Kenmore's comeback

Janet O'Donoghue and Patrick Noe first met at this Commonwealth Avenue spot 25 years ago, but back then it was the Rathskeller, and the only reason to come to Kenmore Square was, as she puts it, for ''late-night snacks and rock 'n' roll."

Instead of a beer-soaked stage, the room is now Eastern Standard, where the couple sits at the marble bar trading bites of duck rillettes and foie gras terrine as swinging jazz plays over the sound system. It's a world away from the Rat, and certainly no IHOP.

A Kenmore renaissance sparked by the building of the Hotel Commonwealth and the ongoing renovation of an MBTA terminal has turned this down-on-its-heels neighborhood in the shadow of Fenway Park into a dining and nightlife destination. The number of eateries doesn't exactly rival the South End or Back Bay. But for the first time in decades, diners and drinkers can piece together a hip night out in the square without ever stepping onto Lansdowne Street.

First course: beer
A sign on one wall at Cornwall's reads, ''Those who don't enjoy each other's company always seem to be in a rush." An after-work crowd lingers, lining up their cellphones on the bar next to glasses of Boddingtons and Smithwick's.

The wood is dark, the lighting is soft, and stuffed boar's heads on the wall wear baseball caps. The space is new, but the bar has been in Kenmore for 30 years. Unlike the Rat, it survived the demolition that cleared the way for the hotel when owners Pamela and John Beale moved their restaurant across the street. The burgers, wings, shepherd's pie, and other comfort grub are all cooked by John, with Pamela and a niece and nephew handling other duties.

Pamela Beale, often called the ''Mayor of Kenmore Square," says that for years ''Kenmore was always at the crossroads; it never got any worse, or any better."

The stirrings for change began in the late 1980s, she says. About a decade later, developers pushed for the hotel as the center of a revitalization project for the square. It opened in 2002, and restaurants and retail stores have followed.

Outside Cornwall's, about 20 people sit on the small patio facing Beacon Street, some of them trying to talk over the sound of wheezing buses at a temporary stop. The center of Commonwealth is a construction site, where by 2007 the MBTA will have finished a glass bus shelter and will have completed the underground work on the subway station, which already has a new entrance at the hotel.

Eric Stevenson, 33, who works at Boston University (a partner in the hotel project), says he has already tried the new Petit Robert Bistro nearby, and then points across the street at the distinctive red awning of Eastern Standard. Petit Robert ''is all the buzz right now," he says. ''But I'm also interested in trying this new place."

Second course: appetizers
A Boston Pedicab carries passengers down the sidewalk next to the Hotel Commonwealth, where Great Bay anchors the corner. The center of the main room is the raw bar, where the menu offers mostly raw seafood spiked with Latin and Asian touches. As undulating shadows and light cast from a mobile ripple like tropical fish across a wall, the sound of the Gipsy Kings jangles overhead, and the cooks piece together tiny halibut tacos with mango salsa and avocado, then a curried albacore ceviche.

Betsy Ross, 30, of Brighton is sampling a few things at the bar, right near the bronze sculpture of a fish. With the raw-bar dishes alone running up to $18 apiece, this is the most expensive restaurant in Kenmore Square.

''I don't do the whole late bar scene that much anymore," she says. ''It's more about going out to dinner."

In recent years, for anyone other than Lansdowne-bound club kids, Kenmore has been little more than a route to the ballpark, Boston University, or Brookline. But in the 1920s and '30s, when it was the western end of Commonwealth Avenue Mall, part of Frederick Law Olmsted's vision for an Emerald Necklace, more than a dozen hotels lined the mall between Arlington Street and Kenmore Square, according to Timothy Kirwan, managing director of the Hotel Commonwealth.

In the 1950s, the square was part of the Auto Mile of Boston; many of the square's buildings still have the wide plate-glass windows from their days as showrooms. By the '70s and '80s, the square had become the jazz and then the rock music center of the city, teeming with clubgoers who thronged Storyville and the Rathskeller. By that time, the Charlesgate Overpass had cut Kenmore off from the Back Bay stretch of Commonwealth Avenue, and the gray bunkerlike bus stop in the middle visually bisected the square.

