of pencil asparagus bundled in prosciutto, but the sharpest-tasting was still the goat cheese.

Among entrées, a grilled half chicken ($13.95) was moist and cumin-y; it came with garlicked, peppered-up chard on the side and a dense, mushy bulgur-firik pilaf underneath. Hanger steak ($15.95) turned out a bit tougher than you might expect, though the flavor came through well, and the basic roast potatoes on the plate may have been the most perfectly cooked things we ate at Full Moon. A vegetarian platter ($9.95) was basically a mix of vegetables we'd already seen: that pilaf from the chicken plate, plus grilled asparagus and cold roasted peppers.

The big surprise was a clam-and-chorizo soup ($7.95), which was listed as an appetizer. The menu promised that clam and sausage, old friends from the Portuguese repertoire, would be served in a "smoky tomato broth." Well. The clams were perky, open littlenecks, the sausage was a fire-breathing scarlet chorizo, and the "broth" turned out to be full-fledged ratatouille. Quite a nice ratatouille, too, but still, a pile of stewed vegetables is a strange thing when you think you've ordered soup.

You would expect a family restaurant to do well with dessert, and sure enough our waitress stepped up with the largest lemon square any of us (including the waitress herself) had ever seen. And that glass of milk on the menu came in handy for washing down a peanut-butter cookie and a gooey chocolate pudding-cake so dense and rich we only got about halfway through before we lost our momentum and wandered over to admire the elaborate Brio train set in the corner. The layout involves hills and bridges and a working roundhouse. Those little wooden Brio cars have a pretty, spare Scandinavian design, but I have something to confess. Growing up, I never quite liked Brio as much as I liked Hot Wheels, a toy that you never suspected was trying to be good for you instead of just fun.

Feeling rebellious at this point, we climbed on our tricycles and pedaled recklessly out into the street.

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

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