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Mucho Gusto Café

A cool little Cuban place with both the kitsch and the kitchen to make up for the lack of . . . lard?

1124 Boylston Street (Fenway) Boston; 236-1020
Open daily for lunch, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.;
dinner served Thurs - Sat till 10 p.m.
No credit cards
Beer and wine
Sidewalk-level access.

By Robert Nadeau

I like to joke that I am the last communist, not only because of my lingering dream of a society more gallant toward pregnant teenagers, but also because two of my very favorite things are Szechuan food and Afro-Cuban music. Of course it has to be said that the most conservative side of communism is what has so fostered these two wonderful arts. Indeed, most great eating comes from a deeply conservative enterprise -- recapturing the flavors of childhood. Gourmandise is culture-bound, backward, nationalistic, chauvanistic -- and when it doesn't lust for the delicacies of the palace, it embraces the most reactionary attitudes of the peasantry. There is a progressive side to great eating, but you have to plow through a lot of Pringles and Pop-Tarts to get to something good, like genetically sweetened corn.

So while Miami salsa music is bland by comparison to Castro's songo, Cuban-American food can be terrific. For the traditional stuff, it's worth a field trip to El Oriental de Cuba, in Jamaica Plain. Mucho Gusto, on the hip block among the various buildings of Berklee College, features a charming blend of modernized Cuban food, unaccented bilingualism, old mambo records, and barely collectible kitsch of the I Love Lucy school of Cubanismo. The latter verges on camp -- pottery figures of black folks with head scarves and conga drums -- but also partakes of a more genuine affection for the culture of the '50s.

What holds it all together is the personal warmth and involvement of the co-owner, Oswaldo/Ozzie, who greets every patron and jumps into every little service gap that might arise in a new restaurant.

Although Mucho Gusto isn't a "great restaurant," it's more fun than a lot of great restaurants, and it has a couple of great dishes. One is a little marinated-eggplant salad currently only available at dinner. Another is french-fried onions, a dish that seldom has much flavor beyond the grease and salt.

On the Cuban classics, Mucho Gusto wins everywhere you don't need lard. Their black-bean soup ($2.50, $3) is unconventionally puréed but classically spiced, with cumin and garlic to lighten up the beans. It's filling and warming without being a guilty pleasure. The Cuban sandwich ($4.50 at lunch, $7.50 at dinner) is slices of ham and roast pork (probably lean fresh ham) in a grilled sandwich with mustard and cheese. The evening version brings a double handful of very good french fries, and the superlative onion strings -- unbreaded, with just enough crispy parts, onion flavor balancing the ecstasies of oil and salt.

The problem of too little lard surfaces in the rice and beans ($3, $5, and a side dish on dinner entrées). The rice of one early evening was already a little hardened; the beans were soupy enough to moisten it, but lacked sabor. You can make tasty Caribbean beans without much fat, by frying a lot of aromatics in a very little canola oil for the initial sofrito, but you can't simply toss the lard can and get the real beans. Another approach, more Mexican than Cuban, is to reach for the "House Recipe" hot sauce bottle. It's quite fiery -- start with a couple drops and stir them in well.

I dunno, Maud. These restaurant snobs are getting weirder every year. This one says a place needs to use more lard. And if they don't get the lard in, he says to put hot sauce on it.Next thing he's going back to overcooked vegetables with gloopy gravy on top, you mark my words.

Ropa vieja ($19 with soup, salad, and dessert) is likewise a somewhat sanitized version of the classic beef stew cooked until the meat falls to shreds. It was devised as a means of tenderizing lean, stringy beef; the name "old clothes" refers to the way stiff, homespun clothing likewise had to be tenderized. So lard restored some moisture, and aromatics restored some flavor. I'm suggesting a treatment more like what I suspect goes into the accompanying soup, ajiaco. This vegetarian soup-stew depends on a variety of starches (potato, corn on the cob, plantain, malanga) to thicken an aromatic broth to about the level of New England pea soup. A bowl of this would make an excellent lunch for a big, hungry vegetarian.

And though lard also adds flavor to deep-fried foods, we've mostly become accustomed to the cleaner taste imparted by lighter frying oils. This pays off for Mucho Gusto, which has a long list of fried delights. We attacked broadside the house sampler ($7, $12), of which the smaller will appetize about four people. It included the french fries of yucca root ($3); thin "potato chips" of malanga ($3); slices of the Caribbean-style unfilled tamale ($5); tostones ($3), flattened diskes of twice-fried green plantain; and maduros ($3), which are once-fried sweet-ripe plantains. These fries, especially the yucca and malanga numbers, were as fresh and as dry-fried and as naturally flavored as I have ever had them.

The larger sampler gets you into the non-vegetarian fried items, such as the sweet plantain balls stuffed with hamburger ($5). Or the superlative croquetas ($7) of puréed ham and cheese, or the empanadas ($5), turnovers of savory dough filled with sautéed minced beef.

A modest list of beers and wines makes this a true café, but don't forget the coffee part. Café con leche ($1.50) is served like a Starbucks macchiato, with espresso coffee underneath a blanket of steamed milk. The roasted flavor of the milk complements the coffee, and I never mind the compulsory sugar. You can linger over dense almond cookies, macaroons, rice pudding (mine kinda chewy), pound cake moistened with syrup, guava pastele (guava jam between layers of shortbread-like cake) -- you get the idea. These desserts, all between $1 and $2, aren't worth crossing the street for, but since you're already sitting in Mucho Gusto, pleasantly full of yucca fries, sipping on strong coffee, they are delightful and a cheap way to enjoy another 10 or 15 minutes of the fantasy.

A word about the music. Two words, actually. Mambo Kings. Even when the track is a street rumba or a soupy bolero, it evokes Havana of the '50s. The décor evokes Americans who might have visited Havana in the 50s. Salud!

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