Savoy

A clubby Leather District restaurant that's not too hip to pay attention to the food

by Stephen Heuser

174 Lincoln Street, (Leather District), Boston; 451-7289
Open for lunch Mon - Fri, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.,
and for dinner Tues - Sat, 5:30 to 11 p.m.
All major credit cards
Full bar
Ramp access through side door

It's not always easy to take the measure of a restaurant in a couple of visits. I've eaten at Savoy twice and run through almost everything on the menu, but I still feel obligated to qualify my judgments: one of my visits was during Tuesday-night "Cigar Club," and once, just before a holiday weekend, mine was the only party eating dinner.

That said, Savoy is a disarmingly good restaurant, and a good value to boot. Its personality is so hip and clubby that one doesn't expect much from the kitchen, but here the only problem we ran into wasn't offhanded preparation or snippy servers, but air clouded with blue smoke. My advice: watch out for Tuesdays, or come equipped with your own double coronas.

Savoy is in the Leather District, an arty neighborhood near South Station whose revival I support wholeheartedly as long as I don't have to park there. (Try the $5 parking lot near the corner of South and Tufts Streets). The place is almost hidden, with scant street frontage and an unobtrusive sign, but you know you're dealing with downtown cool as soon as you enter, because in the foyer a collection of armchairs huddles around a coffee table under a big oil painting of the same armchairs. Pertty sly, huh?

From its tight little entryway, the restaurant opens back into a long, dusky U-shaped space, with two bars and a series of tables set up along a banquette. The walls alternate exposed brick with textured plaster, the floor is done in harlequin diamonds of black and maroon, and the ceiling is a matte-black tangle of pipes and wires. Despite all the cute tokens of '97 cool -- the breezy Moët posters, the cigar nights, the Cosmopolitans -- Savoy manages to be entirely serious about its food. This is apparent from the breadbasket, which holds white and wheat sourdough rolls with impeccably tangy flavor and golden, tear-it-apart crust.

After the bread, the first item on the menu struck me as sort of unpromising. I was wrong. Seafood strudel ($7) was a savory take on what's traditionally a sweet dish; it used hot seafood stew -- scallops and baby shrimp and crabmeat -- to fill a cylinder of flaky phyllo. The pastry was sliced diagonally in two, with one half lying across the plate in a rust-colored tomato-cream sauce, and the other standing smartly at attention. The delicate seafood flavors came through remarkably well, and the presentation was elegant without fussiness.

We were almost as pleased with the wild-arugula salad ($5), in which broad greens were topped with a very light oil dressing and a single large crouton, constructed by crowning the lower half of a dinner roll with a pillbox hat of goat cheese rolled in crushed pistachios. The nuts added a sweet counterpoint to the peppery spice of the greens.

None of the appetizers fell far short of that mark, except perhaps a special of chilled watercress soup that had the fresh, grassy color of vichyssoise but very little taste of watercress. The pizza appetizer ($7) changes from night to night; ours was a round of crisp flatbread topped with mozzarella, dandelion greens (which have a spare, spinachy taste when cooked), shreds of thick bacon, and sections of peeled orange.

On our second visit to Savoy, when we were the only party ordering dinner, we encountered service so considerate it seemed possible that the host suspected there was a review under way. Courses came out with exact timing; water was refilled punctually. (On cigar night, when the restaurant had been quite a bit busier, the service was capable, but our entrees arrived so long after the appetizers that a friend remarked on how pleasingly un-American the length of our meal was. Other Americans might be less amused.)

On both nights, we moved through a series of entrees that demonstrated the same eclectic Contintentality as the appetizers. A pork tenderloin was hollowed out in the middle, stuffed with figs, and sliced into medallions that were arranged in a row like dominoes -- quite a package for $13. The outside of the meat had been rubbed with aromatic toasted cumin seeds that were just a bit strong for the flavors of pork and fruit, but overall the plate was a keeper. It also included an earthy salad of jerusalem artichoke and chopped thick bacon, and a long, quartered baby leek.

We weren't quite as taken with the seared tuna ($14), served with a gingery salad of leek and julienned carrot. The steak was a bit thinner and more browned-through than good tuna deserves; it also arrived almost cold. A plate of salmon served in an open banana leaf ($13) was also cooked to a firmer pink than one might expect in a modern kitchen; it's possible that we'd encountered a timing glitch with the dishes, resulting in fresh-out-of-the-oven pork but warmed-over fish dishes.

More satisfying was a skirt steak ($14), cooked and sliced to display an attractively rare and juicy interior. The meat came with a red-wine reduction sauce that blended sweetly with the charred outside of the meat. The steak was laid on three thick wedges of what the menu described as stuffed flatbread: a kind of quesadilla filled with a stew of shiitake mushrooms and wilted cruciferous greens. A similarly packed plate was the grilled chicken ($12), which was a large breast sliced and fanned out. The soft texture of the skin suggested braising more than grilling, but the bird had the requisite char marks, along with an interesting lemony taste. An orange-inflected sauce pooled around the plate, leaching into the salad of white beans and tomato and parsley, and curling around a big, hot onion stuffed with a soft tabouleh.

Savoy held some of its fire for dessert (all $5). The chocolate crème caramel, which sounded like the seafood strudel of the dessert world (i.e., yawn), offered its own kind of surprise: the cylinder of mild, creamy chocolate custard contrasted beautifully with another, much bitterer chocolate flavor that came from the sauce poured over it. The banana feuillette was pleasant, too, if a bit confectionary: a cloud of tangy bananas and whipped cream lavished between two offset squares of light pastry, set on a plate crosshatched with an intense caramel sauce.

The wine list at Savoy seemed adequate (we had a nice glass of Lurton chardonnay for $4 and a good Hess cabernet for $6), but it wasn't nearly as long as the cocktail-and-liquor list, which had been bound into a little booklet describing all sorts of adulterated martinis and small-batch bourbons. A night sampling that menu, and we probably wouldn't have noticed the cigars.