La Bettola

Hovering between rustic and refined, La Bettola is an interesting muddle

by Stephen Heuser

480 Columbus Ave (South End), 236-5252
Open daily, 5:30 p.m. to midnight
Beer, wine, and sake
AE, MC, Visa
Sidewalk-level access

To me, one of the interesting things about eating out in this city is watching the tug-of-war between the refined and the rustic -- that is, between the kind of shameless culinary exhibitionism that results in one perfect scallop on a plate for $10, and the peasant-kitchen impulse to heap flavors and ingredients together with indiscriminate generosity.

Some restaurants, like La Bettola, get caught in the middle. La Bettola is the second project from the owners of Galleria Italiana, which rose last year from edge-of-the-Common obscurity to an exalted spot among the city's kitchens. With this new South End place, a high-end bistro, the partners are distancing themselves from Italian tradition. What exactly they're moving toward is harder to say.

The décor is Italian enough. In the dining room, ersatz distressed brick is overlaid with ersatz decaying plaster, as if to give diners the impression of eating by the side of the most charmingly dilapidated little palazzo. A spray of flowers erupts from a table stationed in front of antiqued green shutters that open onto nothing. This isn't so bad. Anyone dropping serious cash on food enjoys the sense of eating in surroundings that have been carefully designed. But diners also like to feel that they're in sure hands with the kitchen, and La Bettola, for all its pedigree, is disappointingly inconsistent. There are moments of rewarding originality, and then there are dishes that don't add up to more than the sum of their parts.

The best way to approach the menu seems to be through the prix-fixe dinner: $38 for an appetizer, entree, and dessert. (Everything on the menu is fair game.) Our appetizers, for the most part, were quite good -- the plainest of the salads, for example, was a lovely plate of field greens with an apricot vinaigrette ($7 à la carte). A cold tomato soup ($8) was delicious: a refreshing splash of red with a hint of pepper heat and a scattering of cilantro leaves and diced cucumber -- like a disassembled gazpacho. However, the bowl also held pieces of grilled calamari, which seemed out of place.

We enjoyed the sweet-pea ravioli ($10), two big, overlapping circles of al dente pasta stuffed with puréed peas that carried a hint of mint; they were drizzled with truffle oil and topped with curls of tangy pecorino cheese and three slices of summer truffle. And maybe the best of the appetizers was a plate of scallops ($12), three big pan-seared sea scallops served with slices of heirloom-variety tomatoes (green, orange, mottled red-and-white). They were set on a plate decorated with very green olive oil and a grainy sauce flavored with, I'd guess, something deglazed from the scallops.

Only one of our entrees achieved that level of excellence. It was a lobster-and-potato salad ($27), very simple and very good -- and, like the ravioli, intensely truffled. The salad consisted of chopped claw meat and diced potatoes, bound together with a little mayonnaise and a few green peas, and molded into a short cylinder in the middle of the plate. The lobster tail was sliced into coins and arranged around the top, and the whole thing was crowned with a big sprig of mache. The contrast between the stark red-and-white lobster and the vivid green mache suggested that some real thought had gone into the look of the dish. Those colors also reappeared around the perimeter of the salad: a ring of deep red miso-based sauce was accented with crisp chilled haricots verts.

That kind of color consciousness was otherwise in short supply. A plate of lamb sirloin ($27) came with three slices of lamb arranged over a ragout of zucchini and onion and other vegetables. The lamb was cooked nicely, but the plate had the chromatic range of an old sepia photograph. One original touch was a set of dumplings surrounding the main dish, wonton skins filled with braised lamb meat and Indian spices. Those, at least, were beige.

The tenderloin entree ($27) was drawn with the same brown palette. The tallest of our three cylindrical entrees, this one was built by setting a thick circle of beef atop a round bed of crispy hash browns, with baby cauliflower laid in between -- umber, beige, brown. Even the roasted red and yellow peppers on top of the steak were fading toward dun. The meat was nothing special, even a little fattier than I'd expected, with the mild taste of roast beef (the menu said it was smoked, but I'm not sure the effect showed). The hash-brown cake, I'll admit, was really good; I've had trouble finding hash browns in this city, and let's just say I didn't expect finally to find them at a trendy continental dinner spot in the South End.

In the original category was the black-rice "risotto" ($21), a simple (and, again, cylindrical) cake of deep, glossy black rice set over a mélange of baby corn and sliced leek. The cake held together without the agglutinative starchiness of real risotto, and the grains had the nutty taste of wild rice. An appealing curiosity was the "garlic milk" poured around the cake: the effect was similar to that of coconut milk used in Asian cuisines, only instead of enhancing milk's mild natural sweetness, this played against it.

Among the desserts, the more conventional worked out better than the novel. A chocolate soufflé ($9), which took 20 minutes to prepare, was worth the wait: beyond the lightly crisp exterior was a rich chocolate cake softening toward a warm, gooey heart. The scoop of pistachio ice cream on the side was lovely, sweet and nutty. And a dessert special of pineapple upside-down cake also took time, but it turned out just right -- crisp, almost caramelized brown-sugar cake around the outside, with coconut sorbet and a light, liquidy lemon curd. A genuinely strange dessert was made of shredded cantaloupe and honeydew melons ($7), two watery flavors heaped together and accented with thick, white, slippery strips of young coconut. The four rich white-chocolate truffles on the edge of the dish would have been better as their own dessert. The jury was hung on the icy champagne granita ($8), which was sweet and light and came in a large martini glass with a poached nectarine. That part was delicious, but someone should have stopped before adding the frozen cinnamon-flavored mascarpone (cinnamon?), the whipped cream, and the pastry curl on top.

The wine list, $5 to $9.50 by the glass, $21 to $80 by the bottle, runs toward light and pleasant whites and middle-of-the-spectrum reds. Our waiters were chipper and thoughtful, and the place really did come off as charming overall, especially when we scored an outside table on a warm night. But charm can't take the place of consistency, and consistency is proving a trickier goal.