Powered by Google
Home
Listings
Editors' Picks
News
Music
Movies
Food
Life
Arts + Books
Rec Room
Moonsigns
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Personals
Adult Personals
Classifieds
Adult Classifieds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
stuff@night
FNX Radio
Band Guide
MassWeb Printing
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About Us
Contact Us
Advertise With Us
Work For Us
Newsletter
RSS Feeds
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Webmaster
Archives



sponsored links
- - - - - - - - - - - - -
PassionShop.com
Sex Toys - Adult  DVDs - Sexy  Lingerie


   
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

UpStairs on the Square (Soirée Room)
Adventurous food in a fabulous Klimt-does-Alice in Wonderland room
BY ROBERT NADEAU
UpStairs on the Square (Soirée Room)
(617) 864-1933
91 Winthrop Street, Cambridge
Open Mon–Thu, 5:30–10 p.m., and Fri–Sat, 5:30–11 p.m.
AE, DC, Di, MC, Vi
Full bar
Valet parking, $15, or validated at Charles Hotel garage
Sidewalk-level access via elevator

Now we get to the upstairs part of UpStairs on the Square, which is up a full flight of stairs from the downstairs part, called the Monday Club Bar (open daily), which is still upstairs from street level. The Soirée Room has its own chef, Amanda Lydon, who used to work at the downstairs Truc, and then at the street-level Metro, so her career is clearly on an upward trajectory. In fact, she now commands an executive sous-chef, Antonio Bettencourt, although she’s still beneath proprietors Mary-Catherine Deibel and Deborah Hughes. Presumably an executive sous-chef is higher than a regular sous-chef, but still not yet a chef de cuisine. Or perhaps the next step is chief executive sous-chef?

Résumé padding aside, this is a really beautiful and fun room, with some pretty good food, some flawed food, and some service issues despite having been open for a year. If you can stand the bustle downstairs in the Monday Club Bar, you may prefer the food there at the prices there. The old UpStairs at the Pudding wasn’t cheap, but it focused on Italian food, and it delivered some wonderful dishes. The Soirée Room isn’t cheap, and the food is French, Italian, and nouvelle American by turns, and very good, without — considering our four dinners — reaching the stars. A strong hand on the salt shaker should be restrained — someone must rank higher than whoever salts.

However, the first salt, in the butter that comes with a slice or two of fresh semolina bread, is welcome. A complimentary appetizer of melon-Champagne soup, the color of cantaloupe and served in a flute, had both refreshing flavors. This was listed on the prix fixe menu ($45) but served to all of us, perhaps because I was recognized, or perhaps because it was a slow night.

My favorite appetizer was basil-zucchini soup ($12). This is a good way to use up leftover zucchini, since the basil dominates and the zucchini just provides a little granularity in what is basically a cup of cold cream-of-basil soup, with a nifty garnish of a little crabmeat and sour crème fraîche. Something as simple as a romaine-hearts salad ($12) was wonderfully embellished with real sheep feta, thin-sliced radishes, coddled eggs, and an odd dried herb that was a little too bitter (chervil? Tarragon?).

For a bit of the old UpStairs, I had an appetizer of tagliatelle ($14) with a sort of rabbit-olive-carrot stew as a sauce. The homemade pasta was outstanding, ribbons of perfect chewiness, but the sauce/stew was heavily oversalted. So was the baked chicken on the prix fixe menu, although the mustardy coating on the boneless meat was otherwise a wonderful treatment. This platter had wild asparagus, which look like wheat and taste even sweeter than cultivated asparagus, but they were a little overdone and had lost some of their sweetness. Spring onions were an inspired side, however.

I also hit a lot of salt in an entrée of veal sirloin and braised veal cheeks ($36). This was not a problem with the slices of sirloin, which were unseasoned and somewhat dull meat until dipped in the veal reduction sauce of the baby-vegetable ragout. It was a problem with the two slices of cheek, because they were otherwise so delicious, with an orange-peel flavor like duck à l’orange. The vegetables, including Chantenay carrots, snap peas, morel mushrooms, and cultivated asparagus, were cooked just enough — and delectable.

I also liked the Alaskan halibut ($28), served with squid bodies cut into spiral noodles, a wonderful effect. The fish itself is light and flavorful at the same time, with a nice crust, and the platform of sautéed Chinese cabbage, littleneck clams, squid tentacles, and such is an excellent foil.

The rib-eye steak ($35) is a splendid piece of beef, double-thick but boneless, so it looks like a filet mignon. But no filet ever had this much flavor. Since people who order steak are presumed to want potatoes, UpStairs supplies a cylinder of sliced potatoes au gratin worthy of the steak, and a sauce of "truffled mushrooms."

The wine list is unusual and exciting, organized by both grape variety and producer. We picked an inexpensive "UpStairs favorite," a 2002 El Felino malbec ($30), made by Sonoma winemaker Paul Hobbs from Argentine grapes. Instead of creating the usual light claret made from malbec, Hobbs decided on something like the old black-teeth California zinfandels, so we have a full, dark, powerful wine at a near-port level of 14.7 percent alcohol. So far, the fruit is enough ahead of the tannins and alcohol to make this a workable, even exciting, food wine at two years old. But if I were the wine steward, I would put these bottles away for a few years and triple the price.

A complimentary dessert of panna cotta with shredded rose petals (again on the prix fixe menu but served to the table) might be enough for most people. The prix fixe also brought a large dish of peach sorbet, sharply flavored but not exactly peach. Rum babas ($10) are four mini-muffins that taste like waffles and syrup, with excellent rum-raisin ice cream. A chocolate-almond tart ($10) is rich, bitter chocolate, not so much almond, with rather thin ice cream. Summer-berry pudding ($10) is a variation on English summer pudding, with brioche instead of white bread to soak up the berry juice, and more strawberries than blackberries. A superb dessert. Decaf ($2.50) also was excellent.

The service was active and present on an uncrowded weeknight, but not always effective. There were long pauses between courses. The pre-entrée pause was eventually explained: one dish did not come out right, and so all had to be held. This was accompanied by an offer of complimentary salads, but it might have been better to tell us the situation earlier, since we would have chosen to have the three entrées that were ready, and waited for the last one in better humor. The wine was served nicely and in big glasses, but at the end the waiter dumped the remainder in a glass, including the dregs. If this wine is an "UpStairs favorite," they must serve enough of it to know that the heavy red has thrown some deposit by now.

The room evokes Alice in Wonderland as illustrated by Klimt, with hand-painted oranges and pinks, purple velvet, and lots of gilt. The "bar," which is really a garde manger station, is done in green with silver "bubbles." The windows are round, the ceiling is mirror-reflective, the carpet is leopard-spotted, the lamps are like flowers that grow Christmas-tree bulbs (and there are some of those) — it’s just impossible not to be enchanted. That sensation lingers past the minor problems of food and service, which may be why they were still present in a room that has been functioning for quite a while. Or we may have hit the proverbial "off night," since there was nothing conceptually wrong. It will probably all be fixed by the time you go, but if not, the room will enchant you anyway.

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


Issue Date: July 9 - 15, 2004
Back to the Food table of contents
Back to the Dining Out archive
  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
 









about the phoenix |  advertising info |  Webmaster |  work for us
Copyright © 2005 Phoenix Media/Communications Group