Il Capriccio Review

Il Capriccio: A restaurant in decline

Overall rating: 78

Food rating: 75

Il Capriccio, like La Campania, provided a chance to eat Italian food in Waltham that was as good as all but the very best restaurants in the North End. It was expensive but elegant and had a number of signature dishes, such as their porcini mushroom souffle, that were spectacularly good. It was a place we would go for anniversaries, birthdays, and other celebrations, and to take visiting family out for a great meal.

I hadn't been there in a couple of years. My last visit was with a large group and the food was only okay, but it was hard to judge given the difficulties in serving such a group at once.

This week I went again, and was sorry to find that the food and atmosphere have both declined.

Service was pleasant but inattentive. For instance, we had to ask for bread to be served, though when it came was perfectly decent crusty bread served with good olive oil.

A glass of pinot grigio was fair at best, though admittedly not very expensive. An appetizer of Gorgonzola and pear ravioli was overly salty, overly rich, unbalanced (there was no taste of pear), and overall very mediocre. For a main, I had the chicken schnitzel, which was also oversalted, had a mustard sauce that overwhelmed the dish a bit, and was only okay.

You can get food of this quality or better at Sweet Basil or Fiorella's, both for less money. The atmosphere isn't as elegant at either of these, but Il Capriccio is feeling worn and tired. It's no longer a place I could imagine taking someone for a marvelous romantic dinner, either for the food or for the atmosphere. I'm sad about that.

The Brewster Fish House Review

The Brewster Fish House: Very good food and drink, with incredible lobster chowder

Overall rating: 90

Food rating: 90

I'd heard about The Brewster Fish House from the same friend who had recommended Fin. The Brewster Fish House doesn't take reservations, though, and is typically very busy, so we hadn't tried it. However, this week is back to school for some locales, so Cape Cod is much quieter than usual for a pre-Labor Day week and thus we made it in early to a nearly empty restaurant.

The location is small but the tables are not crowded together, however it was overly air conditioned. The wait staff were welcoming and helpful with recommendations.

I tried two mixed drinks both of which were very good and both of which were unusual flavors. Not the sort of thing that everyone would necessarily like, and this foreshadowed much of the meal.

For appetizers, I ordered an odd seared foie gras preparation that included herring and white peaches. It was very good but not incredible. My wife ordered a sashimi special that she felt similarly about. However, the waitress had said people go out of their way to get their lobster bisque, and so we also shared a bowl of the bisque. Although I love lobster, I'm nearly always disappointed in lobster bisque. Not so at The Brewster Fish House. Their lobster bisque was one of the more wonderful foods I've eaten, creamy with chunks of lobster, but not overly heavy or improperly seasoned. I'm not sure how better to describe it, but it's worth eating there just for the bisque. I also tried some of someone else's fish chowder, and this was very good.

For mains, my wife got lobster prepared out of the shell with pain perdue, mushrooms, tomatoes, fennel, and some beef bone marrow. This was very good. I had fluke with couscous served with brown butter dashi poured into the bowl. The fluke was delicious, though the skin was a bit tougher and/or less crispy than it might have been. The flavor combination was unusual.

For dessert, I got an odd plate of panna cotta served with a topping of whipped cream, some fresh slices of fruit and blueberries in a separate section of the plate, and a third section with olive oil cake topped with peach ice cream. There didn't seem to be much coherence to the dessert. All three parts were good, though the cake/ice cream was best and the panna cotta a bit dull even with the fruit.

Another member of our group got blackberry sorbet (a song by Prince has been running through my head since), and did not like it. However I thought it was really amazingly good though with a very strong and somewhat sour flavor; I'm not a sorbet fan but this was wonderful.

So, reviewing this restaurant is a bit tricky. First, I think the flavors are unusual and this is not an ideal place for people who do not like strong or strange flavors. However, I'm mainly focused on this because the group included people who were less-than-thrilled with such foods, and usually we're out on our own where I wouldn't be commenting on this. Second, and more central to the issue, is that much of the food was very good but not great, the drinks were excellent and strange, and the lobster bisque was so incredibly good that we would be eating here again no matter what the rest of the meal was like.

So the 90 rating needs some explanation as it overrates the overall food a bit, and dramatically underrates the lobster bisque. That said, The Brewster Fish House is one of the very best places I've eaten on Cape Cod.

