some belated reviews: om, caffe umbra, pomodoro

i've been remiss in updating my beloved blog (which is two years old!!!), and have a few restaurant reviews to offer you: caffe umbra and om for restaurant week, plus pomodoro.

om: 8/18, 1p.m.
92 winthrop street / cambridge ma / 617-576-2800 / m-sat 5pm-1am, sun 10:30-2:30 + 5pm-1am / reservations accepted / entrees expensive ($25-35)

appetizer: borscht with smoked potatoes and sour cream
main: duck breast with mustard greens and duck confit bisteeya
dessert: lime cheesecake with mango and saffron

there is something luxurious about having a 3-course lunch that is absolutely more decadent than a nice dinner, even a 24-course dinner - because who has that much time in the middle of the day? it's just so...sinful. and in fact, we were a little rushed because i had to go back to work. thus i do not recommend 3-course lunches unless you are retired, have flexible hours and a boss who doesn't care if you leave for 3 hours, or are a student. ah, the ever-flexible life of the student.

we were given the choice of the lounge of the dining room for our lunch, and i chose for us, having arrived a little early: i saw how much trouble the lounge diners were having, since the tables were too low for the chairs to dine comfortably. what can i say? it's a well-designed lounge, not a well-designed lounge-that-doubles-as-dining-room. so upstairs we went, and you get a very pleasant view of the park adjacent to upstairs on the square from the wall of glass that you're seated against. we started with drinks, and i had this wonderful non-alcoholic drink that consisted of espresso, vanilla syrup, and chocolate in some form. it was like a mocha frappuccino, but several orders of magnitude better. the drinks are seriously good here, though a bit overpriced.

lunch was pretty good. i wasn't blown away by anything, but the flavors were interesting. this is one of those places that's very high concept, where you go if you want to try new flavor combinations, rather than well-done traditional dishes. the flavor combinations don't always work - actually i didn't think any of them were spectacular - but i was happy the chef was trying them, i guess. i felt that the restaurant was a little too new york, which is to say, a little pretentious, especially for boston/cambridge. i just want to eat good food! i don't want to be beaten over the head with the flavor combinations by a waiter who thinks he knows more about food than i do. the only time i want to be reminded what's in my dish and how to eat it is at a place like alinea or the french laundry, when the flavor combination or the sequence of ingredients actually matters.

the borscht was quite good; not having had it before, i have no comparisons to make. but it was smooth, the sour cream was wonderful, and the smoked potato was a particularly inspired touch. the duck was cooked perfectly, but the mustard greens were a little too bitter for my taste. the bitterness was supposed to be cut by the date-based sauce that came with it, but it was spread over the plate and you had to drag the mustard greens over the plate to get it. if there's one thing i really hate about high-concept food, it's when it's hard to eat. it can be a production, but i don't want it to be a production to eat it. the duck came with a cute little bisteeya in a tiny cast iron pan, which was good, but the phyllo dough totally shattered upon contact with my fork, showering me with the slivers. another big raspberry in the face of the diner who cares about ease of eating.

dessert was pretty good - the cheesecake was a bit sweet, but nice and creamy, and not too dense. it again suffered from the eating-as-a-production problem, but the lime-saffron combination is pretty good. all in all, i might come here again if i thought it was sufficiently affordable. the upstairs dining room is also quite nice and comfortable, and not too noisy, despite the uninspired waterfall you see when you enter the restaurant (it's supposed to soothe and relax you upon entry).

caffe umbra: 8/23, 8p.m. (closed as of this past spring)
appetizer: arancini
side: eggplant fries with date ketchup
main: pork two ways - tenderloin and sausage, with mustard cream sauce and fingerling potatoes
dessert: sticky toffee pudding

i didn't think it was possible, but caffe umbra did itself one better this year, over last year's restaurant week. last year, i had an ok main course, but the appetizer and dessert were phenomenal. this year, everything was really great.

ok, so my arancini were a little disappointing - good, but nothing special there. i could have done the same thing at home, happily. but other people's appetizers - especially josh's mushroom tart - were excellent, so i apparently just chose the wrong thing. i split an order of eggplant fries with v, curious to see what they'd be like. they were breaded well and fried perfectly - crusty on the outside and all mushily eggplanty on the inside, just the way i like eggplant. they came with a date-based ketchup that i didn't like, but the fries were good on their own. i could tell that the fries were slightly oversalted to counterbalance the sweetness of the dates, which is nice to see, but it didn't work in the end.

i really liked the main course. miriam had a fish (a firm white one...i forget which one) that was done lightly in butter and a broth of some kind, which was much more delicate than my pork, and quite nice (for really good seafood, or at least fish, i prefer sel de la terre). anyway, the pork. the tenderloin was done perfectly - i do love hunks of meat. the sausage was also good, if slightly unremarkable. the lardons were a little too meaty for me - i like my lardons fried to they're crisp and chewy, not left all canadian bacon-y. the sauce was this really fantastic mustard cream sauce, which was very mild and a perfect accompaniment to the meat. the most wonderful thing, though, was the potatoes - rarely have i had potatoes this good. i can't quite describe why their flavor was so good - suffice it to say that they tasted more potato-y than any other potatoes i've had for a while.

