Hibernia
A supper club that's downtown, swank, and Irish.
Are we looking at a trend?
by Stephen Heuser
25 Kingston Street
(Downtown Crossing), Boston
(617) 292-2333
Open for lunch Mon-Fri,
11:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m.
for dinner Tues-Sat, 5-10 p.m.
and for brunch Sun, 11 a.m.-4 p.m.
Full bar
AE, DC, MC, Visa
Elevator access
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Clearly we have a secret competition afoot in this city: how far can you
stretch the "Irish bar" theme before it snaps? Two restaurants the
Phoenix has recently reviewed -- James's Gate, in JP, and Grafton
Street, in Harvard Square -- certainly test the limits, with their elliptically
Dublinite names and minimally Irish menus. But Hibernia, a supper club that
opened downtown in January, has them both beat. It's the first Irish joint
where the Irishness is so hidden it requires an interpretive note on the
menu.
The name is a clue, but only if you know that "Hibernia" was what the Romans
called Ireland. The abstract designs on the walls, according to the menu, are
based on "the tradition of the Celts"; and the ownership is John Flaherty and
Peter (a/k/a Pedro) Smyth, co-owners of the Druid in Inman Square.
The Druid is woody and Joycean and even sponsors a soccer team, but Hibernia
is all fresh downtown chic, built to contend with nearby trendbot havens like
Oskar's and the G Lounge. The room, like those two, is narrow and deep; from a
handful of linen-set tables in the front window, a long bar arcs back toward
another small dining area. Of all the idiosyncratic wall art, my favorite item
was behind the bar, a bearded face done in intricate mixed metals, like a Green
Man built at an MIT machine shop. From his mouth, a thin stream of water shoots
hypnotically into a glowing orange receptacle.
If the Gaelic is hard to detect in the décor, it doesn't extend at all
to the kitchen, which turns out a fairly pricey fusion-style menu of chicken
satay and "lobster potstickers" and the like.
Some of that menu is very good. One dish was even beautiful: an appetizer of
smoked trout and purple Peruvian potatoes ($9), which came shaped as a tall
cylinder about the size of a soup can. The base of the cylinder was a vivid
violet potato salad, bound with a touch of grainy mustard; the top was
smoked-trout pâté wearing a spray of mesclun like an Easter hat.
Chromatically it was impeccable (violet, beige, green); and as food it was hard
to resist, the gentle smokiness of the trout playing off the bite of mustard
and the unassuming base of the potato.
Two other dishes were just as good. One was a plate of "herbed goat cheese
pillows" with pear slices and greens ($9). The pillows were little triangles of
puff pastry filled with warm, softened goat cheese; the crisp Asian pear slices
fanned across the plate provided counterpoint to both the cheese and the
intense balsamic dressing on the greens.
The second was a roasted chicken breast ($18) hovering on a cylindrical
platform of potatoes (no restaurant can hold itself to just one cylindrical
dish). The chicken was sweet-crusted and tender and very flavorful for chicken;
across the top were laid a dozen thin, springy spears of grilled asparagus. The
potato cylinder underneath -- "garlic crushed potatoes," said the menu -- had a
chunky texture somewhere between mash and potato salad, and it nicely soaked up
the sweet, intense reduction sauce around the plate.
Different as they sound, those three dishes all had something in common: they
were arty takes on comfort food. Chicken and mashed potatoes; bread and cheese
and fruit. Same for the smoked trout -- take away the purple, and we're looking
at a stylish revision of brandade de morue, the French bistro staple where
pungent salt cod is married to the soft, starchy taste of potato.
Once we moved away from the classics, the kitchen faltered a little. For
instance, the lobster potstickers ($10) didn't win me over either as
potstickers (they were flat, more like enormous ravioli than pert Chinese
dumplings) or as lobster. The dominant flavors in the dish -- ginger, orange,
and a salty-spicy gravy -- conspired against the delicate meat and made me wish
I'd gotten just plain lobster meat, maybe with sauce on the side. Similarly, an
entrée of crab ravioli, big square pockets of crab and spinach and goat
cheese, was served in a giant bowl of soupy red sauce that you might describe
as nouvelle puttanesca. But puttanesca, with its olives and capers and onions,
is a very strong sauce, and unfortunately crab is just as delicate a taste as
lobster.
Somewhere in the middle was a deep-brown mushroom soup ($6), not quite cream
of mushroom and not quite broth. To me it was monochromatic and a little oily,
but my friend who ordered it was happy with the concentrated taste and abundant
wild-mushroom caps. An entrée of grilled salmon fillet over spring-pea
risotto ($19) was competent but a bit of a misnomer; the salmon's texture
suggested it had been steamed, not grilled, and the risotto was (a)
tasty, (b) cheesy, and (c) not really risotto, just long-grain
rice cooked a little thicker than usual. Another entrée of scallops over
a soft mound of polenta with wild mushrooms ($20) was serviceably done, if not
exceptional, and the scallops were very stiffly cooked.
To be fair, the dishes we liked best all came on our second visit. The first
visit was on a very strange Thursday night, when the city's attention, and
maybe the kitchen's, was focused on the farewell episode of a very popular
sitcom. Our second visit, on a Tuesday, gave us a better sense of the place: at
10 o'clock, as we were winding down our meal, a band set up and we were
suddenly surrounded by Smoke, a roving jazz night that has found a home at
Hibernia on Tuesdays. (A supper club is a very busy place: Monday is swing
dancing, Tuesday is jazz, Wednesday is techno-house, Thursday is soul and funk,
and Friday is dance and disco.) At any rate, the combo -- the Eric Thompson
Quintet -- brought in a sudden crowd of under-30s, got even the bouncer tapping
his pager, and made me glad about the "club" part of supper clubs.
To finish off the "supper" part, I ordered dessert during the first set: a
berry surprise ($6), which was -- surprise! -- another tall cylinder, this one
an oval stack of puff-pastry biscuits joined by sweet whipped cream and studded
with blueberries. Like all tall food, it collapsed immediately when I stuck my
fork in. No problem. It tasted good, and as a bar lamp glinted off Eric
Thompson's cymbal, as the techno-Green Man spat his glowing stream, as the
soprano saxophonist lost himself in the music and bashfully re-emerged,
Hibernia sure seemed a lot more fun than Seinfeld.
Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.