Café society

Three patios, three approaches to running a restaurant

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Ben's Café at Maison Robert (617) 227-3370 45 School Street, Boston Open Mon-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; Mon-Fri, 5:30-9:30 p.m.; and Sat, 5:30-11:30 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar and on patio Ramp access in back The Harvest (617) 868-2255 44 Brattle Street (Harvard Square), Cambridge Open Mon-Sat, noon-2:30 p.m.; Mon-Thurs, 5:30-10:30 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 5:30-11 p.m.; and Sun, 5:30-10 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar and on patio Sidewalk-level access Joe's American Bar and Grill (617) 367-8700 100 Atlantic Avenue (Commercial Wharf), Boston Open 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m., weekends until midnight AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar and on patio Sidewalk-level access

Warm weather does things to your appetite. You don't always want a big dinner in the summer, and you certainly don't always want it inside. Here are three al fresco spots with a little history to them -- and a few surprises, not all good.

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The enclosed patio in front of stately, 28-year-old Maison Robert is the domain of Ben's Café, the quick-and-casual downstairs half of the operation. You realize, of course, that "quick and casual" is relative when your wine arrives in a floor-standing silver cooler, but the ceiling here is much lower -- fiscally as well as architecturally. One three-course prix fixe menu costs $18, and the other costs $26. Upstairs, those are entrée prices.

So far, so good. Unfortunately Ben's Café, food-wise, is very much a downstairs neighbor, and not a particularly strong argument for classic French cuisine. Service was impressive. So was the wine, a 1992 Pouilly-Fumé ($26), one of many half-bottles on the list. But we were underwhelmed by the cooking, which was competent and unremittingly dull. Possibly this is because the energy goes into the heavily promoted upstairs restaurant (which Boston magazine dutifully drooled over a couple months ago); possibly because the Ben's Café crowd is an older one that just likes very plain seafood crêpes in cream sauce.

At any rate, this is French food that ignores the whole New Cuisine revolution of the '80s: vegetables were boiled or steamed, served plain with a bit of butter; "risotto" ($12) was a pile of gooey long-grain rice, decorated with diced vegetables in bright red and green. There is something sweetly retro in being served pears Hélène ($8) or plain cookies for dessert, but still: you kind of want the smoked lobster bisque ($7) to taste more of lobster than of smoke. Also, there is a graveyard outside the windows, and you don't want to think of that as a metaphor for a cuisine -- or a clientele.

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The Harvest, in Harvard Square, is another neighborhood fixture. After beginning life as a much-lauded Chez Panisse knockoff in the '70s, the place scraped along on its reputation into the '90s before changing hands and re-opening last year with a spiffy new look and a wide-ranging menu to match. Like Maison Robert, the Harvest has an enclosed patio. Unlike Maison Robert, the Harvest has done away with its informal café, and if you eat on the patio you're ordering from the full restaurant menu. There is, however, a bar with its own view (windows giving out to a walkway), where you can piece together a meal of appetizers and feel okay about it.

I wasn't sure about the new Harvest at first. About a month ago, the place was the target of one of the weirdest poison-pen submissions I've ever received: an exposé of bad management mailed to me by four disgruntled ex-employees. Their allegations weren't exactly stop-the-presses surprising -- managers yelling at waiters is par for the course in busy restaurants -- but I was impressed by their indignation. So I had my eyes peeled when I arrived. Did the waiters look as if they feared for their jobs? Hmm. Maybe. But maybe waiters always look like that.

The Harvest is the kind of place where celebrity Harvard professors take each other out to dinner, and where undergraduates take their dates before big events. The night we were there, a tuxedoed college contingent occupied part of the dining room and Anna Deavere Smith was sitting behind us at the bar. The bread was an excellent crusty nut loaf that sat nicely with a gin and tonic. For a restaurant that can easily afford to rest on its laurels, the food was surprisingly energetic and good.

Then again, at $10 an appetizer it had better be good. Stalks of asparagus ($11) were peeled at the ends in the old formal style; they came with pretty spirals of mozzarella layered with pesto. Bibb salad ($8) was crisp and tossed with toasted nuts. A "Parmigiana tartlet" ($10) was a fancy name for a small, fluffy quiche served with an excellent salad that involved morel mushrooms. Fried squid over arugula ($9) came with tiny, sweet tomatoes and an electric-hot "rémoulade" dressing. And dessert was downright pioneering: lemon mousse served in a light citrus syrup, the first time I've seen the food-in-broth fad invade the dessert menu.

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After two kinds of gourmet experience -- rich old people trapped in 1971 and rich young people in 1999 -- sometimes you just want a two-fisted outdoor meal. The waterfront restaurant tottering on ancient-looking pilings near Commercial Wharf used to be a new-cuisine joint called Cornucopia. It was replaced a few years ago by a branch of Joe's American Bar and Grill, part of the ubiquitous Back Bay Restaurant Group (think Abe & Louie's, Papa Razzi, Charley's Eating & Drinking Saloon).

I had never been to this particular Joe's, figuring that a chain bar and grill is going to be the same wherever you find it. That's true as far as the food is concerned, but I had forgotten what a pretty place this is to eat. You sit at patio tables fenced in by heavy nautical chains; the indoor bar is an after-work meat market, but the other view is of bits of the harbor, the greenery of Columbus Park, and the crowded brick buildings that circle the North End. The gin and tonics are every bit as good as the ones at the Harvest.

One of the funny things about modern restaurants is that a place like Joe's can actually be touched more by current ideas of "gourmet" than a place like Ben's Café. While Ben's dutifully turns out crêpes and bisques and the rest of the totems of the mid-century gastronome, a modern burger joint like Joe's dabbles in fusion and raw things. The dabbling isn't exactly virtuosic; the rare ahi tuna appetizer ($9) looks terrific but comes in a clumsy gravy rather than the light soy-ginger sauce you'd want with Japanese food. The fried rice cake was white and gooey inside, and generally looked a lot like Maison Robert's risotto.

But Joe's really isn't a fusion joint, it's a burger joint. And it does a nice job. Mixed green salad ($2 with dinner) was actually fresher than the one I had at Cornucopia before it closed. My white-cheddar cheeseburger was cooked medium, not medium-rare as I'd asked, but I didn't really care: for $8, the burger and the view were a bargain. Pizza margherita ($8.25) was cooked on a grill and scattered with chopped fresh basil. Apple pie, thankfully, wasn't.

As we watched the Custom House tower start to glow against the darkening blue sky, the pedestrian stream changed from men in suits to couples with dogs. If we'd sat there another month, it would have shifted to tourists with cameras, and we'd have been fixed there, happily full, as part of the cityscape.

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

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