The Kirkland Tap and Trotter Review

The Kirkland Tap and Trotter: Good food and excellent drinks in a relaxed atmosphere

Overall rating: 87

Food rating: 85

It took us a long time to make it to KT&T, but we finally got there last weekend. Tony Maws' other restaurant, Craigie on Main, has some of the best food in the Boston area, but the reviews I'd seen of KT&T were kind of mediocre. KT&T is in Somerville, around the corner from Bergamot.

The space is brighter than Craigie and more open, and KT&T has an overall relaxed feel to it. Like Craigie, though, the wait staff were extremely friendly, accommodating, and helpful. I asked our waiter for a number of recommendations, and he clearly was giving his actual favorites, and neither trying to avoid giving a recommendation nor up-selling us.

One of these favorites was his favorite cocktail, Smoke N' Bols, which was really wonderful. My wife got a coconut margarita that was unusual and also very good.

For appetizers we got a mussel stew, made with pasta, and the crispy-fried pork ribs. The mussels were very good and the pasta was excellent. I thought the ribs were good but nothing special, but my wife thought they were really superb.

For an entree, we both got the roasted Scottish sea trout, prepared with rice and vegetables. The waiter had told us this farm-raised trout tasted like salmon and that the vegetables were fresh and delicious. Both of these were accurate, but the fish itself while perfectly cooked and tasting like salmon wasn't actually all that interesting. The accompanying vegetables were great.We also got a side of grilled rapini (broccoli rabe) that was well prepared but nothing unusual.

We didn't get dessert, and the price with two drinks each, two entrees, two appetizers, and one side was about $70 per person, so overall a pretty reasonable price.

Overall, the drinks were great, the food was quite good, and the atmosphere and service were excellent. The food is somewhat different from what you would get at most other places in the area, and we will certainly be heading back. Those mediocre reviews I'd seen don't do the place justice.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns Review

Overall rating: 98

Food rating: 95

Blue Hill at Stone Barns: An amazing dining experience

I'd been hearing that Blue Hill at Stone Barns was the best restaurant in Westchester, where we travel fairly often, but had been unable to get a reservation. Then, a couple of days before we were heading down I checked and found an opening for dinner and snapped it up.

The Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is a non-profit center created by David Rockefeller on land from the Rockefeller estate. Much of the food comes from the working farm, its greenhouse, and surrounding farms.

Reaching Stone Barns is pretty easy, but getting to the parking area at twilight was relatively unmarked and involved a fair number of twisty roads. Once there, we were met by a valet to park the car. You then walk through an open court with surrounded by stone buildings to reach the restaurant. It's a really beautiful space. We didn't take pictures, so I am stealing from the Internet:

The dress code is jacket and tie for men. Once we entered we were offered a chance to either go to our table or sit first at the bar and have drinks. We chose to go to the table, which was in a gorgeous dining room (another stolen picture):

The tables are spaced far apart, and the acoustics make it easy to talk privately. There were an incredibly large number of servers for the number of guests, and so we were very well attended to.

You could easily imagine this feeling stuffy and formal, but it didn't. Everything and everyone felt comfortable and welcoming. I ordered a drink that was basically an old fashioned made in birch wood, which added a birch beer flavor. Unusual and wonderful.

There is no menu at Blue Hill. Food just starts arriving once they check to make sure there are no dietary intolerances. Most courses involve just once piece of food for each guest, and there were 25 or more courses. These ranged from an initial piece of lettuce with some dressing on it, to venison, to dried herring. At one point our table was taken to a separate building (that used to be the manure storage on the farm), where we had some amazing bread with a couple of different accompaniments. I ordered a glass of wine that was at the lower end of the wine prices, but was really delicious.

The foods were unusual and delicious, and the setting and service made it the best restaurant experience I've ever had.

The prices matched the experience: $198 per person before drinks, tax, and tip.

I don't think I can do the restaurant justice in this review, and the expense is enough that it's hard to imagine going back for quite awhile, but if you are in Westchester and want one of the best dining experiences you will ever have, go to Blue Hill at Stone Barns.

Asta Review

Overall rating: 89

Food rating: 92

Asta: Tasting menus with somewhat small portions of excellent food

We went to Asta this weekend with another couple. They had been their twice before, but it was our first time there.

