At Hamersley’s Bistro (553 Tremont Street, Boston,
617.423.2700), chef/owner Gordon Hamersley has worked the French-bistro
tradition with a locavore American slant for 22 years. He started small, and though
he moved to bigger digs across the street after a few years, he hasn’t budged
from that original concept. While his contemporaries built expansive,
diversified restaurant empires, he kept to the South End: there’s no
Hamersley’s Las Vegas or Foxwoods or even Wellesley. He doesn’t hawk a line of
cookware, front a TV show, or do much of anything to promote “the brand.” He’s
just there, working in his open kitchen, pretty much every night. In an era of
nauseatingly self-promoting celeb-chef hucksters, his singular, quiet focus
seems almost quaint.
As it happens, resisting the temptation to collect fat paychecks
for stickering your name over the work of lieutenants in other time zones has
some upsides. For one, it helps your restaurant achieve a remarkably consistent
excellence. I imagine that having cooked his signature roast-chicken dish a
million times, he and his staff would gladly retire it, except his patrons
adore it (and it is indeed phenomenal). The reward for this commitment to
pleasing customers with an assiduous but unflashy artisanry, a less
spotlight-grabbing kind of craftsmanship, is the high regard of his peers,
widespread critical acclaim, and regular appearances near the top of Boston’s
most-popular-restaurant lists.
Many of the virtues of Hamersley’s workmanlike approach are
evident in his “Bistro” Bouillabaisse ($25). In it, he uses the archetypal fish
stew of Marseille as a starting point, but achieves an unmistakable New England
character with the use of impeccably fresh local seafood: Maine lobster,
littleneck clams, mussels, monkfish, and scallops. A raft of grilled crouton
keeps a bright, citrusy smear of rouille afloat in a shallow sea of intense
broth based on lobster stock. Some fennel and one verdant sprig of parsley
provide vegetal texture and interest. There’s real depth and complexity to that
broth, but Hamersley lets his painstakingly sourced local ingredients do most
of the talking. It’s at once sophisticated and homey, not as simple as it
looks, and, like that roast chicken, exactly the kind of dish that defeats less
gifted chefs. This isn’t the most innovative or artfully plated seafood stew in
town, but it might be the most soulful. That quality cannot be replicated
across an empire, and if that’s why Hamersley chose to stick so close to home,
it’s hard to imagine a better reason.
