Recently I was asked, “What’s this I read in the New York Times about sprinkling tobacco on gourmet food?” My response was that this was a sign that the bubble of creative chefery had been inflated too far, and we were bound to see a kind of stock-market panic in which tobacco-sprinkler shares would plummet, and the old standards of fine food would be revalued. Personal taste aside, my advice is to buy options on Margo Bistro. Margo is a smallish restaurant tucked into a smallish hotel right next to Quincy Market and not far from City Hall (power breakfasters, take note). Veteran restaurantgoers will find it most easily by understanding that State Street goes out toward the New England Aquarium, and that it is next to Tatsukichi.
A hotel restaurant has to cover a lot of bases. Hagopian Hotels and chef Christopher Isely have covered them gracefully with a generally conservative approach — maybe with one twist per dish, maybe just letting a fine ingredient swing away. Where Isely does try a trick pitch, as on his signature roasted-red-beet salad ($8), he keeps it solidly over the plate by harmonizing flavors in traditional ways. These beets have been criticized because they aren’t roasted to a peak of caramelized intensity. They aren’t charred like my homemade roast beets, and they aren’t as tasty on their own. But Isely contrasts his beets’ modest sweetness with a bitter green chicory, a salty cheese (perhaps feta or sheep ricotta), and the pure sweetness of oranges. The oranges are skinned sections, a chef’s trick of the old school. For a bit of modern show, this chef has added crunchy strips of fried beet. The whole thing is molded once, so the colors don’t mix. No tobacco, but a very satisfying appetizer.
A meal at Margo actually starts with a basket of crusty French bread and some multi-grain sunflower slices, the latter ideal with honey butter. (When did we last see sweetened butter?) Fresh pea soup ($7) was a buttery stock with crunchy green peas for one textural contrast, feather-light vegetable gnocchi for another. A dotting of porcini oil looked lovely but didn’t have quite the flavor I expected. A vegetarian spring roll ($7) has replaced the duck-confit spring roll on earlier menus. This is still served in vertical towers (looks like sushi, crunches like egg roll), but now features browned-onion and carrot flavors. Prince Edward Island mussels ($7) were nice and fat, in a Provincetown Portuguese–style broth dominated by chorizo sausage and tomato. White beans, creeping into so many appetizers these days, were perhaps too crunchy.
Main dishes will appeal to those who want food to taste the way it looks. Wood-grilled lobster ($26) is not overdone or scorched, the bane of dry-heat lobsters, and nicely presented as a split tail and a couple of claws. The claws are probably steamed, which suits them. The tail is stuffed with some vegetables and herbs in an artful lightening of the traditional New England baked lobster. Fill the plate with some sautéed spinach, baby leeks, and more of those foamy gnocchi, and you have a dinner that isn’t very experimental, but it is memorable because everything is good.
Plum-glazed duck breast ($18) is a conventional treatment of slices, with the drumstick added as a lagniappe. The sauce isn’t over-sweet, and much of the satisfaction comes from beautifully sweet broccoli rabe and — the twist — sweet potatoes cut wafer thin and reassembled into something that looks like potatoes Anna but tastes so much lighter. Isely does a similar wafer-thin slice on eggplant, then tosses it with baby artichokes to go with roast lamb ($22). He’s also conservative with roasting times: his “rare” duck breast is served medium-well, the lamb “medium,” where other chefs are pushing duckling and lamb toward carpaccio. Goes better with tobacco flakes, you know.
If you want something a little fussy, try the asparagus-and-porcini-mushroom ravioli ($15). The woodsy flavors come through the pasta nicely, and the sauce is a sparkle of chopped vegetables and herbs, topped with fresh chervil.
Margo flirts with the steakhouse trick of side vegetables at a price. I don’t think you need these extra vegetables, but if you do, garlic spinach ($4) is more buttery than garlicky. The wine list is interesting, featuring smaller producers from various places. A drawback is that no vintage years are listed. Our Barbera d’Asti (Beppe Marino, $28) turned out to be a ’98, and turned out to be a classic, spicy example of the middleweight red.
Isely’s desserts are likewise classic, which means that puff pastry is back in town. A special apple tart with crème fraîche ($7) was glorious with the stuff, and a pancake of it stood in for shortcake under the “oven roasted strawberry tart with rhubarb lemongrass ice cream” ($7). I think those classic chefs used to use more commas: this turned out to be lemongrass ice cream and chunks of semi-candied rhubarb among the strawberries.
The big hit, I think, is the “Margo Chocolate Cake” ($7). Dense chocolate cakes are another area where there’s a lot of satisfaction a few car-lengths back from the edge. This one derives an almost curried complexity from a pinch of almond and is brilliantly matched with homemade pistachio ice cream, with an almond tuile for decoration.
White-chocolate mousse ($7) didn’t transcend the second-order feeling of all white chocolate, although the chef got a lot of visual interest by spacing two scoops of mousse with two tuile wafers, and setting a light sandwich cookie on the side. I also don’t buy the notion of “blueberry brioche bread pudding” ($7). This one is overly deconstructed, with the bread on top and a layer of blueberries in pastry cream underneath. Nope.
There are still kinks in the set-up. To get to Margo from the State Street entrance, you follow a weird thread through the mini hotel lobby. We arrived early and found that the near-empty dining room can clang from a few loud talkers in the neighboring bar. The room also vents in a little cigarette smoke that way. About 10 times during our dinner there was a slight hum and a dimming of the lights. Some piece of machinery — dishwasher? elevator? — needs its own circuit. The hotel lobby is decorated with framed antique maps ... well, Norman Leventhal and the Rowes Wharf Restaurant don’t own the idea. But the French posters and the bare brick and the Gipsy Kings — that’s so 1998.
Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.
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