Curry report

Two new Indian places. Same old menu, mostly.

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Mehfil (617) 437-0152 1116 Boylston Street (Fenway), Boston Open for buffet lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m., and for dinner Mon-Fri, 5-11 p.m., Sat and Sun, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Disc, MC, Visa Beer and wine Sidewalk-level access No smoking India Castle (617) 864-8100 928 Mass Ave (between Central and Harvard Squares), Cambridge Open for buffet lunch Mon-Fri, 11:30 a.m.-3:30 p.m., and for dinner Mon-Fri, 5-11 p.m., Sat and Sun, 11:30 a.m.-11:30 p.m. AE, Disc, MC, Visa Full bar Sidewalk-level access Smoking at bar

Restaurants don't seem to last very long at 1116 Boylston Street. Three years ago the space was a Persian restaurant that had customers only on the nights when the owner hosted a Eurodisco party upstairs. Then for a couple years it was Sintoburi, a Korean-Japanese sushi bar that never managed to drag many sushi fans away from the Back Bay. Since March it's been an Indian restaurant: Mehfil, a sleek-looking place that, décor-wise, seems to be waging a single-handed battle against the usual subcontinental kitsch. Whether the customers will join the fight remains to be seen.

On a city block dedicated to junk food, caffeine, and sheet music, Mehfil's cool blue interior stands out. You scoot into one of the high booths, listen to exceedingly mellow tabla and sitar music, and look through the window at kids outside sitting on their skateboards, rolling back and forth, back and forth. The walls around you are lined with geometrically cut blond plywood; the light fixtures are a fetching cobalt. This is not your typical curry joint.

Well, almost not. Mehfil does serve the exact same Indian menu as every other restaurant in the city: papadums, chicken tikka masala, lamb vindaloo, naan, and so on. There is a South Indian menu (dosa, uttapam, sambhar) available on weekends, but not during the week. Still, even on weekdays, there's something distinctive about this place, something even a little stylish in some of the dishes.

Mainly, I mean the vegetable samosas ($2.75) and the aloo chat ($3.95). Your average samosa has a predictably tetrahedral shape and greasy-crunchy texture. But here, the skin was light and flaky -- fried, but still soft to the bite, with a subtle and fragrant potato mixture inside. (Your average samosa also does not arrive with a cocktail umbrella planted in it.) Aloo chat, a tangy cold potato salad, never showed up the first time I ordered it, but I'm stubborn, so I ordered it on my second visit and I was glad: it came on a shallow, shiny silver plate, with chopped fresh cilantro over the top. The cool yogurt-tamarind sauce was just the thing for a hot night.

Other dishes were straight shots down the middle. Chicken tikka masala ($10.50) was buttery, with a lively yogurt tang to it; saag paneer ($9.25), the classic mixture of spinach and cubed farmer's cheese, tasted strongly vegetal. The hot black-lentil dish dal makhni ($9.25) had a subtle but pervasive garlickiness and audacious little slivers of ginger perking things up. A sizzling platter of mixed tandoori meats ($14.95) wasn't huge, but was well executed: the chicken stayed moist, and the ground kebab meat was wonderfully spiced. As at most Indian restaurants, chili heat is conservative: "medium" dishes had no perceptible heat, and the ones we ordered "hot" were spicy, but just so.

Come dessert, the kulfi ($3.50) was the densest ice cream I've ever had. It came in a little quartered cake, and we had to cut it with knife and fork. I don't know if that counts as style, exactly, but it sure is distinctive.

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Like Mehfil, India Castle opened recently in a space that has played fast and loose with people's business ambitions. The previous occupant, Malimo, didn't quite make it as either a sushi bar or a jazz club. The occupant before that, a Brazilian grill called Pampas, was one of the best party restaurants in metropolitan Boston until it closed a couple of years ago. (Rumor was the INS shut it down.)

India Castle, the new occupant, is a stylish-looking place too, but it's borrowed style. The hinged wooden menus have a wavy pattern that echoes the waves in the layered ceiling; both seem like a suspiciously better fit with a sushi restaurant than an Indian one. As does the sushi bar, still standing, which the owners have converted to a buffet station. At least there are Indian prints on the walls.

Once again we're looking at the standard menu, mostly North Indian classics with a few other things thrown in: a mild lamb masala ($11.95); a malai kofta ($9.95) with creamy brown sauce over a kind of ground-vegetable kebab. The tandoori mixed grill ($12.95) was generous, with big chunks of lamb and chicken, but a bit drier and less complex than the one I'd just had across the river.

However, India Castle does serve its small South Indian menu every night, so we had a chance to try a dosa ($3.95), the enormous pancake of fermented lentil batter. It was excellent: a foot long, rolled like a crêpe, and wonderfully sour. The accompanying sambhar (a hot lentil soup) was deep, sweet, and spicy; the coconut chutney had an intriguing sour-cream undertone.

We did run into a bit of a language problem. Chicken tikka masala arrived as lamb tikka masala; a question about the onion relish on a dosa didn't get very far before I just gave up and ordered something else.

It initially struck me as funny that anyone would open an Indian restaurant on this stretch of Mass Ave, on the periphery of the most curry-intensive neighborhood in New England. But India Castle does fill a role: it's a little fancier, a little more upscale than the Central Square joints, and less crowded than the tonier Indian places in Harvard Square. I wouldn't have predicted this, but business seems to be pretty good. Some of us see a block of Mass Ave without an Indian restaurant and call it biodiversity. Some people call it a business opportunity; that's why they're running India Castle and I'm just eating there.

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Food tales from all over

Two weeks ago I ate at a very expensive restaurant in New Hampshire called the Crystal Quail. This is not one of your stupendous northern New England destination restaurants with a zillion-bottle wine cellar and six kinds of wild boar: the place seats 10 people, maybe 12 on a busy night, and the chef looks like Edward Gorey. The Crystal Quail is a farmhouse; you bring your own wine and choose between exactly two entrées. Not long before we'd gotten there, the owners had bought a veal calf, and therefore my meal involved Alsatian-style veal sausage for dinner, and veal livers in béchamel sauce as an amuse-bouche. We had a garden-picked salad that started with mizuna and got more exotic from there. (Ever eaten love-in-a-mist? Neither had I.) By the time we finished, we had eaten two kinds of veal, two quails, a pheasant terrine, some sort of succulent plant, and dessert. Something else had happened, too: my girlfriend Jennifer had become my fiancée Jennifer. The Crystal Quail has been around 25 years, and the cooking is no longer the most fashionable, but it felt as though the New Hampshire hills had given us something truly worth eating. There are more important things in this life, after all, than fashion.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.

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