The Boston Phoenix
May 28 - June 4, 1998

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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

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.

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