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[Dining Out]

Beacon Hill Bistro
You can’t have too many restaurants like this
BY ROBERT NADEAU

dining out
Beacon Hill Bistro
(617) 723-1133
19 Charles Street (Beacon Hill), Boston
Open daily for breakfast, 7–10 a.m.; for lunch, 11:30 a.m.–3 p.m.; and for dinner, 5:30–11 p.m. (until 10 p.m. on Sun). Open for brunch Sat and Sun, 11 a.m.–3 p.m.
AE, DC, Vi, MC, Di
Beer and wine only
Parking at Boston Common Garage
Sidewalk-level access

Small hotels are popping up in odd places in downtown Boston, and some of them have very decent restaurants. The Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro houses one of them, with some dinner platters rivaling the fare at the top restaurants in town — and that’s not even getting started on lunch and dinner.

The room looks a lot more like a French bistro than most American bistros. It’s white and dark green, with dark wood, and tables in two straight lines, like the girls going to school in Madeleine. It has a floor of fine tiles and a soundtrack of world music that runs mainly to Portuguese, perhaps because the owners managed a hotel in Lisbon. But other than a few fava beans, there’s nothing openly Iberian about the food, which is predominantly French and Italian, with strong New England flavors. With 10 appetizers, as many entrées, and a couple of blackboard specials, the menu fits nicely somewhere between the bistro and the full-tilt restaurant.

The bread is crusty, glutinous sourdough stuff with butter, not olive oil. The dish that set the tone of our dinner was gnocchi with cèpes and braised vegetables ($7.50). The gnocchi were good, the braised baby vegetables (turnips, carrots, and such) were outstanding, and the cèpes — porcini in Italy, my favorite wild mushrooms — were amazingly delicious. A dark sauce has never been lapped up with such alacrity. Same was true of the garnishing pools of asparagus purée. Roast-beet salad ($7) is becoming a cliché (albeit a welcome cliché), but this restaurant breaks the mold by molding slices of beet into a layered cake like pommes Anna, cutting a pie wedge, and serving it as a deconstructed salad with an olive of goat cheese (not farmer’s cheese as the menu says) and field greens (not mint as the menu says).

Asparagus soup ($7.50) is a beautiful green bisque that doesn’t overstate the asparagus, but does overuse salt and pepper like many seafood bisques. The garnishes of asparagus tips, fresh green fava beans, and “confit carrots” (sweetened chunks of carrot) were appetizing morsels, but when they ran out, the green stuff wasn’t so much fun.

“Confit” has another culinary meaning for confit of chicken ($17) — that is, cured with spices under oil. Beacon Hill Bistro’s chef does a light cure, but presents a handsome leg of chicken and three slices of sautéed breast, rolled and stuffed, on a bed of butter beans and a little spinach, with a sweet-and-sour sauce. Food here is somewhat vertical, and rather more elegant than the Parisian idea of bistro food, but just as tasty.

Roast cod on savoy cabbage and fava beans ($16.50) was a superbly sweet chunk of fillet, served with favas alchemized into a potato-like cake, along with wisps of cabbage. This dish might be a little Portuguese or a little Basque, but in the Boston context, let’s call it a very elegant update of schrod.

Native lamb ($18.50) is some baby chops and a hunk of flavorful, lean, braised meat (perhaps from the leg) complemented by a real potato cake, and more of those marvelous cèpes.

The wine list comprises about 30 bottles, mostly from $19 to $48, with 13 wines by the glass ($5.50 to $7.50). The wines by the glass aren’t the same as the wines on the list, even when they are the same kind of wine. Thus a glass of 1998 Cave de Ribeauville riesling from Alsace ($7) was bone-dry and spicy, but only the appetizer for a bottle of Trimbach riesling ($33), also from Alsace. Among the current reds, don’t miss the ’96 Valdepeñas ($6.50), a softer and spicier idea of Spanish red wine; it’s ideal with today’s spicier food. Tea ($3.50) is served properly, in a china pot with loose tea in a mesh insert. Cappuccino ($3.50) is excellent, but the decaf ($1.95) had probably been sitting around for a while, and decaf does not sit well.

The dessert tray had only three items, although a few more desserts are concocted “downstairs” (a true Parisian touch, the kitchen downstairs, although it reminds us of the subterranean kitchens in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Nicholas Freeling’s The Kitchen). We had three items from the tray, and one from downstairs. The blackberry tart ($6.50) was an immortal, a classic thin-crust tart with just enough pastry cream to hold the numerous berries — smaller but riper than we usually get in May. The flourless chocolate cake ($5.50) was very good — perhaps a little dry, although it had the Viennese-style real whipped cream to help it along. Crème caramel “roll” ($5.50) was a long slab of stiff custard, from which our waiter cut a respectable square and spooned on more caramel. From downstairs, the cheesecake ($6.50) is a little round cake of almost unbearably rich cheese confection, with a sprightly wine-fruit topping.

Service at Beacon Hill Bistro is in the French-bistro style, which is effective but less forthcoming than full restaurant service. Our waiter could not remember who had ordered what for any course, and should probably have written it down since he got all the whats right. Atmosphere very much reflects the affluent neighborhood the hotel restaurant sits in. If hotel guests were dining our night, they blended into Beacon Hill pretty well. Even the Portuguese music blends in, especially when a fado singer or Cesaria Evora slows down and gets, uh, torchy. (There is a fine bistro called Torch across the street.) It’s not that Beacon Hill didn’t have a bistro before, but two places where you can walk in early and eat a terrific meal are not too many. Twelve would not be too many, either.

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

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001




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