NEW ENGLAND’S culinary tradition may be America’s oldest, but it’s not often considered its most delicious. After all, our local cuisine originally sprang from the British Isles, land of the boiled potato and overdone roast, and the Pilgrims, whose religious convictions and the harsh privations of early colonization demanded a bland parsimony at the table. Consider two signature dishes of our colonial forebears: New England boiled dinner, a wan soup of stringy boiled beef and root vegetables, and red flannel hash, the remains of the previous night’s boiled dinner chopped up for the next morning’s breakfast. Is it any wonder that the only Boston restaurant still dishing out unrepentant Olde New England cookery is Durgin-Park, a cartoonish, conglomerate-owned Faneuil Hall tourist trap?
Fortunately, New England cuisine didn’t stop evolving with the Puritans, but continued to absorb influences from subsequent waves of immigrants from all over the world. And we remain blessed with an incredible range of fresh local foodstuffs: abundant seafood; superb dairy products; heirloom fruits and berries; wild game; beautiful squashes, corn, and legumes; good beer and cider. Independent chef/owners have cultivated a more modern local cuisine that highlights the best of our local forests, farms, and fisheries, but supplants Puritan frugality with epicurean flair and the accents of later-arriving New Englanders. You can continue to enjoy your plain boiled lobster and Indian pudding; just don’t overlook the efforts of our most creative local chefs to update classic New England dishes.
Union Bar & Grille
A relative veteran of the burgeoning South End restaurant scene, Union Bar & Grille (1357 Washington Street, Boston, 617.423.0555) hews to a modern New American ethos that favors local, seasonal ingredients in refreshed versions of American classics. Its handsome ambience is bolstered by a mostly American wine list and famously smooth service. Perhaps in response to its scads of new nearby competitors, Union offers an autumn prix-fixe menu, making it possible to have a three-course feast featuring game, gourds, tree nuts, root vegetables, and maple syrup ($40; $68 with wine pairings) that would have been mostly foraged or hunted in the wild three centuries ago.
An appetizer of wild boar in a gingersnap braise is a bit gamier than farmed pork loin (like dark turkey meat versus light), flanked by a featherweight parsnip purée and showered with crunchy fried sweet-potato matchsticks. A hefty medallion of seared New Zealand venison is milder and leaner than the liverish meat of wild deer served in my hunting cousins’ homes, but benefits from a sweet-spiced, concentrated pan gravy. The roasted chestnuts in this jus are a little confounding: they have a pleasant flavor reminiscent of chickpeas, but an odd chewy/chalky texture.
More appealing are sides of pumpkin spätzle (like gnarled yet fluffy gnocchi) and wilted turnip greens. A recently offered maple bread pudding tastes of Grade B syrup, the darker, more intensely flavored product that maple farmers reserve for themselves while selling so-called Grade A syrup at a premium to unwitting outsiders. Granted, most of these dishes would be as familiar to Squanto and Myles Standish as Martian cuisine, but the refined treatment of high-quality rustic ingredients suits this posh urban oasis to a T.
Petit Robert Bistro
How could a modest-looking Parisian bistro in Kenmore Square evoke classic New England cuisine? Certainly not in the canonical French classics featured here, like charcuterie, duck confit, bouillabaisse, coq au vin, cassoulet, and steak frites. Yet there is one clear echo of that homely Yankee one-pot supper, the aforementioned New England boiled dinner, which Petit Robert Bistro (468 Comm Ave, Boston, 617.375.0699) exalts with a Gallic flair and luxury that might furrow a Boston Brahmin’s stingy brow. When a premature arctic breeze whistling down Comm Ave has me turning up my collar, Petit Robert’s pot au feu ($16) manages to warm my chilly bones from the inside.
The basic boiled dinner ingredients are all here: a tough, cheap, fatty cut of beef (boneless short ribs) braised slowly to falling-apart tenderness, plus some parsley-flecked potatoes, carrots, and onions (but no cabbage) in a mild, clear broth. What boosts this stew to kingly heights is the side plate of roasted marrow bone (a donut-sized shank segment) garnished with dollops of Dijon mustard and pink-tinged horseradish dressing. The steaming marrow, spooned onto hunks of excellent baguette, is unctuous and decadent-tasting, a coarse country cousin of the noble foie gras.
One could hardly follow this elegant gloss on the Irish-heritage boiled bacon and cabbage with mere pumpkin pie, so we opt for a pumpkin soufflé ($10) with cinnamon crème Anglaise, which arrives the promised 20 minutes later. It’s as scalding, sweet, and steamily evanescent as a salacious dream. (There’s one more parallel to Olde New England here in the refreshingly stony demeanor of the waitstaff. They offer no obsequious smiles, no phony familiarity — just a taciturn, workmanlike service that, while eminently French, would not seem out of place in Puritan Boston.)
