Pimp My BLT
Chefs enjoy bringing their own styles and tastes to classic dishes. The latest wave is teaching an old sandwich new tricks.
Certain dishes are timeless, and the BLT sandwich -- smoky, salty bacon with crisp lettuce and acidic-yet-sweet tomato -- is one of them. But the urge to play with these classics is irresistible to many chefs. While tweaking as a method of culinary invention can't be called foolproof, the BLT is one combination that stands up nicely to creativity, a sense of adventure, and, well, lobster.
Pino Maffeo of Restaurant L in Back Bay thinks the dish "plays well with a lot of different seafoods." His take is an appetizer of four diminutive stacks: Each little disc of tomato holds a tiny wedge of iceberg lettuce that's draped with a tinier strip of crisp bacon and topped by a jellybean- sized fried West Coast oyster. There's a dot of herb aioli hidden between the "L" and the "T," and a minute amount of fried jasmine rice sits in for bread.
Chef Robert Fathman of Azure, also in Back Bay, offers a soup that smacks of the sandwich. Its base is a bright-green puree made of English peas, fava beans, and baby spinach, and it's served with one dollop of bacon-infused creme fraiche and another of yellow tomato concasse (peeled and then roughly chopped). Toasted, garlicky croutons bob between tomato chunks. "It's a play on Mexican green soup," Fathman explains, which is made green with chilies and flavored with ham hocks.
The seafood-BLT combination is not unique to Maffeo's kitchen. At Bambara in Cambridge, it's sometimes "more conceptual, and in some ways more literal," says executive chef Michael Haimowitz, who makes a fried soft-shell crab PLT -- P for pancetta -- in which spicy arugula takes the place of lettuce. And Mark Allen, chef and owner of Le Soir in Newton Highlands, has added lobster BLTs to Sunday brunch. Allen likes this version because "it's understandable, approachable," though it's obvious that chefs -- and diners -- don't need that much convincing.
B. L. Teases
AZURE 65 Exeter Street, Boston, 617-266-6222, www.azure.com
BAMBARA 25 Edwin H. Land Boulevard, Cambridge, 617-868-4444, www.bambara-cambridge.com
LE SOIR 51 Lincoln Street, Newton, 617-965-3100, www.lesoirbistro.com
RESTAURANT L 234 Berkeley Street, Boston, 617-266-4680, www.louisboston.com
