" Zon " was the father of co-owner Frank Zontini, who also co-owns Pluto, the two kewl gift-and-card shops in Jamaica Plain and Somerville. Although the restaurant is decorated in gothic red and black, it isn’t otherwise dark or edgy at all. Instead, the menu is bipolar, with some very wonderful bistro entrées and some very plain comfort food, both inexpensive, versus a rather good but kinda pricey wine list. In all, Zon’s may commit a lot of small errors, but somehow they don’t add up to problems because the food prices are so good.
For example, the bread is good: dense white slices, apparently cut from a round loaf. One evening we didn’t get bread until we asked for it, and both times it came plain on a plate. One night it had an intriguing aftertaste of bacon. It might have been baked that way, but more likely it had been cut with the wrong knife.
There was also a hint of bacon in the " cabernet vinaigrette " dressing served over a house salad ($5). That was a pleasant foil to the sweet dressing, but it was undercut by the use of sea salt in the salad, which was both too granular and too bitter. Beyond that, it was a generous salad of Boston lettuce, slices of yellow and orange tomato, and seeded cucumbers — at a time when salad ingredients had almost doubled in price.
" Chips & dip " ($5) is a plate of hand-fried potato chips (thicker and greasier than the Cape Cod brand), served with a classic ’50s California onion dip. This is retro without nostalgia, and the dip really does wonderful things for those chips. Artichoke dip ($8) is pure bistro, a nice-size artichoke to pull apart, with a lively sauce of chopped artichoke hearts and something tart like apples to dip in it. On our visits, soups of the day ($4) included a potato-onion with duck stock (that tasted mostly like salt, pepper, and cream) and a beet-ginger (which was too thin and hot with the ginger).
The most successful entrée was a " today’s catch " of broiled tilefish ($16). Tilefish is a delicious species too little known, but the star of this platter was the delicious combination of morel mushrooms, fiddleheads, sugar snap peas, asparagus, and yellow beet — an amazingly lavish pile of premature spring vegetables, in a sauce well flavored by the excellent morels. This skillful use of exotic produce is influenced more by Jamaica Plain’s lamented Five Seasons than by the previous occupant of this space, the Black Crow Caffe.
The rib-eye steak ($14) is a best buy, an impressively large boneless entrecôte done rare to order, although the oven-roasted potatoes served with it are overdone. The steak unfairly overshadows the excellent meat loaf ($12), a more modest football of lean chopped sirloin topped with bacon and served with a mushroom sauce and mashed potatoes cleverly highlighted with a little horseradish. Roasted chicken ($13) was a little dried out, but came with another excellent sauce, a nice side order of string beans, and potatoes with a little hazelnut mashed in. The lobster gnocchi ($17) are close to perfect. The meat from half a lobster is out of the shell, and ours was slightly underdone — the right direction of error. The gnocchi are quite light and delectable, set in a Newburg-like sauce and served with snap peas, whose tendrils make for an edible garnish.
On the comfort side, " mac & cheese " ($12) is a big crock of the stuff, made of small elbow macaroni draped with four strips of aged cheese. It’s clearly not a best buy, but not really wrong in any of its aspects. Burgers ($8–$10) are nicely presented on a rich brioche roll. The " herbivore " ($10) was based on fluffing up ground portobello mushroom, probably the best path to a vegetarian burger. Among the possible toppings, it’s hard to pass by the large portion of stir-fried vegetables — sugar snaps, green beans, and strips of red bell pepper in hoisin sauce. The sautéed onions are good, and the tomato " rat tat tooie " is a good non-seasonal version of stewed tomatoes. You can probably wheedle extra toppings at $1 each. But you get a lot of good, thick-cut French fries in any case.
The wine list is quite good, but not cheap. (The cheap red, 1999 Hacienda pinot noir — $5 glass/$18 bottle — I found thin and hot with alcohol.) But the 1999 Montes Estate merlot from Chile ($7/$28) has plenty of acidity and fruit and a lingering flavor. Even better is a 1998 Tatachila " Wattle Park " shiraz ($7/$28), tannic and dark as you expect from Australian shiraz, but loaded with intense fruit. Sure to be popular is " Zon’s brew " ($4), a 16-ounce draught of sweetened ale that goes down well with the food. The sodas come in eight-ounce old-fashioned glass bottles. The cappuccino ($4) is fine, but the decaf coffee ($1.50) is very thin, an unfortunate contrast to the old Black Crow, where the coffee held up the spoon all by itself. Tea ($1.50) offers a fun selection of bags, but ours came in a mug of tepid water. Getting the bags into the water was a good idea, but the water has to be hot. Making matters worse, it’s served without a saucer to clap on top to hold in the remaining heat.
There is one great dessert, the chocolate " cup cake " ($7). It’s served in a mug and looks like a mug of chocolate syrup. It tastes even better, as you mine through layers of chocolate cake, creamy filling, and more syrup. The cheese plate ($8) on our night featured a three-ounce wedge of nicely overripe double cream cheese and a Granny Smith apple. No bread, but a request for some settled that.
On the other hand, an ice-cream trio of vanilla, pistachio, and black pepper was all waxy and granular, as though ice milk without sugar had been frozen too rapidly. I actually had high hopes for black-pepper ice cream, as the white-pepper ice cream at Vong in New York is brilliant. These ice creams are served as small scoops with cones for hats, alongside heaps of jimmies and pistachios. The idea was to have fun with it, but it would be more fun with better ice cream. A free-form apple tart has good apples and a great blueberry sauce underneath, but the crust is bland and underbaked.
The room is a small L-shape, and it gets very, very loud when full. The music (good country on quieter nights) adds to a noise level that is actually unpleasant at times. Service is pretty good, though: even when packed, it’s a small enough place that the servers don’t lose anyone.
Zon’s plans to open for weekday lunches and Sunday brunch; it will be interesting to see how it works for lunch and what gets taken from the dinner menu. There is a small bar, and it also has potential as a wine bar. But the already sizeable crowds want food, and Zon’s serves some of the best at the best prices since the early Delux Café.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com
