The Linwood Grill

Sometimes a new chef shows up and makes you say Damn!

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

The Linwood Grill 81 Kilmarnock Street (West Fenway), Boston (617) 247-8099 Open Mon-Thurs, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5:30-10 p.m.; Fri, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m. and 5:30-11 p.m.; Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; and Sun, 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m. AE, DC, MC, Visa Full bar Sidewalk-level access Smoking in adjoining bar only

You could eat stranger things than lamb riblets with sweet jalapeño chutney, but you couldn't eat them in a stranger place than this. Nobody I know would ever have picked the old Linwood Grille as a place to eat lamb riblets. Nobody I know would have picked the Linwood as a place to eat, period.

The Linny, to be charitable, is a dive. Don't get me wrong, it is a dive with many virtues -- a clear view of the Keno screen, prompt beer service, an orderly display of baseball pennants. For years it has been a happy after-work escape for certain employees of this newspaper, and it has even gained a certain low-key cachet as a rock club. But food? Let me put it this way: I offered to take a co-worker one night, and he said, "You're eating where?" I had to be very clear that I was offering not only free food, but free beer, before he agreed to come.

It's not the sort of mistake you'd make twice. The dive bar we know and love is still there, pennants and Keno and all. The restaurant is like a different establishment entirely -- it's next door, in a space that used to be a flower shop. The guys who launched the restaurant just tore into that space, stripping the walls down to brick and turning the room into . . . how to put this? It is a total showpiece of downscale chic. The open kitchen is framed with wiggly red neon suggesting fire. Every tabletop is a lacquered street map of a Southern city. There's a wood stove holding a TV that runs a video loop of burning logs. The cocktail menu includes "gin & juice." (It turns out to look like a Cosmopolitan.) The bare brick wall behind the bar is painted over with billboard-style lettering: COLD ICE BEER.

The barstools are built from tractor seats.

The new restaurant has dropped the "e" from Linwood Grille and, more important, acquired a wood-burning smoker custom-built in Texas. It also brought aboard a really ambitious chef, Brian Hill, who previously has worked in Hawaii and New Orleans, as well as in two branches of the Todd English pizzeria Figs.

Hill used to do something else, too: he was the guitarist for the Heretix, and manager Ray Lemieux was the band's singer. This is a celebrity venture of a very quiet kind -- and the cooking puts Planet Hollywood to shame. They've built a wide-ranging and impressive New Southern restaurant with culinary nods to the Caribbean, Louisiana, and dear old New England.

Most people seem to be treating it as a barbecue joint, but the dishes that really stayed with me weren't barbecue at all. Those lamb riblets, for instance -- the meat was soft and rich and coming away at the bone; the jalapeño chutney more sweet than hot.

Southern food is not famously healthy, so there's something appropriate about a "killed lettuce salad" ($4.95) of chopped romaine tossed with hot bacon grease and vinegar. The result looks like a normal green salad, tastes guiltily fantastic, and leaves you with a little pile of cubed slab bacon in the bottom of the bowl. If that doesn't sound good to you -- well, hon, you don't enjoy food.

Most of the appetizers amount to a whole meal in themselves. A chalkboard special called the "smoked fish of the day" costs about $8. One night it was trout -- a big fillet, white and still tender, all vinegar tang and smoke. It came with two accompanying veggies: a white-corn salsa and a truly wild-tasting red-bliss potato salad.

Just as big was the cabrito ($9.95), another fine dinner in itself. Cabrito? The menu says, "if you don't know what it is, ask," so we asked. The meat is goat. The dish is a big bowl of yellow Jamaican-style goat curry, and it rocks. Goat is usually a pretty tough meat, stewed until it's soft enough to eat. This meat was in slices, like beef; it was tender without losing its rich game quality. And was that lemongrass we detected on the top?

Another total novelty was rabbit-and-sausage gumbo ($4.95 cup, $9.95 bowl) -- a bowl of okra stew over rice, not too stiff with filé powder, laden with shredded rabbit meat. If you like rabbit, this is a very generous serving even without the gumbo. And if you like okra, you'll be pleased with the cute slices of battered fresh okra around the top.

The chef also does some groovy things with fish. A special of fried perch ($16.95) was three generous pieces of flaky white perch in a crisp, dry cornmeal batter. Pooled under the fish was a wonderfully buttery puddle of creamed corn; alongside were Italian-style mixed greens flavored with garlic. A truly inventive treatment was the catfish ($14.95): it was topped with garlic and parsley and grilled, tamale-style, in a corn husk. Anything inside a corn husk cooks by steaming, and the result here was a delicate, fragrant fillet of a fish that's normally subject to all kinds of abuse.

Interestingly, the barbecue itself was a slightly more mixed bag. I really didn't enjoy the brisket ($10.95) -- two very dry slabs of meat chopped into strips and laid across a piece of bread. A far better idea is the burnt ends ($10.95) -- the least appetizing-sounding barbecue dish of all, but maybe the tastiest. These are the chopped-off ends of brisket slabs, tossed with some sweet barbecue sauce and served over white bread. You get a pretty moist mixture, maximum smoke flavor, and a choice of two sauces: sweet or hot. Actually, both sauces were sweet, and pretty full flavored; at lunch I dipped my pulled-pork sandwich ($5.95) into each of them, and stuck with the hot. (One disappointment, incidentally, was the lack of a real North Carolina vinegar sauce for the generally excellent pulled pork.)

The bar serves a whole mess o' beer on tap, and iced tea is pre-sweetened in the Southern style. Dessert -- well, dessert is the one thing you don't always have room for after barbecue. Still, anyone who likes cookies would be foolish to miss the cookie sandwich ($4.95): two gluey-good chocolate-chip cookies cemented with a fat scoop of vanilla ice cream. Split it with someone you love. We didn't get far through our fat, tart slice of Key lime pie ($2.95), but it wasn't the pie's fault.

For all the down-home décor, the restaurant's trendy roots do show through. The host, for instance, was wearing the black-pants-and-French-blue-shirt uniform of bistro management everywhere. Our waitresses were appropriately folksy, though, and I dug the mural on the back wall: it's a painting of a South End roof cookout, guests playing poker and drinking cocktails on a deck overlooking downtown. All the guests, however, are pigs. I wasn't sure if it was supposed to remind me of the ingredients of my sandwich or of the shape I was acquiring as I sat there rooting greedily through my cole slaw and beans. And I definitely didn't want to think about what, exactly, the pigs might be grilling.

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

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