Turner's Seafood Grill & Market
506 Main St., Melrose
781-662-0700; turners-seafood.com
Restaurant hours: Lunch Tuesday-Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; dinner Tuesday-Thursday, 5 p.m.-9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 4:30-10 p.m.; Sunday, 5-9 p.m. Oyster bar hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 11:30 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m.; Sunday, 3-9 p.m.
Visa, Mastercard,
Accessible to the handicapped
With its renovated storefronts and retro-style streetlights, Main Street in downtown Melrose calls to mind a bustling market street from a century ago. One of the town's most nostalgia-inducing landmarks is Turner's Seafood Grill & Market, although the place is actually just 14 years old.
"We wanted it to look like an authentic New England seafood house," says co-owner Kathi Turner. The popular restaurant has expanded twice since its 1994 opening, most recently in 2005, but it feels as if it's been here for generations. The decor features a high molded-tin ceiling, lazy overhead fans, sea-green wainscoting below bare brick walls, and nautical tchotchkes, from lobster pots and scuffed oars to ship models and wooden fish.
Turner's Seafood has a right to look old. The family-owned business traces its roots to James F. Turner, who started work at the Boston Fish Pier in 1920. Four of James F.'s grandsons and their wives now own and manage Gloucester-based Turner Seafoods Inc., which supplies their Melrose restaurant as well as other restaurants nationally.
A small but prominent part of the Main Street restaurant's interior is a small fish market: fresh cuts of fish and shellfish on beds of ice. Fish that doesn't sell to shoppers during the day is generally served up to diners in the evening. Kathi Turner says the fish market accounts for only about 15 percent of the restaurant's total sales. "But it helps show who we are and what we do. We handle seafood from dock to plate."
On weekend nights, Turner's is packed. Especially popular is the huge horseshoe-shaped raw bar, which seats 20. (The restaurant doesn't take reservations for fewer than seven people, but you can call after 5 p.m. to be put on that evening's wait list.)
The menu offers a couple of steak entrees and a chicken appetizer or two, but otherwise it's all seafood all the time. In keeping with the old New English fish-shack theme, we started out with a tasty cod cake accompanied by baked beans ($4.50). The cake was light and fishy - but not too fishy - with a nice crunchy surface. A pair of unpretentious stuffed clams was also yummy, with plenty of clam for the money ($5.25).
One of our dining companions tried the old-time finnan haddie ($21), a dish of smoked Atlantic haddock with pearl onions in a cheese sauce. He hadn't had it before, and he liked it. "It has a nice combination of saltiness, smokiness, and creaminess," he said.
Fish is supposed to be health food, but the tuna Rockafella ($25), pan-roasted with a topping of fresh spinach and cheese, came in a sinfully buttery sauce. Simpler but just as satisfying was the broiled scrod ($21), fresh in flavor and texture.
All in all, we were happy with the food, the service, and the atmosphere (even if the decaf tasted instant, not brewed). The food isn't cheap, but if you have to pay a premium for fish these days, why settle for fish that was pulled from a freezer?
COCO McCABE and DOUG STEWART
