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Spinnaker
Rotating out of style
BY ROBERT NADEAU

 Spinnaker
(617) 492-1234
Hyatt Regency Cambridge
575 Memorial Drive, Cambridge
Open Fri–Sat, 6–10 p.m.; Sun, 10 a.m.–2 p.m. and 5–9:30 p.m. Dancing Fri–Sat, 10 p.m.–1:30 a.m.
AE, DC, Di, MC, Vi
Full bar
$7 validation discount in hotel garage
Street-level access

While the gourmet world moves on, the Spinnaker, Boston’s only revolving restaurant, rotates its merry way around. Tourists want to eat there, and so do a remarkable number of local people who see it as a place for special celebrations. My daughter Stephanie has wanted to go there for years, and finally expended her wish on her 17th birthday. So, while the hotel’s executive chefs and the trendy critics were concentrating on the small plates at the hotel’s new Zephyr on the Charles, I was spinning slowly on the Hyatt’s roof for the first time since the hotel opened. I expected to experience some déjà vu, but the first thing that jogged my memory was the rotation. The restaurant doesn’t actually revolve; only a doughnut of the floor does. The outside wall of windows and the central dance floor don’t move, which induces a special kind of vertigo once you sit down. You see the horizon move one way, while the columns in the center of the room seem to move in the opposite direction. In most rotating situations, you can settle a queasy stomach by fixing your eyes on the horizon. At the Spinnaker, I suddenly remembered that doing that makes it much worse. What you need to do is fix your eyes on the table or the people around you. It’s not like a boat or an airplane; it’s like a carousel where the kids who look for their parents get dizzy, and the kids who watch each other on the ride do fine.

Since people come for the view, the staff at the Spinnaker can’t exactly advise them to keep their eyes on the food. What they can do is offer to slow down the rotation, which is on a dimmer switch. Of course, some in the room — like my son Maurice, for example — want it to spin faster, so the motion is more noticeable. The servers at the Spinnaker have little contests, nudging the rotation speed up and down according to the requests of their tables. That said, the view is surprisingly good, considering that the Spinnaker is really only on the Hyatt’s 15th floor. The Prudential is too tall to take in, and the Hancock isn’t at its best angle, but you can see lots of lights and bridges up and down the Charles and toward Boston.

The great paradox of locating restaurants in popular attractions is that people keep coming whether the food is good or not. Thus there has never been much incentive for the Hyatt to solve another revolving-restaurant problem: there is nowhere to put much of a kitchen. The current incarnation has a much-simplified menu with only five appetizers and seven entrées. (The restaurant’s previous format was Spinnaker Italia, with a longer menu, some of which has been retained.) But even with fewer selections to handle, not many of the dishes reach the table warmer than room temperature.

The room is also getting a little tired, especially the blond-maple butcher-block tables, which are not only dated conceptually, but showing a distressed finish. Food starts well with a basket of sourdough bread and a dip of rather good pesto. They could hold that pesto for a pasta dish and serve the good bread with sweet butter, and no one would be the wiser. And one of the appetizers, spinach-crabmeat fondue ($9.95), is rather excellent. This is a casserole with a very good portion of real crabmeat stirred up with some spinach and a lot of cream, and run under the broiler to melt the cheese on top. Some toasted bread crusts on the side could be dipped as if it were fondue, but I ate most of mine with a fork. Even at lukewarm, this is very appetizing and could make a full dinner for a lot of people.

Calamari diavolo ($9.95) is probably a terrific dish somewhere closer to the kitchen. The squid is quite tender, cooked through but not overcooked, but by the time it reached our table, the breading (cornflake crumbs?) had softened. The dip is a very serviceable marinara sauce, and the portion is fair at the price. Caesar salad ($8.95) has a lot of cheese and maybe some anchovy in the sauce, but it’s not special.

Entrées are priced without vegetables, so you’ll need that caesar salad, or one of the $4.95 side dishes. This policy is barely tolerable in expensive steak houses, but is quite odd in a restaurant where you can order roast chicken ($19.95) and get a plate with a drumstick, a thigh, and a (dried-out) breast — no sauce, no vegetable, no starch. You could then add basmati-rice pilaf ($4.95), which has some corn and pine nuts, but not much flavor for all of that. Button mushrooms ($4.95) at least have flavor, and there are quite a few of them.

Asparagus with hollandaise sauce ($4.95) may be the pick of the sides, a goodly heap of correctly cooked thin stalks, with a genuine hollandaise in all its lemon-butter-egg glory. A baked potato ($4.95) is perfectly fine, perfectly plain except for sour cream, and a perfect illustration of how this is poor merchandizing. Putting this potato on every plate would cost almost nothing, and a well-starched customer is much more relaxed when it’s time to pay. Increased sales of the prime rib — an excellent piece of beef that tastes just as good lukewarm — would repay the potato budget.

You may find it easier to accept grilled swordfish ($25.95), which has handsome grill marks on a good, meaty, inch-thick steak. It isn’t hot, but it isn’t harmed by the lime sauce or the bunch of watercress on top. Roast salmon doesn’t stand up so well to sitting around. The salmon is served with a raspberry coulis — which really doesn’t go with salmon, but is easily avoided — and the same heap of watercress.

Several pasta dishes have lingered from the Spinnaker Italia menu. The best may be plain spaghetti ($18.95), with a chef-school meat sauce that rises above the ordinary. The pasta is the ordinary part, but lots of people don’t mind if their pasta isn’t al dente. They will mind, on something like the seafood pasta ($23.95), if the sauce is thin and lacks flavor, even if the mussels, shrimp, and clams are reasonably fresh, and the scallops are only a little past peak. Bow-tie pasta ($16.95) comes with sliced baby artichokes and makes a generally good impression.

The wine list is only fair and gives no years, which at these prices is discouraging. The all-important cheapest red and white are Veramonte chardonnay and merlot from Chile ($6.50 glass/$26 bottle), and the chardonnay is barely drinkable if you don’t gag at the price, which will buy you an entire bottle of better chardonnay at Trader Joe’s. The merlot is a step up, but a big hotel can do a lot better than this.

Desserts are competent but dated. The tiramisu ($6.95) is neat and bland. The fried cheesecake ($6.95), which looks like an egg roll, is actually a decent marble cheesecake. Fresh berries ($6.95) were blue, rasp, black, and straw; only the raspberries were really fresh. Nevertheless, I approve of the chef for knowing that dieters who order the berries will be secretly pleased that they come with pastry cream in a nice tuile-cookie bowl. The chocolate cake ($6.95) is not only flourless, but apparently eggless and creamless as well; it has the consistency of fudge and comes with very good vanilla ice cream.

The Spinnaker is open only three nights a week, but fills up rapidly, so make a reservation. Keep in mind, though, the policy of tacking a 17 percent automatic tip on parties of five or more, which is something of a discouragement. That’s exactly who wants to come here, and given a few price breaks and vegetables, the restaurant would fill up the other four nights.

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

Issue Date: February 7-14, 2002
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