For years I’ve been working on excuses to review restaurants on Cape Cod, but I’ve come up with only two that readers should accept. I review every restaurant in Provincetown that does Azorean Portuguese seafood, on the theory that this is an important regional style. And every few years I review a summer restaurant with so much style — usually Mediterranean — that it is worth a trip out of Boston. The Martin House, located in the West End of Provincetown, is this year’s style nominee, having reached the threshold where I would be genuinely excited to review the same restaurant if it were in the South End of Boston.
In fact, the Martin House features a breadbasket I would be excited to find in the North End of Boston. It includes a dark slice touched with anise, some dense white bread with sesame seeds, and — Boston bistros, take note — a focaccia that isn’t overloaded with grease, garlic, and herbs. Focaccia is supposed to have some oil and herbs in it, but it’s a bread, not a whole pizza.
Among the appetizers, it’s hard to get past the pan-seared Wellfleet scallops ($12). It’s been a great year for New England scallops, and this is an outstanding treatment of six of them, glazed just enough to intensify the flavor without overdoing the delicate meat. Oysters Claudia ($11) attempts the same exquisite level with Wellfleet oysters on the half-shell, but the Japanese trimmings — “ponzu sauce,” along with wasabi and gari (the green mustard and pickled ginger, respectively, of the sushi bar) — add nothing special, so I’d send Claudia back to lemon, black pepper, and a little horseradish. Well, ponzu is a kind of lemon, actually, so keep that.
Another knockout is lamb loin crusted with Moroccan spices ($11). It looks a little like the ubiquitous seared-tuna appetizer, since the lamb is served in rare slices, and the spices (lots of coriander seed and red pepper, as I taste them) are rolled onto the outside. But the condiment is a terrific homemade chutney, with some fresh watercress.
Then there’s the terrific fig jam on toast, served with a salad of spidery, spicy arugula leaves ($7). It was, in fact, the kind of meal where the least memorable appetizers were an excellent wilted-spinach salad with wild mushrooms ($7) and a special smoked-chicken/kaffir-lime soup with smoked-chile cream ($8) that was just a dash of lime juice short.
Some like to test a bistro with roast chicken. Tell those people to try out the free-range chicken ($23) at Martin House, which is juicy and fortified with the most amazingly flavorful gravy. The underlying barley-couscous pilaf was a little dull, but that was easily solved by distributing the gravy.
The obligatory lobster ($33) is a pound and a half, baked, and stuffed with a smoked-salmon “hash” that ought to be mandatory. The lobster itself was a summer hard-shell with somewhat powdery claws, but plenty of juicy tail meat. The bonus here was excellent baked new potatoes. Filet mignon and braised short ribs of beef ($27) seems an odd pairing — one cut for Baltic Avenue and one for Park Place — but they do define the beef spectrum, from the buttery-soft-but-bland steak to the stringy and flavorful rib meat. You could even eat them together for a kind of reverse beef Wellington. Roast rack of lamb ($29), cut into baby chops, was cleverly paired with curried vegetables. I liked the first bite of the vegetable mix, which had a hot-dry spicing and plenty of lentils and beans. But later on it got dull, as though the chef had lost courage.
Duckling ($26) is muscovy, a lean breed that produces breasts that taste like steak. The platter is filled with a spicy sausage made of the rest. Grilled yellowfin-tuna steak ($26) is a recent special that I assume is a place-holder until more bluefish is available. The “Vidalia radicchio fennel tomato nage” will go better with bluefish, as will the buttery mashed potatoes.
Martin House has an excellent wine list of offbeat classics from France, Italy, and California. With red meat and fish together, we enjoyed a 1998 Chinon, Cuvée de Tireaux from Olek-Mery ($28), a light red with a hint of cherry. On the spring list, we had mini-tasting of secondary wine grapes: a 1998 primitivo ($5.50/$21) with the dark-cherry-berry aromas of good zinfandel, which may be a descendant of primitivo, and a 1997 melon ($6.50/$26), from a secondary grape in Burgundy that made a crisp, Muscadet-like “fish wine” in California.
Martin House does not let up with the desserts, and even produces a fine cheese platter ($10) with a variety of fine crackers, an aged Grafton cheddar, a Tuscan pecorino of similar texture, and a brilliant semi-soft goat cheese with a dab of fennel honey. They were out of the only chocolate dessert, but Rebecca’s Italian cookie plate ($7) included a chocolate-chip cookie, along with homemade amaretti and a nice hazelnut cookie with some buttery filler. My favorite was a torta di nonna ($7) — not made of actual grandmothers, but rather an almondy pie, somewhere between ricotta cheesecake and custard pie. Fresh plum crostata ($7) had a heavy crust-and-custard layer, topped with a thin design of sliced plums; it was almost like the torta di nonna. Tropical-fruit tiramisu ($7) was bold satire, with bananas sticking up out of layers of cake and mango. It was almost as sloppy as real tiramisu, without the defined flavors. The Martin House serves excellent decaf (this alone should excite the South End) and proper tea in a china pot.
Indeed, the Martin House serves especially well; it’s the kind of place where the waiter brings a warm, Japanese-style towel to the lucky lobster diner. Servers in really good restaurants are often happy, and these people were happy. The space is a much-modified 1750 house that preserves something of the low ceilings and small rooms, even though the entire second-floor attic has lost its walls. There is stenciling on the first floor, and painted stripes like a sail loft on the second floor, and even a gas fire on cool evenings. The red-maple tables are period-evoking without cramping the knees, which perhaps best describes the whole effort. I preferred the fado singing on an early visit to the symphonic Hollywood I heard this month. But if they wanted to bring the Martin House to Boston year-round, they could play all disco and the food would still be splendid.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.
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