Scanning the bar of the moment

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Barcode 955 Boylston Street (Back Bay), Boston (617) 421-1818 Open daily, 11:30 a.m.-1 a.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Smoking at bar Bar (with some dinner tables) up a small step from street level; dining room down a flight of stairs

Yes, that's the name, but you're supposed to call it Barcode. That's how it is with fashionable restaurants: try taking a date to UPC Symbol and see how far you get. As you might guess, this is a bit of a concept restaurant, and very thoroughly done. The phone number is incorporated into the logo. Notice the little "Q" in the corner of the design? Barcode is the first non-brewpub venture from Joe Quattrocchi, the owner of Commonwealth Brewery and the Back Bay Brewing Company.

Most people probably still think of the space as Division 16, a big bar that attracted a beer-drinking clientele and served them 16th-rate food. Under the new ownership and after a very serious redesign, no one would recognize it as the same place: now it's a British Colonial-themed room with rattan on the pillars and ginger on the pork chops.

Barcode is the latest manifestation of a local trend toward theme restaurants with a vaguely international flavor (Bomboa, Masa, Pravda 116), and it is also the Place To Be right this second -- or at least its front bar is the place to be, full of your more-stylish Back Bay businessmen, the ones in trim three-button suits and snappy loafers. Like a lot of Places To Be, it is also prodigiously loud: the hardwood floor, the half-acre mirror behind the bar, and an uninsulated ceiling create an echo chamber that amplifies every power conversation going on in the place.

If you are not here to shout down a bunch of people with better haircuts than you, what you really want is a table. Barcode's dining room is down a few steps, carpeted (thank goodness), and surrounded by mahogany-framed windows and mirrors. The brick walls are done in a fashionable cream-and-chocolate color scheme. The square tabletops, blond oak rimmed with mahogany, can barely fit all the wine glasses and silverware they're laid with. Looming over your shoulder is the biggest potted palm you've ever seen outside a conservatory. The waitress takes your coats. Overhead, palm fans turn very slowly.

Barcode's kitchen talent was imported wholesale from Salamander, which for five years has been a temple to haute fusion food. Ingredients from the Asian world appear here in marinades, spice rubs, and sauces; there are a couple of overtly Asian dishes, like the maki roll. But despite the atmospherics, the lineage, and the general claim to be a French-Asian fusion restaurant, this isn't Salamander: some of the dishes aren't fused with anything at all. Roasted endive salad ($10), for instance, is built around the rich, almost artichokey taste and texture of two split roasted endive heads. Short ribs ($9) melt enticingly around the bone and sit in a spicy-but-not-too-hot tomato sauce. The tuna carpaccio ($11), which is a bit fusiony, is also impressively similar to real carpaccio: paper-thin, with a pepper crust and wasabi mayonnaise drizzled in a Z.

Just about every appetizer worked. The most obviously Asian dish was a smoked-salmon roll ($9) -- slightly reinterpreted maki, fish rolled into seaweed with slices of red and yellow bell pepper for color and crunch, nested in nice sweet vinegared rice. And "sugarcane skewered beef" ($9) was two generous chunks of soft, slightly fatty meat (not a bad thing; fatty beef is more flavorful) marinated in a sweet-hot marinade and served on splinters of sugar cane, like satay.

The entrées were bigger and somehow plainer: basically fancy bar-and-grill food, though some of the plainness may have been because we were still eating from the winter menu. A plate of tamarind roast chicken ($17) was quite large (there's still a big chunk in my fridge), served with mashed celeriac and a toothsome tangle of fried carrot strips spiced with cinnamon. Steak au poivre was nice, if expensive at $24: two large pieces of tender beef cooked just as we asked, medium-rare, with a huge pile of excellent frites and a dark onion jam.

The only vegetarian entrée was the least impressive: squash potstickers ($15), basically a kind of ravioli with oilier skin. Maybe the most memorable thing I tried was the ginger-brined pork chop ($19) -- again, the ginger didn't stick out, but the double-thick pork chop was wonderful, very tender and, like most of the dishes (and the clientele), eminently attractive.

Two of three desserts were total knockouts. The non-knockout, pineapple upside-down cake ($7), was merely pretty good. Our waitress said the chocolate soufflé ($7) was the best dessert she's ever had: a classic chocolate overdose in a ramekin, gooey in the middle, with a pitcher of thick fudge to pour over it. A lemon-berry napoleon ($7) was one of the best desserts I've ever had. Three airy triangles of thin, crisp dough were stacked like the wings of a triplane, with tart lemon mousse to hold them together and berries and cream to decorate the plate.

Unlike a lot of new restaurants, Barcode has genuinely smooth and helpful service. It's a busy place, but our servers on two different nights knew the menu, handled the wine well, and were able to answer detailed questions about ingredients. (What are these little curls? Fried carrots. What is ponzu? Here, a mixture of soy sauce and wasabi, with a little rice wine.)

It's nice to eat at a high-concept restaurant where not much costs more than $20 and everyone knows what they're doing. Normally the Place To Be has a higher buy-in price and a lot more attitude. As we were finishing our meal, a man in a black windbreaker sat down at the table next to ours. He put down a StarTac phone, and I recognized him by his unmistakable profile and his larger-than-life smirk: Todd English. I was with someone -- my mom, actually -- who had just eaten in one of English's restaurants and had been appalled by the service. She took the opportunity to tell him about it. I understand he was conciliatory.

Meanwhile, I was asking our waitress whether she was assigned to The Todd's table, and she said -- whether with relief or jealousy I couldn't tell -- that she wasn't. A shame. The Todd could have done worse than to watch her work, and make her a job offer on the spot.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@phx.com.

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