review: nora is a quarter-century old (sel de la terre)

we went to sel de la terre for nora's 25th, since craigie street bistrot was booked (note to self: book craigie street for own birthday). the food wasn't really amazing, but it was quite solid, occasionally approaching epiphany. i had barbecued salmon with brussels sprouts, turnips, and "spiced butternut squash nage," with crispy parsnips on top. i hate it when restaurants try to be clever or cute with their terminology - one ends up wondering what it means in english. "crispy parsnips"? that could be any of a million different things. it turned out that they were basically really thin chips made out of parsnips instead of potatoes. very enjoyable, but i'm not sure that they really went with the rest of the dish - in fact, they were pretty much a separate experience from eating the rest of it, so i have no idea why it was included. however, the rest of the meal was fantastic - the salmon was nothing short of the best salmon i've ever had. i'm not sure that i think that barbecued salmon is the best way to treat it, but it did go well with the squash puree. the turnips were fantastic - all crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, and brussels sprouts are only unredeemable if they've been steamed or microwaved after having been frozen. probably the best thing about the dish was the salmon, which was simply perfectly cooked and really...well, i don't really claim to be the expert on the flavor level of different kinds of salmon, but this one was pretty darn good. it was also a rather obscenely large piece of salmon - almost twice what you might get at another restaurant.

however, the restaurant in general is priced pretty well for all this, and of course there's the bread at the beginning. sel de la terre is famed for the bread, and is rightly so. i'm a big fan of the black olive bread. the butter had to be european - it was rather yellow and you could just taste the butterfat, not in a bad way. i do wish the bread had been warm, though - i'm generally not a fan of cold bread. it's not a problem when the bread is light, but when it's dense, you feel like you're eating a brick.

what made up for a fairly up-and-down evening was really great service - just enough so as not to be inattentive, and not too much so as to be overbearing. i felt like our server would have talked to us about herself a little bit, had we been the type of people to inquire. i suppose that's my ideal of servers in general. and it's an ideal that requires servers to perhaps share a little too much about themselves, but there's something that distinguishes run-of-the-mill service and really good service, and for me, that involves some sort of action on the server's part that is different from the norm.

we had a couple of appetizers as well (i apologize for the woeful organization of this entry) - the charcuterie and a smoked chicken-feta cheese flatbread pizza. both were quite good, if not groundbreaking. the charcuterie at craigie street is better, but this one was the traditional combination of forcemeats and condiments. the flatbread pizza was maybe a bit...unexciting? i guess maybe i feel that flatbread pizzas are all the rage now. however, the smoked chicken-feta cheese combination was really great. i would have liked something to add a little more zing to it - citrus of some kind? something that was a little sharp in flavor.

i had been thinking about my favorite restaurants recently, and these are my first thoughts regarding a top ten (in the boston/cambridge area):
1. craigie street bistrot
2. pigalle
3. caffe umbra
4. sel de la terre
5. upstairs on the square
6. central kitchen
7. aujourd'hui
8. picco
9. rangzen
10. addis red sea

and these are the places i would still like to go to:
rachel's kitchen
oishii (the one in newton)
taberna de haro (the tapas restaurant near my sister's house in brookline)
hamersley's bistro
neptune oyster
martsa's on elm
family restaurant in brookline
plus places in inman square, and davis square in general, and the japanese restaurants in the porter exchange building