Curry report
Two new Indian places. Same old menu, mostly.
by Stephen Heuser
DINING OUT |
Mehfil
(617) 437-0152
1116 Boylston Street (Fenway), Boston
Open for buffet lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., and for dinner Mon-Fri,
5-11 p.m., Sat and Sun, 11 a.m.-11 p.m.
Disc, MC, Visa
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access
No smoking
India Castle
(617) 864-8100
928 Mass Ave (between Central and Harvard Squares), Cambridge
Open for buffet lunch Mon-Fri, 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m., and for dinner
Mon-Fri, 5-11 p.m., Sat and Sun, 11:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m.
AE, Disc, MC, Visa
Full bar
Sidewalk-level access
Smoking at bar
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Restaurants don't seem to last very long at 1116 Boylston
Street. Three years ago the space was a Persian restaurant that had customers
only on the nights when the owner hosted
a Eurodisco party upstairs. Then for a couple years it was Sintoburi, a
Korean-Japanese sushi bar that never managed to drag many sushi fans away from
the Back Bay. Since March it's been an Indian restaurant: Mehfil, a
sleek-looking place that, décor-wise, seems to be waging a single-handed
battle against the usual subcontinental kitsch. Whether the customers will join
the fight remains to be seen.
On a city block dedicated to junk food, caffeine, and sheet music, Mehfil's
cool blue interior stands out. You scoot into one of the high booths, listen to
exceedingly mellow tabla and sitar music, and look through the window at kids
outside sitting on their skateboards, rolling back and forth, back and forth.
The walls around you are lined with geometrically cut blond plywood; the light
fixtures are a fetching cobalt. This is not your typical curry joint.
Well, almost not. Mehfil does serve the exact same Indian menu as every other
restaurant in the city: papadums, chicken tikka masala, lamb vindaloo, naan,
and so on. There is a South Indian menu (dosa, uttapam, sambhar) available on
weekends, but not during the week. Still, even on weekdays, there's something
distinctive about this place, something even a little stylish in some of the
dishes.
Mainly, I mean the vegetable samosas ($2.75) and the aloo chat ($3.95). Your
average samosa has a predictably tetrahedral shape and greasy-crunchy texture.
But here, the skin was light and flaky -- fried, but still soft to the bite,
with a subtle and fragrant potato mixture inside. (Your average samosa also
does not arrive with a cocktail umbrella planted in it.) Aloo chat, a tangy
cold potato salad, never showed up the first time I ordered it, but I'm
stubborn, so I ordered it on my second visit and I was glad: it came on a
shallow, shiny silver plate, with chopped fresh cilantro over the top. The cool
yogurt-tamarind sauce was just the thing for a hot night.
Other dishes were straight shots down the middle. Chicken tikka masala
($10.50) was buttery, with a lively yogurt tang to it; saag paneer ($9.25), the
classic mixture of spinach and cubed farmer's cheese, tasted strongly vegetal.
The hot black-lentil dish dal makhni ($9.25) had a subtle but pervasive
garlickiness and audacious little slivers of ginger perking things up. A
sizzling platter of mixed tandoori meats ($14.95) wasn't huge, but was well
executed: the chicken stayed moist, and the ground kebab meat was wonderfully
spiced. As at most Indian restaurants, chili heat is conservative: "medium"
dishes had no perceptible heat, and the ones we ordered "hot" were spicy, but
just so.
Come dessert, the kulfi ($3.50) was the densest ice cream I've ever had. It
came in a little quartered cake, and we had to cut it with knife and fork. I
don't know if that counts as style, exactly, but it sure is distinctive.
Like Mehfil, India Castle opened recently in a space that has played fast and
loose with people's business ambitions. The previous occupant, Malimo, didn't
quite make it as either a sushi bar or a jazz club. The occupant before that, a
Brazilian grill called Pampas, was one of the best party restaurants in
metropolitan Boston until it closed a couple of years ago. (Rumor was the INS
shut it down.)
India Castle, the new occupant, is a stylish-looking place too, but it's
borrowed style. The hinged wooden menus have a wavy pattern that echoes the
waves in the layered ceiling; both seem like a suspiciously better fit with a
sushi restaurant than an Indian one. As does the sushi bar, still standing,
which the owners have converted to a buffet station. At least there are Indian
prints on the walls.
Once again we're looking at the standard menu, mostly North Indian classics
with a few other things thrown in: a mild lamb masala ($11.95); a malai kofta
($9.95) with creamy brown sauce over a kind of ground-vegetable kebab. The
tandoori mixed grill ($12.95) was generous, with big chunks of lamb and
chicken, but a bit drier and less complex than the one I'd just had across the
river.
However, India Castle does serve its small South Indian menu every night, so
we had a chance to try a dosa ($3.95), the enormous pancake of fermented lentil
batter. It was excellent: a foot long, rolled like a crêpe, and
wonderfully sour. The accompanying sambhar (a hot lentil soup) was deep, sweet,
and spicy; the coconut chutney had an intriguing sour-cream undertone.
We did run into a bit of a language problem. Chicken tikka masala arrived as
lamb tikka masala; a question about the onion relish on a dosa didn't get very
far before I just gave up and ordered something else.
It initially struck me as funny that anyone would open an Indian restaurant on
this stretch of Mass Ave, on the periphery of the most curry-intensive
neighborhood in New England. But India Castle does fill a role: it's a little
fancier, a little more upscale than the Central Square joints, and less crowded
than the tonier Indian places in Harvard Square. I wouldn't have predicted
this, but business seems to be pretty good. Some of us see a block of Mass Ave
without an Indian restaurant and call it biodiversity. Some people call it a
business opportunity; that's why they're running India Castle and I'm just
eating there.
Food tales from all over
Two weeks ago I ate at a very expensive restaurant in New Hampshire
called the Crystal Quail. This is not one of your stupendous northern New
England destination restaurants with a zillion-bottle wine cellar and six kinds
of wild boar: the place seats 10 people, maybe 12 on a busy night, and the chef
looks like Edward Gorey. The Crystal Quail is a farmhouse; you bring your own
wine and choose between exactly two entrées. Not long before we'd gotten
there, the owners had bought a veal calf, and therefore my meal involved
Alsatian-style veal sausage for dinner, and veal livers in béchamel
sauce as an amuse-bouche. We had a garden-picked salad that started with mizuna
and got more exotic from there. (Ever eaten love-in-a-mist? Neither had I.) By
the time we finished, we had eaten two kinds of veal, two quails, a pheasant
terrine, some sort of succulent plant, and dessert. Something else had
happened, too: my girlfriend Jennifer had become my fiancée Jennifer.
The Crystal Quail has been around 25 years, and the cooking is no longer the
most fashionable, but it felt as though the New Hampshire hills had given us
something truly worth eating. There are more important things in this life,
after all, than fashion.
Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.
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