This is an odd restaurant with an odd name. The hotel owners have carefully rejected the timeless qualities for which the old Ritz-Carlton dining room was treasured — service, atmosphere, and décor — and bet the franchise on a highly fashionable version of Pacific Rim fusion food. What’s odd is that they have succeeded with many dishes, yet it’s hard to see how future generations will come back for a raspberry-macaroon dessert presented like a porcupine full of chocolate quills. It may be cool now, but in a year it might be so five-minutes-ago. It's a good plan to forge a new-new-new identity for the restaurant at the Boston Common Ritz to distinguish it from the old Ritz-Carlton’s dining room, which will reopen. With another Jer-ne in California, it's clear that the Ritz-Carlton intends to make the new concept its new signature. They’re serious about this.
They probably paid a lot of money for the name, too. It’s how the dictionary does the phonetic spelling of " journey " : a 180-degree-rotation on the small e gives you a schwa, the symbol for that bland short-e/short-u sound that foreigners have to practice for years to get. Neither the schwa nor the mid-height dot between the syllables are on common typesetting fonts, so basically only magazines put out by dictionary companies are going to be able to print the name of this restaurant correctly. When you do figure it out (I had to ask), you have " journey " — another signal that this restaurant is not primarily aimed at Bostonians.
Assuming you can explain to the cab driver where you want to go, what will you find? Jer-ne has expensive, successful, Asian-ized food with a great, heavily marked-up wine list. The cuisine is strongest on appetizers and desserts, a little shaky in the middle, and generally more posh and less authoritative than Limbo or Blue Ginger. The décor is remarkably bland and ineffective. There are some sly culinary references to the old Ritz, but you should probably leave that comparison at the airport. (If you live here, you might go to the airport first, to get into the right frame of mind.)
Food starts with a breadbasket of pappadums and freshly grilled flat bread, and ramekins of sweet butter and chutney — as though we will have one foot in tradition and another in fusion all night. A tray of lime and lemon sections, though, is a wonderful idea in any cuisine. There’s a sweet-corn-and-lemongrass chowder ($7), which tastes mostly of cream, glorious cream, with a very light breeze of lemongrass in the background and a little fish. But the dinner bento box ($15) is mostly fusion: two sea scallops in a Malaysian-style red curry; a seaweed salad; a piece of soy-braised scrod; a salad of shredded daikon and carrot, with sesame seeds and mango chunks; two slices of a nice pork pâté (with a tamarind sauce), and salad based on a very smoky salmon. The cake-walk sampler ($14) leans back to Euro-luxe, offering three round canapés: a slice of duck liver on puff pastry, a savory crab cake, and salmon soufflé wrapped in nori to look but not taste like maki sushi.
The caesar salad ($12) is a kind of chef’s joke. It comes in what looks like a free-form tortilla shell, as though the company had brought in the German chef, Jorg Behrend, via two Asian Ritz-Carltons just to upscale a few menu items from Chi-Chi’s. Ha! The shell is a cheesy tuille that tastes like the old crouton plus the old grated cheese, and the salad is inside, with a nice white anchovy on top. The salad of greens features a pretty layout of three cheese canapés next to three halves of cherry tomato (with vinegar for flavor). Chicken skewers ($12) with peanuts bring another pretty salad, but the skewers are unseasoned and the peanut sauce is mostly peanuts.
Main dishes are built around two visible appliances: a tandoori oven and a large steamer. The oven is clearly the tricky one, judging by a roasted sea bass ($28) that was cooked to just the right degree of doneness with a bright-red coating, but which still had little distinctive flavor. The mounting of eight fine asparagus spears saved the plate. That brings us to the steamer, which hosts its own seasonal-price lobster or shrimp platter. This is serious competition for the spa food at the Four Seasons, as the lobster comes out marvelously plump and delicious, with the claw meat laid on top of the split bodies. It also includes the best garnish on the table: " aromatic rice " with a little fruit mixed in, the aroma coming mostly from a very subtle accent of star anise. There’s also a bamboo steamer of shredded vegetables.
On the other hand, when Behrend boots one, it really collapses. You would think that " seared pepper tuna with bean sprout caper pancake carrot cardamom reduction " ($29) would have more flavor than commas, but the tuna was overdone, and all the other nouns turned out to be sweet, red, eggy stuff like the omelets on the sashimi platters at Japanese restaurants. Who knew that cardamom plus capers plus carrot equals zero? At lunch, a lobster wrap ($14) implodes seaweed and pineapple into another flavor black hole, entirely blotting out the lobster meat unless you pick it out of the wrap. Sake-braised scrod ($23) attempts to remake a Ritz classic, but the overly salty and peppery dark sauce just murders the underlying vegetables. Crusted beef tenderloin ($29) is good beef, in a sauce with good mushrooms. But that’s not a lot, and if you don’t lust for steamed seafood, you might skip entrées and save room for the desserts.
On the other hand, you shouldn’t skip the wine list, even through it starts in the $30 range, doesn’t really get moving until $50, and really gets comfortable around $70 or $80. We economized with the 1999 Sipp Mach gewürztraminer ($32), and it was a surprisingly sweet and aromatic wine, ideal for the food all the way through dessert. We sprang for the 1999 Casa Larostere " cuvee Alexandre " ($39), the most expensive Chilean merlot I’ve ever seen, but it too was truly excellent, with a distinctive nose of raspberries and violets. Tea is served correctly in Japanese iron pots, and the winged espresso cups are very, very nice.
Now we turn to the desserts, each served with a different scoop of ice cream or sorbet. Certainly the prettiest is white-chocolate mousse with raspberry sorbet ($8.50), tied with the Boston cream pie at lunch, which is arranged in a solid tower of mousse and cake. The warm chocolate five-spice triangles ($9.50) include two of each wrapped in filo dough, making them a little dry and powdery, like upscale hamentaschen, but with cardamom ice cream.
My favorite was the macadamia-nut financière ($9.50), which is actually a poached pear in a shell of ground nuts, with a bit of almond brittle and vanilla ice cream — kind of a sly restatement of pêche à la Ritz (a forgettable peach over vanilla ice cream in a chocolate cup mounted on marzipan) from the old place. The chocolate-coconut-frangipane purse ($9.50) is busy, but more chocolaty than the triangles, with better pastry and really neat peppermint ice cream. Raspberry macaroon ($8.50) is in the aforementioned porcupine shape, strongly accented with the licorice flavor of " star-anise mousseline " and a distinctive grapefruit sorbet. Tropical-fruit wontons ($9.50) are mostly pineapple, with a " green tea sorbet " that (perhaps fortunately) is more like pear.
Service, while not up to the old standards, is good and plentiful — not effusive, but there are touches like a staffer’s offering to guide us to the bathrooms. The general set-up is better than at many new restaurants in that tables are well spaced, and there are some sound-absorbing carpets and silk curtains. The real problem is the space — a long, windowed lobby that looks out at other buildings. This would be bad enough if we didn’t remember the old Ritz-Carlton dining room and its view over the Public Garden. The semi-open kitchen is the modern way, but it casts flares of light and shadows, and clangs noise. Expensive food ought to be more remote.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com.
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