Bricco

Something new under the (Tuscan) sun

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Bricco (617) 248-6800 241 Hanover Street (North End), Boston Open Mon-Thurs, 5 p.m.-midnight, Fri-Sat, 5 p.m.-1 a.m., and Sun, 5-11 p.m. AE, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Sidewalk-level access Smoking in the bar area

Bricco came to my attention, as a lot of restaurants do, with a blazing press release months before its opening. The press release trumpeted the arrival of a new restaurant on Hanover Street, but instead of gushing about a "new standard in luxury" or "quality food served in restrained elegance," as these things usually do, this one focused on the chef, Bill Bradley.

Wow. It's so rare these days to have your food cooked by the vice-president's chief rival for the Democratic nomination.

Just kidding. Different Bill Bradley. This one, it turns out, is a chef whose last couple of jobs have been in California's wine country, which is impressive in itself. The region's cooking has become so good that its little agricultural towns -- Sonoma, Napa, St. Helena -- have been reborn as food destinations. And the most influential chef in California works there: Thomas Keller, who came up with the idea of dividing dinner into about nine tiny courses, each with a different explosive flavor.

Bradley has incorporated some of that concept into Bricco's menu. The restaurant does serve traditional appetizers and entrées, but there's also a whole new menu category: "tastings," each of which amounts to an appetizer for one person, a few bites for two, or a taste for three. It's the first time I've seen anything quite like it outside of a Spanish restaurant. Even if not every one of the dozen or so tastings was perfect, they still make a restaurant that's otherwise fairly high-end ($17 to $26 for entrées) a lot more flexible and approachable.

Much of the good food in the North End has been migrating to the side streets, leaving Hanover Street with the shticky tourist joints. But there's no shtick at Bricco: here you walk under a deep maroon awning onto a striking blond-and-brown-striped wood floor. The interior is very Peter Niemitz, with walls of mirror and dark wood, X-style wine racking over the bar, and chandeliers shaped like inverted spiders. The nights we visited -- a Tuesday and a Monday -- the place was quiet, with only a few tables occupied.

If you take a table along the wall, you may end up sitting on Bricco's very bouncy banquette, watching the chefs at work in the open kitchen while you nibble bread from one of those trendy spiral-wire breadbaskets. The bread is nice, though nothing mind-blowing: long, thin breadsticks (overbaked to a dark brown one night); rosemary focaccia cut into pretty lozenge shapes; slices of a grainy country white called porridge bread. The accompanying spread is more interesting: white-bean dip deepened with artichoke.

Dinner at Bricco begins when you're handed a big, nearly blank sheet of card stock with a single paragraph in the middle, a fluttery little encomium to Bricco itself. Turn the sheet over and -- aha! -- it's the menu, evenly divided into first courses, main courses, and tastings. The thing I really like about this menu is its rangy ambition. There are some original-sounding dishes, such as oyster-mushroom bruschetta and red-pepper soup with fennel. There are some standards, like mozzarella with basil. And then there's stuff you've never seen before. Fried olives. Cold smelts. There is one entrée -- the chef's specialty, the waitress told us -- that consists of exactly five giant gnocchi.

Over two nights, we ran through a good deal of the tasting menu, a bunch of appetizers, and two entrées. Considering the principle of the tastings, there's probably room for a bit more precision, but the spirit is right. Take the spiedini ($4.25), three skewers of pork cubes alternating with red grapes. Grilled grapes are good, and of course grilled pork is terrific. Did it need to be charred on the edges? Probably not. There was also a slight tendency toward undersupply, even for what are supposed to be tiny dishes. Grilled calamari ($4.25), tenderly cooked with a bit of chili and a squeeze of lemon, was a tiny cluster of purple tentacles and white rings. I'm no fan of excess, but if the dish is good -- and this was -- you find yourself simply wanting more. The fresh mozzarella plate ($3.75) was elegantly austere, with a drizzle of dense, sweet balsamic vinegar around the white cheese, but the basil and tomato were barely there.

The largest tasting was also the weirdest: the "Venetian-style smelts" ($4), which were fishy little fillets, cold and soft, sweet with raisins, onions, and pine nuts. They offered a window onto another culinary world entirely, a real departure from the tight late-'90s flavors that characterize the rest of the menu. (Of the three people at the table, only one of us liked the smelts. That was me.)

A fritatta of potato and artichoke ($4) was tasty, but slightly messy. When the fried olives ($4) arrived, little golden balls on a plate, we popped them into our mouths and promptly burned ourselves. The things were hot, but once we waited a bit, they were fascinating -- crisp batter, purple flesh, and a nucleus of salty chopped anchovy -- and somehow not nearly as odd as they sounded.

As for first courses, a soup of puréed red pepper with some fennel over the top ($6) was marred only by its temperature, which was drastically uneven -- very hot in the middle and lukewarm at the edge -- in a way that suggested microwaving. Agnolotti ($10) were appealing stuffed pasta purses; a mushroom risotto was happily gooey and earthy, but as unevenly heated as the soup.

Our two forays into the entrée menu were interesting. The plate of ricotta gnocchi ($17.50) centered on a delicious ragout of oyster mushrooms and asparagus; the gnocchi were light, cheesy dumplings the size of large scallops, seared on top and bottom. Two grilled quails ($23) had nicely salty grilled skin but were fairly undercooked at the joints. They were laid on an unannounced crouton spread with foie gras (yay!), but the gravy on the plate had a slightly unpleasant mouth-coating quality that ran counter to the grilled sharpness of the dish.

The wine list, befitting a restaurant run by a Sonoma-trained chef, is extensive; we had a half-bottle of a round, focused Morgan sauvignon blanc, as well as a bottle of Regaleali rosé (trust me) for $22, which was crisp, summery, and just about the least expensive thing on the list.

Desserts (all $6) were quirky: "The Pyramid" was a little Luxor Hotel of chocolate-shelled chocolate mousse, standing on a square of cocoa powder. "Neoclassic Panna Cotta" took the form of three disks of custard striped with caramel sauce and accented with a dollop of caramel mousse. "A Study in Cannoli" had a lovely caramelized shell and a mascarpone filling with the rich tang of buttermilk.

Our first night at Bricco was encouragingly smooth; our server had a sense of humor and lavished attention on our water glasses. On the second night, however, it felt as if we were getting the B team; our server, though friendly enough, more or less ignored us in favor of the two tables of middle-aged patrons nearby. The word "bricco," apparently, refers to the loftiest plateau in a Northern Italian vineyard, and if Bricco the restaurant hasn't quite reached that height yet, it's already providing quite a view.

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

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