Clío

Precision, intensity, and a spareness that would seem arrogant if the food weren't so good

by Stephen Heuser

370A Comm Ave. (Back Bay), Boston; 536-7200
Open Sun - Thurs, 5:30 to 10 p.m.,
and on Fri and Sat, 5:30 to 10:30 p.m.
(breakfast daily, call for hours)
Full bar
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Lift access from street level

Clío, which is certainly the best restaurant to have opened in Boston all year, has a lot to answer for. Quiet, civilized, and meticulously decorated, it is the opposite in every respect of the lamented Eliot Lounge, which it replaced. The dark and grotty Eliot -- unofficial Boston Marathon bar, sometime Phoenix hangout -- was a local institution that fit badly with the tony hotel around it. (The hotel now uses Commonwealth Avenue as the address of its new restaurant, even though Clío really opens onto the funkier sidewalk of Mass Ave.)

At any rate, if the price of progress is to lose institutions like the Eliot Lounge -- which, to be fair, wasn't doing much business by the time it closed -- the benefit is a restaurant like this one, which opened about a month ago and is already booming for a simple reason: the food is wonderfully, phenomenally good.

Emblematic of chef Ken Oringer's style is the appetizer of "day boat scallops." For $12, we received exactly two scallops, which I admit sounds insane. But the point is, the scallops were perfect -- seared to an identical deep, toasty brown along the top edge, placed on a bed of thickened lobster sauce accentuated with bits of leek, and garlanded across the top with not quite enough pearly-gray ossetra caviar to taste. Each scallop was set on a giant, wide, bleached-white shell, which in turn was balanced a couple of inches off the plate on a pillar of salt. Two little altars of food. A pair of burnt offerings to the god of luxury.

I'm fascinated by restaurants like Clío, by how happily they ignore the usual association of value with quantity. (The most plentiful dish here is also the least expensive: a leafy plate of mesclun for $7.) The equation, in fact, is precisely reversed: dishes are arranged as though their very smallness make them worth the price. In a $15 appetizer of foie gras, the tight vertical presentation (seared goose liver underlaid with black and green figs, topped with peppered frisée) is contrived to appear as tiny and isolated as possible in the middle of its gleaming-white plate. This strategy can succeed only when the flavors are very intense, as they are here. The dish moved from the strong cracked-pepper taste of the frisée and chive straws, through the velvety richness of the liver, to the sweet, ripe fig slices on the bottom.

The soup on the menu, a purée of fresh peas ($7), was a scant portion even by haute Cali-French standards: there was really just enough to wet the bottom of the dish. But it was unlike any pea soup I've ever tasted. Bright spring-green in color, perfectly liquid in texture, it captured the garden quality of freshly shelled peas and set against it the earthy, salty savor of sautéed morel mushrooms. A few cut chives provided a nice pungent note, though the fresh thyme sprinkled in the soup came on a bit strong.

In general, Clío's presentation leans away from levity toward a kind of soulless, food-magazine perfection. One witty moment, though, was when the lobster arrived in a stack of curling split tail and two claws -- with a single long, red feeler planted in the claw meat, arcing up and over the plate like a lone streetlight. The lobster itself was cooked just till tender and basted with a butter sauce that left the lobster flavor pretty much alone. I'd like to have seen a little more than two clams and a few vegetables along with it; $29 is a lot to pay for this much lobster, no matter how prettily it's served.

On the opposite pole from the mild, almost undertreated lobster was the hanger steak ($24). The hanger is a strange and delicious cut of meat, much tenderer than its pedestrian name might suggest. I don't know what the chef did to the outside of the steak here; our server said something about a rub of cumin and coriander seed, but that can't be the whole story. Blackened on the outside, pink verging on red toward the center, the small steak practically shouted with grill flavor. Under it came a little ragoût of artichoke, portobello mushroom, white asparagus, yellow beet, and so on. The menu promised 17 vegetables, but I wasn't counting. I was fixating on the roasted beef bone, full of hot gooey marrow, that also came on the plate, necessitating a special visit from a waiter bearing a marrow fork.

A dish called "tournedos of 'lotte' " ($22) turned out to be medallions of monkfish, mild and white, with a golden outer crust tasting of lime, orange, and grapefruit. "Aromatic glazed short ribs" ($26) was a little cylinder of muscly beef braised till the meat turned butter-soft, like oxtail stew. The meat was set on a cloud of mashed potato and corn, which in turn was ringed with rich, dark jus. Atop the meat, at four corners, were generous shavings of black truffle, which lent the dish an earthy seriousness that put me in mind of autumn.

A chromatically spectacular dessert called the "snow cone" ($8) brought us back to summer: an oversize martini glass contained a scoop each of cantaloupe, watermelon, and honeydew granité; next to it were lined up three narrow glass cylinders of melon juice -- electric orange, pink, and chartreuse -- to be poured over the ices. A crème brûlée ($8) was more restrained but still on target: glassy amber crust, creamy texture, and vanilla seeds scattered across the bottom like black pollen. With it came a little bowl of plump berries and a lemon wedge filled with an impeccably tart and sweet lemon sorbet.

Of the wines available by the glass, we liked the least expensive white best: a João Pires muscat ($6.50), soft and round. A glass of '93 Lindemans cabernet ($8.50) was a little sharp around the edges. The wine list by the bottle has about 90 wines organized in no appreciable way, with not many below $30.

But this isn't a restaurant for a below-$30 crowd. Or a below-30 crowd, for that manner. Clío is a place built for Boston's power diners: a place where the napkins are tied with a little raffia cord, the floor is leopard-print without irony, and the dinner rolls are delivered, with tongs, by a waiter. Clío attracts the Hamersley's crowd, the Rialto crowd, the kind of genteel people who go to restaurants like this on a regular basis, and who might, on a given night, decide that you look young and agreeable, and lean over the center island to ask you all sorts of embarrassing questions about how your girlfriend can look so pretty without makeup, and whether you are married, or whether you're perhaps thinking about it, because it's really very nice.

As I said, Clío has a lot to answer for.