The Boston Phoenix
March 2 - 9, 2000

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The Aquarium

Tanks for the memories

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT
The Aquarium
65 Holland Street (Davis Square), Somerville
(617) 623-3200
Kitchen open 11 a.m.-11 p.m.; dinner served 5-9:30 p.m.
AE, MC, Visa
Full bar
Smoking at bar
Sidewalk-level access
You can't order live fish at the Aquarium -- the tanks that ring the room are merely decoration -- but that's pretty much the only thing you can't do at this Davis Square restaurant/bar/club/playpen. There's a sign by the door that says SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, and the owners aren't kidding. This may not be the best restaurant in Somerville, but it is certainly trying to be the most things to the most people.

There is a stage in the back of the room littered with colorful plastic children's toys; every weekday from 10 a.m. onward it serves as a children's play area. There's a three-hour pause for lunch, then it's playtime again, then (adult) dinner runs from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Some nights a projection TV screen descends and the Aquarium becomes a sports bar till closing time. Some nights there's a DJ; some nights there's a band and the neighbors complain.

Plus, I mean, it's an aquarium.

In some ways, you sense that this is a solution to a permanently awkward space: 65 Holland Street is not quite cavernous like a rock club, not quite intimate like a restaurant. You walk through the front doors, past a little rocking wooden dinghy, into a room decorated in blue and gray, with big vividly lit fish tanks, a number of TV sets, and a lot of bar seating. The menu looks promising, and if you're there for dinner, you're shown to a table with white butcher paper over a tablecloth. Your water comes in a cobalt-blue pint glass that matches the light fixtures.

So far so good, but it's also pretty clear that you're eating in the part of the Aquarium that will become the dance floor in a couple of hours. (One clue: there are amp stacks next to you. Another clue: there are huge guys hovering around in black shirts that say STAFF.) Still, when I first ate at the Aquarium I was favorably surprised by the food. The bread plate was a pile of focaccia buns doused in a very fresh basil purée (they call it pesto, but it doesn't have the pine nuts or the saltiness). In my appetizer there were only two scallops for $7.95, but they were expertly done, seared golden on top, tender but not too soft on the inside. Beneath them, a bed of braised bok choy had a lot of flavor. And the lobster ravioli ($13.95) was dead-on: eight ravioli overstuffed with fresh lobster meat, in a tomato-cream sauce that had a pretty ideal blend of richness and tart chunky tomato. Service was calm, attentive, and quick.

The next night I brought a few friends, and the restaurant was much busier. Again the service was good, but suddenly the kitchen wasn't hitting any of the high notes. The bread plate was the same, with that grassy fresh-basil taste. But an appetizer of "panko shrimp" -- spicy crusted fried shrimp ($7.95) -- had a dense, crunchy coating almost exactly like what you'd get in a box of frozen supermarket shrimp. Shrimp-zucchini fritters ($6.95) weren't notably more exciting.

Seafood chowder ($5.95) is one of those things that a restaurant called Aquarium has a moral responsibility to knock out of the park. Was it a bad soup? Not at all, but it was the sort of thing you could find in any number of trendy bars, kind of an all-purpose multicolored shrimp-and-corn-and-cracked-pepper affair without a strong seafood taste.

My favorite dinner plate was from the "all day" menu, not the dinner menu: a lobster-salad sandwich ($10.95). The waitress called it a "lobster roll," but it's not exactly your standard lobster-shack arrangement. Instead of a hot-dog bun (or the baguette mentioned on the menu), the lobster came between thick slices of white bread, the kind you might use for French toast. It was a nice chunky salad of real lobster (a lot of lobster shacks use mostly crayfish) mixed with celery bits and a little mayo, garnished with baby greens. Half the plate was taken up with a big stack of floppy skin-on fries.

Despite the name, the Aquarium isn't totally seafood-oriented, and this may be a good thing; we ordered both grilled-fish dishes on the menu, and neither was memorable. Chilean sea bass ($15.95) was a white fillet, hatched with grill marks, soaking up a saffron-colored broth alongside some potato slices and leek rings. (I happen not to understand why chefs like serving entrées in broth, but plenty of people seem to think it's fine.) Its flaw was more a matter of blandness than infelicity; my friend described this species as "the tofu of fish" for its neutral ability to soak up flavors, but you need stronger flavors than these to make it sing. The real misfire, though, was a long squared-off fillet of salmon ($15.95) that had been overgrilled on the top but left quite uncooked in the middle. It came with some tasty orzo and lightly braised mustard greens, but nice side dishes don't help if someone was napping at the grill station.

There's a wine list at the Aquarium, but we didn't investigate it too deeply; there are about 15 beers on tap. The handful of desserts (all $4.95) are mainly of the brownie-with-ice-cream variety. I ordered a sorbet trio, which was good, though inexplicably sprinkled with crunchy chunks of biscotti. A special cognac-and-chestnut bread pudding was a sort of spongy brick covered in whipped cream.

Until last Thursday night I had been thinking of the Aquarium as mainly a restaurant: atmosphere a little strange, but food not bad for Somerville. Then I stopped by at 10:30 on a Thursday night for a last look at the menu and I realized I had the place wrong. It is not a twentysomething bar faking the gestures of an upscale family restaurant; it is a late-night college bar with a playpen and a better-than-average kitchen. The huge STAFF shirts were managing the line by the door; dinner was over, and the late-20s-and-up dinner crowd long gone. The place was packed, and as I walked by, a tour bus disgorged a fresh pack of Tufts kids who marched dutifully into the line.

Something for everyone, indeed. Now they just need a Sunday bingo game.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.


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