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[Dining Out]

The Chart House
Fabulous views, free parking ... and decent seafood
BY ROBERT NADEAU

dining out
The Chart House
(617) 227-1576
60 Long Wharf, Boston Waterfront
Open Mon–Fri, 5–10 p.m.; Sat, 4:30–10:30 p.m.; and Sun, 4:30–10 p.m.
AE, CB, DC, Di, MC, Vi
Full bar
Free valet parking
Street-level access to some tables

The Chart House has been around so long that we forget it’s part of a chain of some 40 restaurants, all grown from an Aspen, Colorado, diner upscaled by a beached surfer and a former Navy demolition diver. These days it’s a public company (NYSE-CHT) under newish management that closed 11 locations last year and remodeled the rest, completing a four-month job here in Boston. One way the chain status is camouflaged is that more than half the Chart Houses are in historic buildings, including ours. The 1760s Gardiner Building on Long Wharf was probably not the chart house for Boston Harbor, but it did once house the office of John Hancock, perhaps the one where he helped plan the Boston Tea Party in 1773.

I did not follow the remodeling closely, but the restaurant seems larger, with most of three floors in use, and I don’t recall having seen the wrought-iron banisters before. It’s still a series of rooms full of old-fashioned blond-wood tables placed next to bare brick walls under bare beams. Because the restaurant’s popularity rests on the harbor views and convenience, the food remains solid but uninspiring, and somewhat overpriced. (Free valet parking helps even the balance, however.) The new menu emphasizes a list of fresh seafood, but nothing I tasted on a Saturday night was impressively fresh and sweet. There are never too many big seafood restaurants on the harbor, though, and if you make careful decisions, the Chart House can be a very good one.

One tip might be to try for the second floor, since that’s where the kitchen is, and there are definite production problems on a busy night. They started with lukewarm “hot bread,” both a sweet brown sunflower and a crusty white. The Chart House has prudently blended onions and vegetables into the butter served alongside, which means it doesn’t make as much difference if the butter picks up flavors in the refrigerator. This makes a good combination with the sunflower bread, but less so with the white, and both loaves would gain a lot if served right from the re-warming oven.

Generally, the most effective dishes were simple ones, such as steamed mussels ($7.95), decently plump ones in a nice broth with onion and garlic. The crab cakes (appetizer $11.95, main dish $26.95) were very good, mostly meat (and therefore falling apart), garnished with lots of capers and a mustardy rémoulade sauce, probably the best sauce of the evening. Crunchy coconut shrimp (appetizer $9.50, main dish $21.95) had more crunch than coconut, but were six large shrimp fried on a couple of skewers, with a Thai-style sweet-hot sauce.

On the other hand, the lobster spring rolls ($9.75) were the size of egg rolls, cut open the long way to reveal the relative lack of lobster meat; they were also kind of limp and served with an overly vinegared imitation of Vietnamese fish-sauce dip. This may work in some parts of the country, but most Chart Houses are located in places with real Vietnamese food. Fried calamari ($8.50) doesn’t come up to the Boston standard, with a limp fry job (or it was by the time the dish reached the table) and a kind of sweet-salsa dip. “Award-winning New England–style chowder” ($4.95) was served in a cute aluminum caldron with feet, but the stuff inside tasted like too much celery salt.

Although the Chart House menu now has a “fresh list,” the differences were not great between “fresh” items, such as Boston schrod ($17.95), and the better airmailed seafood, such as the sweet-and-sour Chilean sea bass. ($21.95; $20.95 grilled or baked without sauce). The schrod was a plain fillet (some Bostonians will expect buttered crumbs on top) that made for dull eating with baked (probably converted) rice and a colorful cole slaw. The sea bass was a better-tasting piece of fish, and the sauce was well-balanced. Seared scallops ($21.95) were a fine portion of five large sea scallops, but they were most probably pan-seared in some hot oil — not so nice an effect as the wood grilling at Legal Sea Foods. Swordfish tapenade ($20.95) was yet another item off the fresh list, but again, it was an average piece of fish, elevated mostly by the topping of chopped olives.

Big combinations are done pretty well at the Chart House. Cioppino ($21.95) isn’t huge, but the combination of fish fillet and king-crab leg in tomato-onion soup-sauce is a nice change for Boston seafood lovers, and the four fresh basil leaves on the large bowl are a nice touch. Seafood linguine ($21.95) isn’t the crispest pasta, but again, the seafood-tomato mix is welcome.

Although main dishes come with rice and cole slaw, the obvious intention is to sell some side dishes of vegetables, as they do at steakhouses. Creamed spinach ($4.25) is straight from the steakhouse, but a fine foil for simple fish: cheesy cream sauce provides richness. Asparagus ($5.25) was almost a pound on a black platter, topped with a mustard sauce and crushed almonds. Garlic mashed potatoes ($4.95) were commendably real and topped with brown onions, but not very garlicky and perhaps too lumpy. The menu concedes that these side vegetables serve two; in fact there were perhaps four servings there.

The wine list is almost all Californian, but does not list vintage years. What turned out to be 1999 Benziger fumé blanc (Sonoma, $27) was a classic California sauvignon blanc, with plenty of fruit and some acidity, served at a cool (not refrigerator-frigid) temperature.

You have to order the hot chocolate lava cake ($6.95) 30 minutes ahead. You should, since it is quite simply the best dessert on the menu: a dense chocolate pudding-cake with butter-brickle crumbs in the sauce. “Raspberry crème brulee” ($4.75) is a good job once you accept that the raspberries are on top. The dessert is creamy and crusty even if it does have fewer accent marks than it used to. The “Original Mud Pie” ($5.95) is based on thin coffee ice cream. Key-lime pie ($4.95) is the real thing hidden under a large layer of sweetened cream and over a too-large graham-cracker crust. If you want real Key lime, you can dig it out.

Coffee, decaf, and flavored coffee were all very good, as the large restaurant keeps them moving along. Table service was also very good, once I got over the jitters induced by the greeting “Hi, I’m Kathy! I’m your server tonight!” As it turned out, Kathy got everything to the right person, chatted pleasantly, and handled the wine well. I blame the system and the sheer size of the restaurant for lukewarm dishes and slow assembly. Another system problem showed in the men’s room, which was filthy by 7 p.m. on a Saturday night.

As for the atmosphere: a lot of people out for the evening, having a pretty good time. I don’t think the background music adds much (think Sting on a distant radio), but it isn’t a big distraction from the views, the sense of a contented crowd, and large platters of plain food. That’s always been the appeal of the Chart House, and substituting rice for potatoes doesn’t risk the franchise.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.





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