Asta serves only tasting menus, and has a three course tasting for $45, a five course tasting for $70, and an eight course tasting for $95. There is also an optional course of foie gras for an additional $24. Wine pairings are available with the five and eight course options.

The restaurant is next to Deuxaves on Mass. Ave in Boston. It feels much less pretentious and "happening" than Deuxaves, and is a relatively small space but does not feel crowded. The wait staff were welcoming and reasonably helpful. The tables have drawers with silverware, so when courses and silverware are cleared, you replace forks, knives, and spoons from your drawer. Although it sounds kind of hokey, I thought this was a really nice touch.

We were given a welcome glass of sparkling wine. The amuse bouche was some duck liver and hearts on a tortilla and was delicious.

The three course menu actually had the foods that sounded best to both me and my wife, but did not seem like the best way to try a new and highly rated restaurant. Asta can handle different people at the table getting different numbers of courses, so we asked whether we could get one three course meal and one eight course meal with plans to share the dishes between us. The waiter told us that this would not work well because the eight course meal has such small portions that they are hard to share. This was a bit of foreshadowing of one of the main problems with Asta.

The actual options are, of course, quite limited, and so pure tasting menu restaurants, though interesting in theory ("let the chef just pick what he wants to serve"), aren't our favorite choices. Places with some a la carte options necessarily provide more flexibility if you're not thrilled with the tasting menu offerings.

In the end, I got the five course tasting menu and added the foie gras, and my wife got the three course tasting menu. We split the wine pairing for the five course menu.

The first course was octopus with a squid ink sauce that was very tasty. The three course meal had a salad with some biscuits and was excellent and substantially more food. The second course was a bowl of beans that was good but not great. The third course was broccoli prepared with a small amount of cheese and some horseradish, and this was superb -- probably the best course of the five course menu. The foie gras was served with some sweet potatoes and a coffee-based sauce. It was well prepared but not actually that tasty. The main course was this pieces of duck breast that was wonderfully prepared and delicious. The main course on the three course meal was chicken breast, and this was excellent and again quite a bit more food than the duck. The dessert was a hazelnut cake with a lightly poached pear that was very good. The dessert on the three course menu was a crepe with some berries that my wife thought was excellent.

The bread that came midway through the meal was good. The wines were unusual and mostly quite good.

Portions on the five course meal were small enough that I was still hungry at the end of the meal. The couple who was with us had had the eight course meal on one of their visits, and apparently there was very little food in a number of the courses. The amount of wine served as pairings was typically about half a glass, so our plan to share a tasting meant that my wife and I each had much less than two glasses of wine.

With the foie gras course, we were served a tumbler of some Trappist monk ale, and when the bill came it turned out that there was an unmentioned (on the menu or by the waiter) $8 charge for this. Apparently it was assumed that if you were having the wine paring that you would want this tiny non-wine paring with the foie gras. We mentioned this to our waiter, and one member of the group asked him to take this charge ($16, since two of us had gotten the foie gras) off the bill. He did this, but clearly wasn't pleased about it.

For me, this put a bit of a damper on the meal. I did not want to feel like we were being cheap or haggling over the cost, but I would expect a restaurant to mention that when you add a $24 item like the foie gras, that you are actually adding a $32 item if you happen to have picked a wine pairing. This is particularly the case given that I would not have chosen to have ale, and that $8 seemed like a lot for the tiny portion presented.

Overall, Asta is a very nice place to eat if you area okay with being constrained to a tasting menu. Much of the food was excellent and the wines were good. The prices are a bit high for the amount of food served, and my impression is that this becomes more of an issue as you go from three to five to eight courses, but this is a Boston restaurant on Mass. Ave., and the prices are not out of line for this quality of food.

For a place with only a tasting menu, I much preferred Asta to Journeyman.

Updated ratings

As of October 2014, I decided it was time to go through all my restaurant ratings and make sure that I still agreed with them and that they accurately reflected how I would order the various restaurants I'd reviewed.

I took the opportunity to spread out the lower ratings, since my ratings all tended to cluster above 80, which compressed differences between restaurants. I also revised ratings for restaurants whose food/quality had changed some over time. Most particularly, this affected Ribelle -- now one of my top-rated restaurants.

