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Neptune Oyster
A world of deep-sea flavor
BY ROBERT NADEAU
Neptune Oyster
617.742.3474
63 Salem Street, Boston
Open Sun–Wed, 11:30 a.m.–11 p.m., and Thu–Sat, 11:30 a.m.–midnight
AE, MC, Vi
Beer and wine
No valet parking
Access up two steps and a threshold bump

Some critics judge a restaurant by the quality of its butter sauces or how hot the soup is by the time it gets to the table. For me, one of the great challenges has been to find a place that can get both good fried seafood and decent French fries out of the same kitchen. I can think of fewer than five restaurants over the years that have passed this test, even fewer than the number that have successfully juggled spareribs and chocolate.

Neptune Oyster, among several other virtues, can fry anything, whether it comes from under the sea or under the ground.

Let’s start with oysters, of which Neptune stocks a dozen kinds. Due to red tide, Wellfleets from Cape Cod are out, but that still leaves a variety of sweet Canadian oysters; bivalves from still-unaffected Maine and Connecticut fisheries; and deep-dish Kumamotos from Japan. We had a half-dozen Cape Bretons ($1.90/each), fresh and sweet on ice with optional bits of horseradish, cocktail sauce, and a mignonette-pepper dressing. I slurped happily. Fried oysters ($12) are splendid, although my samples came as garnish on a fish-based special. (The chef here worked for a while at Olives, and has a mild leaning toward vertical food.)

About fried clams (market price, recently $17), I am entirely clear. These are among the best fried clams I have ever had, and my witness is a guest who grew up in Maine. They are a fine heap of belly clams, each with a crisp and meltingly delicious shell of light batter. The dish comes with a kind of tartar sauce, but I wouldn’t have touched it if I weren’t being paid to report everything. In fact, I might have changed all the other dinner orders to fried clams, absent considerations of employment.

That’s not to say that an appetizer of tuna ribbons ($12) was less than brilliant in its own way. Raw or barely seared tuna has been done to death in Boston restaurants in recent years, but this treatment, while simple, was novel and terrific. What if you had never heard of sushi or sashimi, but you knew that raw tuna strips were edible? Well, if you were making Italian food, you might put them in a little salad with crisp green beans, cracked olives, watercress, and capers. If this had happened here 25 years ago, with a little promotion, there would be "crudo" bars all over the region, some run by Italians, some by Greek-Americans, and probably lots under Korean-American ownership.

Sea-urchin ditalini ($14) are another try at making Italian food out of sushi material, but a less impressive one. I mean, no platter of perfectly cooked pasta tubes with a sauce of butter, bacon, and seafood is going to be a disappointment. But sea urchin (actually sea-urchin roe) is delicate stuff, with a delicate flavor, and you have to gather a few morsels by themselves to realize that they’re there.

Among the entrées, you won’t go wrong with red snapper ($23), an outstanding fillet on a bed of mashed potatoes so buttery it will remind you of France, if the butter sauce with pitted green olives on top hasn’t already got you humming old Piaf and Chevalier numbers. Fish was also the best part of "North End cioppino" ($20.50). All the seafood in the cioppino was impressive, including a heap of plump mussels, two clams, and a pair of giant, shell-on shrimp (so you could suck the fat out of the heads as the Cajuns do). But there were several kinds of fish — a rich pink fillet like wild salmon or Arctic char, and a thinner, darker fillet such as swordfish. The broth itself was surprisingly peppery, like gumbo, but the scoop of rice (typical for gumbo) is flavored with saffron, like the broth of bouillabaisse. Neither pepper nor saffron is typical of California cioppino, but you’ve been warned, so enjoy the fish.

For something exotic, the skate wing Véronique ($22.50) is also fried. Well, our three lobes of filleted seafood were probably sautéed à la meunière. Skate, despite looking weird and being related to shark, is just plain tasty seafood, even when somewhat oversalted, as here; the grapes cut the salt.

Or you could just have a lobster roll ($19). This comes two ways: cold with mayonnaise, as we know it, and warm with butter. Naturally we tried the latter, and it was fine lobster meat in the perfect roll — soft and gooey as the cheap hot-dog rolls of our youth, but with a little glazed crust, like real bread. All it needed was to be cold with mayonnaise, and it would have been perfect. It also brought the crucial French fries, and they were very good. They weren’t perfect, but they were close enough to set or tie the fish-house record for fries.

Even though this is a much more serious restaurant than the average oyster or clam bar, diners face the same problem of remembering to order vegetables. The tuna ribbons will get you some roughage; otherwise, don’t pass over the salad menu. There also aren’t any desserts, but this is not unusual in the North End.

Neptune Oyster offers wine and beer, and both are very good. A Guinness ($5.75) was drawn slowly and carefully, and served correctly — almost warm. A 2003 Feudi di San Gregorio falanghina ($10/glass) was my first taste of this ancient white grape, and it was impressively tart for a Southern Italian wine — about as acidic as the Sancerre or muscadet often recommended for seafood. A Duckhorn merlot ($8) from California was better than most St. Emilions, if you are just drinking red, or perhaps ordering the token steak or chicken dish.

Service at Neptune is quite good, given that it is hard for anyone to move in a small room packed with tables and bar seats. The servers manage to convey relaxation, so dinner doesn’t seem rushed — a difficult trick in a crowded place with some buzz. In fact, arriving early without reservations on two visits, we always found the room pleasant and welcoming. The décor ought to be loud — octagon tile floor, white tile and mirrors on the walls, tin ceilings, marble tops on tables and the long bar — but there isn’t enough room for the noise to reverberate much. In the window are oysters on ice. Inside is a world of flavor.

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


Issue Date: July 1 - 7, 2005
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