Meanwhile, the Red Sox flirted with building a new park elsewhere but ultimately decided to stay, which Kirwan says has helped fuel Kenmore's rebirth. The proximity of the park helps attract diners and hotel visitors who may return even when there's no game.

Ross, a bartender at the West Side Lounge who is about to finish massage school, is impressed with the area. ''Hopefully in a few weeks I won't be a starving student and I can actually afford to go out and experience something here besides Red Sox games, although I'm not complaining," she says. ''I could do that all the time, too."

Third course: dinner
As dusk falls, the lights along Commonwealth blink on, with the Citgo sign above throwing its reflection in windows. The Sarah Vaughan song playing at Eastern Standard matches the room's brasserie style, which extends from the leather seats, marble bar, and red lamps to the veal schnitzel, pork chop, and hanger steak on the menu.

The 140-seat place has been open only a few weeks, and it's already crowded, possibly because the Peter Niemitz-designed room captivated passersby as it took shape.

Owner Garrett Harker, former partner with Barbara Lynch at B&G Oysters and the Butcher Shop in the South End, has his eye on the room, and seems nervous but proud. ''We're up and running," he says.

''Up and running, with training wheels on," interjects manager Gwen Butler, directing traffic.

On the block where the Police, the Ramones, and Sonic Youth once blared, a full complement of diners sits at the marble bar. ''Look at all these people," Harker says. ''You've got South End people, you've got Beacon Hill people, you've got some people that probably have never left the Bristol Lounge before. I think it's great to have this area reintegrated with the rest of Boston."

O'Donoghue and Noe, the couple who met at the Rat, know the restaurant business well: They once owned Cafe Celador in Cambridge, and Noe, 51, now teaches culinary arts at Quincy High School. But O'Donoghue, 47, director of creative services at the Museum of Fine Arts, says that even though Kenmore's changes are exciting, it's all ''still a bit of a work in progress."

Fourth course: dessert
At 10 p.m., a canoodling couple sits at one end of the pastry bar downstairs at Petit Robert Bistro. Under a Brigitte Bardot poster, a cook torches the top of creme brulee, arranges a little chocolate Eiffel Tower on a plate, then serves up a giant profiterole, scooping ice cream into a puff and drizzling it with chocolate sauce.

Loic Le Garrec, manager and co-owner with chef Jacky Robert, says the place has been mostly busy, but he's not sure how it will do on game nights, when anyone not at Fenway might be tempted to avoid the traffic and parking nightmares. Nonetheless, Kenmore ''has become super-cool, thanks to the hotel," he says. ''There was nothing here, so people are so excited."

He pulls out a piece of scrap paper and starts to sketch out the latest idea, for an 8-foot-tall replica of the Eiffel Tower, complete with lights, that will go on the corner of the restaurant's front patio, announcing the bistro as a piece of Paris in the square.

Fifth course: cocktails
Foundation Lounge, in the basement of the hotel, is a sleek study in textures, from zebra-wood walls to rough concrete steps, perhaps more like New York than anything else in Kenmore. Against a soundtrack of soft funk, customers share plates of edamame and maki. By 11 p.m., a well-dressed crowd streams through the main room.

Chantal and Edward Boxer, who run a concierge business called Fini, glance around the bar and marvel at the neighborhood's metamorphosis. ''When we first moved here, it was burned-out buildings," he says.

Chris Wooster of Jamaica Plain, having cocktails with Jodi Vautrin and Christopher Scott, who live on nearby Boylston Street, echoes the sentiment: ''It used to be that good eating in Kenmore Square was Souper Salads."

The friends, who went to BU in the 1990s, recently ate at Petit Robert, ''and that was really, really good," says Vautrin, 33. ''And all of a sudden we realized that it's the new South End."

Not quite, but maybe one day. A future phase of the project will add more trees, says Hotel Commonwealth's Kirwan, plus brick sidewalks and carriage-style street lights around the circumference of the square. Other restaurant projects are in discussion, too.

Restaurants are ''like little mini-neighborhoods in themselves," each drawing a different crowd, he says. ''It's the glue that holds it all together."