Green Street
Under new Cambridge-native ownership, Central Square institution Green Street (280 Green Street, Cambridge, 617.876.1655) dropped its spicy Caribbean menu in favor of casual Yankee cooking for the 21st century. Chef Peter Sueltenfuss’s innovative approach to old-timey New England fare is exemplified by his treatment of bluefish, an oily local game fish that in clumsier hands can be unpleasantly fishy. On most local menus, bluefish is carefully trimmed of its darkest meat and grilled to reduce its natural greasiness, or smoked and mashed with cream cheese into a mild pâté. Here, Sueltenfuss produces an extraordinary appetizer of bluefish ($8) by curing thin filets in-house with salt and sugar. The result has the tender, almost-melting texture of cured salmon while retaining the unmistakable blue-gray color and richness of bluefish. This artisanal product is remarkable by itself but well-served by its piquant accompaniments: crunchy pickled green beans, cubes of vinaigrette-dressed beets, and a sinus-clearing horseradish cream. Combine bites of these on chunks of crusty bread and you get the flinty New England cousin of that deli classic: lox, cream cheese, and red onion on a bagel.
New England-style chowder is another traditional dish that’s inspired many colloquial variants. What they share is a clear broth lightened with cream or milk, cured pork (often fatback) for saltiness, root vegetables, and local sweet corn, lobster, oysters, clams, or cod, usually with a garnish of plain crackers. Some versions are absurdly rich with heavy cream, others lighter-bodied with whole milk. In Rhode Island, chowder is sometimes served clear, whitened to each diner’s taste with hot milk or cream at the table. Aficionados agree that the only unforgivable sin — one constantly committed in lesser restaurants — is heavy-handed thickening with flour or cornstarch.
Green Street’s chowder ($8) is a beautifully light, inland-style corn chowder with bacon, potatoes, and a touch of cream. Its novel twist is the addition of crisp, deep-fried soft-shell clams, combining the flavors of sweet corn chowder, fried clams, and briny clam chowder in a single bowl. You might add a side of the excellent, not-oversweetened baked beans with molasses-rich brown bread ($5) to complete the nutritious and frugal meal. It will gladden the hearts of your swamp-Yankee ancestors, who’d probably rather not know how tasty it all is.
Neptune Oyster
With its extensive raw bar and French-inspired menu of mostly seafood specialties, Neptune Oyster (63 Salem Street, Boston, 617.742.3474) provides a rare respite from the North End’s endless procession of Italian restaurants. But it also may be the best small-Western-style seafood restaurant in Boston, offering an astonishingly fresh, broad, and thoughtfully prepared cornucopia of local and flown-in marine delicacies: littlenecks and quahogs; steamers and mussels; crab, lobster, and langoustines; sea urchin, squid, and octopus; sardines, tuna, bluefish, and anchovies; sturgeon and trout; smoked salmon and salt cold. Neptune’s kitchen sings of the river and the sea, the raw and the cooked, the smoked and the cured, in salads and crudos, deep-fries and stews and grills. If you want to show a visitor what New England seafood is about, this is a nonpareil starting point.
On Monday nights, Neptune gives a rare nod to its Italian neighbors by featuring a special of lobster spaghettini ($33). This is a big, bold-flavored dish, a mound of slightly underdone pasta with copious chunks of Maine lobster tail meat, sauced in a spicy plum-tomato marinara with white wine and a fistful of sliced garlic, topped with Parmigiano and dark-roasted breadcrumbs. This makes a fitting follow-up to the similarly Italophilic oyster stew ($10), a true minestrone loaded with poached oysters and the pungent aroma of fresh oregano. You might argue that the delicate flavor of lobster and oysters are overwhelmed by the insistent Mediterranean flavors of these dishes, but you’d go unheeded by the crowds packing Neptune on a night when its competitors are mostly empty, and the special always runs out well before the kitchen closes.
Pops
With its elegant turn-of-last-century décor, Pops (560 Tremont Street, Boston, 617.695.1250) looks as fancy as its tonier South End neighbors, but has prices (all under $22) that put it in a more modest class. Chef/owner Felino Samson serves a kind of elevated comfort food that attracts thrifty Bostonians who might feel guilty splurging on a Tuesday-night dinner. Indeed, Pops often seems more packed with locals than the wealthy suburbanites who flood the neighborhood on weekends, no doubt drawn by Samson’s creative-yet-budget-friendly stamp on prosaic dishes like the stuffed quahog.
This staple of Rhode Island clam shacks is designed to make the best use of the quahog, a cheap, oversized hard-shell clam with tough, chewy meat. In its traditional preparation, a steamed quahog is removed from its shell, chopped, mixed with a mild Wonder Bread stuffing, and stuffed back into the shell for serving. Samson’s update of the humble “stuffie” ($9) doesn’t vary much from this formula; it just uses better ingredients with more trenchant flavors: very fresh quahogs, homemade Portuguese-bread crumbs, diced linguiça (a garlicky Portuguese pork sausage), sweet corn, a vibrant topping of minced tarragon and parsley, and a dollop of eye-wateringly garlicky aioli.
Samson has managed to punch up a beloved but often insipid shore-food classic with flavors from the Portuguese-speaking immigrant community that historically manned much of our local fishing industry. His glamorized stuffie is another example of how classic New England cuisine is evolving to reflect the increasing diversity and culinary sophistication of New Englanders themselves. With chefs like these at work, we can all be thankful we’ve moved beyond pot roast and codcakes. @
[Photos by Joel Veak]