When I look at reviews of restaurants, I often wish I could quickly see all their reviews to get a sense of whether I agree with them about restaurants we've both been to, since if I do their reviews of restaurants I haven't been to seem more useful to me.

With that in mind, here is a list of the restaurants with their revised ratings, sorted by overall quality:

Name	Overall	Food
T.W. Food	96	95
Craigie on Main	93	93
Hungry Mother	93	95
Ribelle	93	94
Momofuku Ko	93	94
Hamersley’s Bistro	92	93
Oleana	91	94
Speakeasy	91	85
Myers&Chang	89	86
Bronwyn	88	90
Sycamore	88	88
Bergamot	88	88
Strip T’s	87	90
Journeyman	86	85
Sarma	86	85
Fin	85	89
Bar Boulud Boston	84	83
Lineage	83	85
Puritan & Company	82	84
Lumiere	80	80
51 Lincoln	79	79
Farmstead Table	78	79
Sweet Basil	75	75
Buca’s Tuscan Roadhouse	73	75
Elephant Walk (Waltham)	50	50

Here is the same list, sorted by food quality:

Name	Overall	Food
T.W. Food	96	95
Hungry Mother	93	95
Ribelle	93	94
Momofuku Ko	93	94
Oleana	91	94
Craigie on Main	93	93
Hamersley’s Bistro	92	93
Bronwyn	88	90
Strip T’s	87	90
Fin	85	89
Sycamore	88	88
Bergamot	88	88
Myers&Chang	89	86
Speakeasy	91	85
Journeyman	86	85
Sarma	86	85
Lineage	83	85
Puritan & Company	82	84
Bar Boulud Boston	84	83
Lumiere	80	80
51 Lincoln	79	79
Farmstead Table	78	79
Sweet Basil	75	75
Buca’s Tuscan Roadhouse	73	75
Elephant Walk (Waltham)	50	50

Bar Boulud Boston review

Overall rating: 84

Food rating: 83

Bar Boulud Boston: Beautiful Space; Good Food

We went with friends to Bar Boulud Boston, who had enjoyed the New York Bar Boulud. I'd had a hamburger in one of the Daniel Boulud New York restaurants many years ago, but otherwise have not eaten in any of his establishments. The restaurant had opened very recently, and we noted a number of negative reviews about the food and service the day of our reservations, and seriously discussed canceling and going elsewhere.

Bar Boulud is in the Mandarin Oriental, and there is valet parking for the hotel that is discounted (to $19) if you eat at the restaurant. That made parking easy, if expensive. We were greeted as you'd expect at a fine restaurant and the service was attentive and appropriate, so whatever had been others experience, we had no problems.

The space itself is beautiful with wood floors, wooden arches perhaps reminiscent of a vineyard, a glass wall looking onto Boylston Street, and beautiful tables and chairs.

Two of us had cocktails that were good but quite expensive, and glasses of wine were also very expensive; beer seemed more normally priced. Bread was brought out that was  a perfectly nice crusty bread.

For appetizers, the cold lobster aioli was fine but not particularly interesting. Similarly, the cauliflower soup was pleasant but not remarkable. One person had the onion soup, which he felt was excellent and one of the two best things we had at dinner. One person go the Salad Lyonnaise made with chicken liver, and this was tasted by all and felt to be the one really tasty dish of the evening. Two of us shared the Shrimp al Ajillo which was fairly dull and had very few shrimp for the price.

For main courses, two of us had the lemon sole which was nicely prepared and a large amount of fish. One person had the burger, and felt that it was underseasoned for a high-end restaurant burger. One person had the Spaghetti au Citron in a clam sauce; it was tasty but a bit overly salted.

For dessert, the Maple Pear Coupe was okay but nothing special. We shared a basket of Baked Madeleines which were nice, but again nothing special; we commented that they would have gone well with a chocolate dipping sauce.

The overall experience at Bar Boulud was nice enough -- certainly better than the early reviews had suggested -- but the food met the expectations created by the reviews: it was nicely prepared and pleasant, but there was no wow factor as you might expect from Daniel Boulud's first restaurant in Boston. The prices were not unexpected for the location (in a very high-end hotel), but were too high for the food. Eating at the soon-to-be-closed Hamersley's Bistro would be a bit more expensive but provide a much more exciting meal.