Blue Cat Café

Another year, another concept at 94 Mass Ave

Dining Out by Stephen Heuser

Blue Cat Café (617) 247-9922 94 Mass Ave (Back Bay), Boston Open Sun-Wed, 5-10 p.m., and Thurs-Sat, 5-11 p.m.; bar open till 1 a.m. Full bar Smoking in bar area AE, DC, Di, MC, Visa Sidewalk-level access

Ninety-four Mass Ave is an astonishing quick-change artist. The restaurant that occupied the spot for ages, Newbury Steak House, didn't manage to survive into the restaurant boom of the '90s, and a few years ago the space was taken over by Steven Foster and Kevin Troy, the nightlife impresarios who also own Jillian's and the Mercury Bar. Since then it has been three entirely different restaurants: Café Mojo, 575, and now the Blue Cat Café. Same ownership, same space, but -- as they say in the restaurant trade -- different concept.

You could probably write a trend history of the late '90s based simply on the décor of these restaurants. You couldn't do it based on the food, because the food hasn't shown any appreciable trajectory; it has gone from wobbly but inexpensive New American (Mojo) to quite accomplished, if slightly pricey, Japanese-Italian fusion (575) to mid-priced New American that's slightly better than No. 1 but not quite as polished as No. 2.

The concept, though -- well, the concept has gone through some exciting changes. Café Mojo had couches in the bar and big folky-trendy murals on the walls; 575 had overstuffed chairs in the bar and a working sushi bar along one side of the dining room; the Blue Cat has jazz photos and turntables in the bar and a great big smoky mirror where the sushi bar used to be. This new version is unquestionably the toniest and most spot-on of the three: finally, a restaurant that knows what it wants to be.

What it wants to be is a lounge. We asked the host for a booth one night, then surveyed the dining room and laughed: just about every table was a booth. And nice booths, too, upholstered in oxblood-colored leather that puffs out in ridges like a scallop. It's a very polished effect, especially with midcentury French liquor posters on the wall, and it's hard not to like an all-booth restaurant: you feel like the center of the action wherever you sit. The bar, up a step from the main dining room, has always been the heart of this restaurant, and on slow nights this is where most of the people congregate. In its current version, it has a handful of semicircular booths (you can eat and smoke here, which will appeal to some people) and bare brick walls hung with black-and-white photos of bebop musicians. The effect is classic jazz lounge, and there's one cool, unusual touch: a turntable stand (the Blue Cat has a jazz DJ at night) with the solid construction and carefully turned legs of a piano.

But this is a dining-out column, not a concept column, and the report on the Blue Cat's food is: it's pretty good. As at most restaurants driven more by market positioning than by food, the dishes are moderately priced and share a certain innocuous creativity. There are twists on things, like fried leeks in the clam chowder, and Southwestern relish with the hanger steak, but you don't run into a lot of flagrant originality. Which -- don't get me wrong -- is fine. The food has a consistency that would keep anyone but a real snob happy.

As an example, let's take the "wasabi tuna salad" ($7.25). This is a handsome plate, sleek and modern, with four fanned-out slices of tuna, raw in the middle and seared on the outside, blending the chic minimalism of sushi with a bit of reassuring cooked flavor. So far, so good. And we liked the lobster-and-crab cakes well enough; lobster meat is too firm to blend smoothly into the mashed texture that you expect from crab cakes, but then again, you can't really complain about a little extra lobster in your food. And it's nice, when you're paying $8.25 for an appetizer, that the plate comes with a little mesclun salad topped by a mustardy vinaigrette.

All the appetizers we had were tasty, and some were even inspired. A potato-leek soup ($4.50) was capably done, if a bit too salty and concentrated, but the "almost traditional" clam chowder ($5.95) was very clever: where normal clam chowder has diced potatoes and chopped clams stirred into a thick base, this one had two open clamshells floating on top of the soup, with quartered new potatoes bobbing happily along with them, and a tasty little stack of leek ribbons right in the middle of the bowl. The broth, slightly thickened but not heavy, had a fine clam-juice taste and was given a nice depth of flavor by some chunks of excellent bacon.

The entrées delivered slightly more food for the money, but with slightly less energy. A dish of baked penne ($9.95) was essentially latter-day mac-and-cheese: pasta coated with a wholesome gruyere-and-white-wine goo and a few peas and portobello mushroom chunks thrown in for earthy substance. A hanger steak ($14.50) was slightly more interesting, if only because you don't usually see the flavorful and obscure cut outside Francophile restaurants. This one was slightly less tender than other hanger steaks I've had, but not bad, and served with a fun Southwestern salsa of corn and red peppers.

A whole section of the Blue Cat menu is dedicated to sandwiches and burgers, most of them decorated with bacon and blue cheese and various fripperies; we tried a muffuletta ($7.95) -- a New Orleans sandwich with Italian roots -- and got something so big and overstuffed we could eat exactly half. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. The idea of a muffuletta is a fat, airy toasted bun with a fine brown crust, filled with ham and salami and topped with a tangy mixture of mayonnaise and garlic and chopped-up olives and peppers. The effect is slightly oily, very flavorsome, and totally excessive in an appealing New Orleansy way.

There was one real failure among the dishes we tried. Though the seared-tuna appetizer worked perfectly well, a similar dish on a different night -- the pan-seared tuna entrée ($14.95) -- had obviously been sent out without a second look. The fish was second-rate, a big chunk of rare tuna in an off-putting pink, with the grain of the fish pulling apart unattractively. A kitchen has to be extra-careful with rare dishes; we didn't finish this one.

We did finish our desserts: three scoops of fruit sorbet ($5.25) served in a martini glass; crème brûlée ($5.50) in a small, deep ramekin, nicely glassy on the top and thick and eggy inside; and an espresso ice-cream sandwich ($6), which was a ball of espresso ice cream between two round disks of thick chocolate, all topped with bittersweet sauce.

Service at 94 Mass Ave, whatever the name of the restaurant, has always been pretty good. Our waiter one night was genuinely smart and informed; another night our service was slightly more inert but still friendly. The wine list at Blue Cat isn't extensive or particularly oenophilic (it's impressively outdone by the martini list included at every table), but I'm always glad to see a few bottles for less than $20. We had a decent South African sauvignon blanc for $18 (Robertson Winery, 1997) that stood up nicely to the muffuletta and the penne-and-cheese, and that seemed like a pretty nice concept to me.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@phx.com.

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