and dessert. well, friends, i basically chose this restaurant despite the fact that it didn't post its menu, because i knew the sticky toffee pudding would be on its dessert menu. i had it last year and it was absolutely transcendent: the best thing i'd had in a long, long time. a very long, long time. and it still is. it's basically a coarse pound cake steamed in caramel, so the whole thing is saturated with caramel, and the edges are slightly chewy with accumulated caramel. that thing is still transcendent. i can still taste it when i think about it, and think about it i do. i also tried miriam's dessert - a chocolate espresso torte - and i tell you that this is the place to go for dessert if that's what you're wanting. my god. i have never tasted such a silky chocolate torte (read: no flour) in my life. that thing is amazing. it's the best chocolate cake i've had in a restaurant (minus that chocolate confection at alinea), ever. and a bonus: i emailed the chef to see what kind of chocolate they use in the kitchen, since the server didn't know, and it's callebaut bittersweet - the kind i use. i felt somewhat justified in my love for callebaut for baking...

a note about going to caffe umbra: this restaurant, despite the great food, is EXTREMELY loud. so loud i wouldn't go there except later in the evening when people start to leave, or early when people haven't yet arrived. i've never set foot in a more poorly acoustically designed space; you literally have to yell to hear people who are two feet away from you. that said, i'd totally go back. just when it's not crowded.

pomodoro: 8/25, 7p.m.
24 harvard street / brookline ma / 617-566-4455 / 11am-11pm / reservations accepted (and recommended, by me) / cash only / entrees moderately expensive ($18-25)

appetizers: calamari, antipasto
main: pappardelle with fresh peas, foraged mushrooms, and rabbit in a cream sauce
dessert: creme brulee
cocktail: pear brandy alexander

we were originally supposed to go to la morra, but charles' parents got stuck in traffic, so we went to pomodoro instead. when my parents said "pomodoro" i got a vision of some hokey, plump times-based font with tomatoes in the place of the o's. when we arrived, i saw that it was actually a very nice-looking, hip-looking place. true to that impression, the clientele is a mix of older, cosmopolitan types (this place is in brookline; there's another location in the north end) and hip, young things.

this reservation was fortuitous, because this is the best italian restaurant i have ever been to. it has also vaulted to number 2 on my list of favorite restaurants in boston/cambridge, after craigie street and before pigalle, because of its affordability (dinner for 7 was $260 with a generous tip).

when you enter, you see a small bar that's in the middle of the restaurant. huh, unusual. if you're waiting they'll have you stand at the bar in this tiny restaurant, where people brush by you in order to get past. you know you're in a real restaurant when the people at the bar are eating, and not just drinking. true to this sentiment, when you wait at the bar, they bring you menus, napkins, water, and bread. let me talk about the water and the bread. the water is kept in tall glass carafes with lemons and mint - a lovely combination and fairly unusual for water. the bread is quite good - foccaccia and then some sort of cheese-covered lighter bread - and comes with a very excellent olive oil, and a pile of olives that have a slice of preserved lemon on them.

the main thing i like about this place - besides the decor, which is all dark browns and golds and is absolutely luxurious without being overly so - is that it's like you're welcomed by a family. not just any family - not the stereotypical tv-commercial italian family - but some cosmopolitan italian family that lives in milan or some other fabulous urban place. they brought us twice as much food, appetizer-wise, than we asked for, without charging us for more, which in retrospect was slightly too much, but made us feel very much loved. though having very little space is usually annoying, here it was only mildly so - everyone is shifting around for each other, but it's one of those things happening in the backgrounds - everyone is still focused on their conversations.

the appetizers were great - the calamari done just right, with the most flavorful (and red) tomato sauce i've had in quite a while. the antipasto were also great - traditional, with the almonds and such - and the bread is an appetizer in of itself.

the main courses were the star of the night, though. my pasta made "foraged mushrooms" an acceptable term on a restaurant menu. usually, when restaurants say this, they're just being trendy, but here they mean it. those mushrooms were simply the best i've had in this city. some chewy, some earthier than others...i felt like i was actually eating products of a forest. the peas were good, though i don't have a good enough palate to tell if they were truly wonderful, and the rabbit was done with care to ease of eating - it was shredded. not shredded too fine, nor left in chunks too large: it was perfect. though i have to admit that my palate also doesn't see much of a difference between rabbit and pork, except that rabbit is milder than a very porky tasting pork.

dessert, sadly, was a bit of a bomb. we had creme brulee (a trio) and again they brought us more - 7 instead of 3, one for each of us. but the creme brulee didn't have the silky quality it's supposed to have; instead it had the texture of a third-rate hotel school student's creme brulee, which is to say that silky it was not. it seemed to have curdled. however, eggs, cream and sugar are still a wonderful combination, and we ate away. oh, a quick note: pomodoro is cash only, so go to the atm before you get there.