Intrigue Café

Hotel dining for the rest of us

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Intrigue Café (617) 439-3995 Boston Harbor Hotel 70 Rowes Wharf, Boston Waterfront Open daily, 7 a.m.-10 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Handicapped accessible

The Boston Harbor Hotel has built its culinary reputation on its Rowes Wharf restaurant, where chef Daniel Bruce conducts lavish and wonderful explorations in nouvelle New England food. But not everyone's in the mood for a $34 venison chop, at least not all the time. The Intrigue Café downstairs is meant to be all other things for hotel guests, who might want a chance to eat food they recognize, and at all hours. It also makes a useful refuge for we who live here, especially those of us curious to see what a superstar chef does in a more informal context. (Full disclosure: five years ago, and some years after my initial review of Rowes Wharf, I was employed on a one-time basis to write the program for the hotel's wine festival.)

The menu perforce is all over the map, but much of it succeeds, and when it fails, it fails as a nouvelle American menu of limited means ought to fail -- on out-of-season strawberries and Mediterranean side dishes, for example. When it succeeds, it is with the sensible theme of One Level Better. Like the much-lamented Ritz Café, it does the expected better than we expect it to, charges more than we expect it to, and has really outstanding coffee and tea.

I mention the coffee because the menu makes much of the "historic" La Touraine brand used, and attempts another historic link by devoting a full page to Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), the Wayland-born physicist who designed widely used cooking stoves and drip coffee pots. The menu does not mention, however, that Rumford was a Tory who spent the American Revolution in the British foreign office trying to destroy Boston and went on to write a treatise for the ultra-reactionary Elector of Bavaria, a prince of the Holy Roman Empire, on cheap recipes suitable for use in workhouses. This far-fetched appropriation of Rumford for an overpriced café seems somehow fitting for the Boston Harbor Hotel, which, having obliterated its own stretch of the historic harbor, now lines its lobbies with maps from the clipper-ship era. If one cannot actually inhabit Rowes Wharf, one can at least aspire to the domineering, opportunistic spirit of the slave-dealing merchants the antique maps evoke -- not to mention the spirit of Rumford, who might be considered the Werner von Braun of his day.

Nothing Rumfordian or treacherous about the food, fortunately. We get the One Level Better motif with a breadbasket of crackers, soft rolls, and corn bread. The crackers are tall, thin homemade strips, the soft rolls have real flavor, and the corn bread is white and none too sweet, Southern style.

So now that the theme is established, what does Chef Bruce do with shrimp cocktail ($11)? Five giant shrimp, a salad of endive and field greens, dabs of crème fraîche for the pretentious, wonderful cocktail sauce with hand-grated horseradish for the rest of us. Clam chowder ($4.75)? Lots of cream, leeks instead of onions, a serious clam flavor, plenty of potatoes, and oyster crackers on the side. Fried calamari ($9.50)? Really sweet, fresh squid, tartar sauce with a lot of capers, and a bed of 100 percent arugula.

On a soup of the day ($4.50) of ginger and carrot, there was no cream, just a consommé-like concentration of carrot flavors with a measured hit of ginger. Our only weak appetizer was another soup of the day, this one made from fresh berries -- it was honest and pleasant, but a little flat. Another chef might have reached for heavy cream, sugar, or lemon.

The motif continues on some main dishes. Lobster and shrimp salad ($14.50) is made with fresh mayonnaise on a terrific salad of field greens, with baby asparagus for a garnish that is both familiar and truly excellent. A daily special of fried soft-shell crabs ($13.50) is presented on a typical platter of arugula and field greens, but the plate is triangular and garnished with a border of red and yellow pear tomatoes -- we are in the kitchen of Pee-wee's Playhouse, but the tomatoes are delicious. Crab, shrimp, and codfish cakes ($14.50) are blended as brilliantly as Bruce's upstairs lobster sausages. The platter includes three frothy fried cakes, tartar sauce with capers, and the salad of field greens and arugula. Grilled lamb chops ($14.50) are the exquisite baby lamb you expect upstairs, garnished with a lengthwise slice of artichoke, pitted kalamata olives, and an Israeli-style couscous that would fulfill the starch-with-meat expectation, but only if it were served hot instead of cold.

Knowing the chef's interest in wild mushrooms, I could not resist the "oregano marinated wild mushrooms" ($9). In fact, I didn't get much of the marinade, perhaps because the oyster mushrooms and shiitakes didn't take up enough fluid. But the sautéed mushrooms -- no sauce there -- were deliciously concentrated in flavor. Again a Mediterranean starch was foolishly served cold, in this case cubes of polenta further qualified by the use of white corn meal. I think this must be Rhode Island white corn meal, and some kind of New England intention, but it still would be better hot.

The wine list is good but expensive, mostly American like the one upstairs. It's hard to go One Level Better with cheap wine. There's also a lengthy list of vodkas and rums, but one of the more exciting beverages here is tea ($2.75). It's made from loose leaves, in a large variety of specific regional and herbal blends, and served in two-cup glass press pots, rather like Rumford's coffee pots. We had a toasty Keemun Congou, and an unusual "Rote Grütze" with a sort of berry flavor.

The dessert to have is layered mango-and-raspberry parfait ($6.75), the improvement being that all five layers are mousse, not ice cream. German chocolate cake ($6.25) is a dense, flatiron-shaped thing that seems more like a pudding. Between the "cake" and the sauce, there is enough chocolate here, however. Strawberry shortcake ($6.25) is a familiar dish that tries to go One Level Better with strongly minted whipped cream and feathery shortcakes. It might have worked with riper berries. The bowl of summer fruit ($6.25) was also askew: the pineapple was excellent, but the cantaloupe, strawberries, blackberries, and blueberries were dull. All summer I've been enjoying one of the best Massachusetts peach crops ever, and lately the first of the apples and pears, not to mention those new golden kiwis. Why not use those fruits instead?

I picked up errors on the bill in both my visits; the computer adds okay, but the humans have to key in the foods and drinks correctly. For the most part, though, service at Intrigue is very good, and it will get better when the outdoor terrace closes for the fall. The servers have shirts with embroidery where there could be a tie. The atmosphere is defined by jazz background music, the hotel guests, and the passing crowd of the harbor, which includes tipsy locals coming off the cruise ships. The view is actually improved by the Fan Pier courthouse, as it reduces the impact of the dreadful "rotunda" -- actually a gazebo on steroids -- that was built with the hotel.

In all, it's a useful café in a neighborhood with so few restaurants that the courthouse had to include a cafeteria.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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