Long considered one of Boston’s best fine-dining
destinations, L’Espalier (774 Boylston Street, Boston,
617.262.3023) lost something when it moved to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel last
year. Though boasting a certain frosty modern elegance, its new rooms feel a
bit underwhelming, a trifle five-star-hotel generic. Gone is the intimate,
inimitably romantic atmosphere of the aristocratic Gloucester Street townhouse
it previously occupied for 25 years. Bowing to recessionary pressures, the
restaurant also abandoned a longstanding jackets-required dress code. Jeans and
sneakers, hoodies and baseball caps are more commonly seen on the customers, a
once-unthinkable departure from the old venue’s famous decorum.
Fortunately, L’Espalier’s mystique wasn’t entirely lost in
translation: chef/owner Frank McClelland still brings the same exacting New
French sensibility to his locally sourced New American menu, producing
exquisitely beautiful dishes from first-rate artisanal ingredients. Service
remains polished, pampering, and rather formal. Better-dressed guests haven’t
stopped flocking here to celebrate red-letter birthdays and anniversaries,
consummate business deals, or pop the question. And the new space has a
handsome lounge where patrons can enjoy pre-dinner cocktails, an amenity the
original lacked. The kitchen’s storied attention to detail still shines in the
extraordinary, magazine-cover-beautiful desserts of pastry chef Jiho Kim. Some
of these include components that draw on modern molecular cooking, like
strawberries compressed via vacuum technology and milk solidified into a gel
with a seaweed-derived organic polymer. But avant-garde technique and
painstaking platings are never allowed to supersede the primary goal of
beguiling the palate.
Consider the milk chocolate banana pudding ($14), a dessert with
the formal reductiveness of a haiku. It consists of three simple geometric
shapes: a tall cylinder, a sphere, and a long, thin rectangle. The milk
chocolate cylinder houses a foundation of moist banana bread, a middle layer of
featherweight banana pudding, and a top layer of crème anglaise that cascades onto
the plate after a knife slash by the server. The rectangle is a crisp wafer of
banana cookie, the sphere a scoop of intense chocolate sorbet atop a nest of
cocoa nibs. Beyond the gorgeous complementary flavors, there’s a fascinating
textural interplay at work: smooth and crunchy, creamy and spongy. It’s a
bravura finish, a quietly stunning conclusion to the parade of extravagance
that is lunch or dinner here. The new digs may not be quite as perfectly
charming as the old, but the desserts show that L’Espalier hasn’t lost a step
otherwise.
