By George, it's comfort food
George: An American Tavern
Back Bay / Boston
The two young men at the bar looked confused as they glanced around the room. "What happened to the Rattlesnake," they asked the bartender. "Oh, it's the same place," he replied, "but now it's George." Growing up is hard to do. The Rattlesnake Bar attracted a barely post-college crowd with plenty of beer, cocktails, and forgettable Tex-Mex fare. According to George chef Al Soto, the owners, who also have the Parrish Cafe across the street as well as Bukowski Tavern and Flash's, came in one day, looked around at the crowd and decided they wanted a place where they'd like to eat with a slightly more mature emphasis.
The result is George, with a cuisine strong on comfort food, as close to home food as a restaurant in Back Bay is likely to serve. The post-college feel lingers -- in the boisterous bar crowd on a Friday night, the couples lining up on the street to be admitted to the roof deck (where smoking is still allowed), and the sometimes haphazard service.
Walk into this place, outfitted with so much tile that it resembles a very clean and tidy subway station, on a Friday evening and you'd think nothing has changed. The crowd at the bar swells into the aisles and the noise is deafening. Diners are led to the back reaches. It's quieter but also rather somber, a sort of statement that you're not in the swim of things. Besides pretty young things of both sexes, there are photos of Georges galore: George Washington to George Jetson. But they're difficult to see from the back booths.
The menu, divided into small and large plates, is straightforward and reasonably priced. In a phone interview, Soto indicates he's working for simplicity and an unfussy style, and that comes across in the food. We start one evening with a roasted beet salad, a signature dish of this chef, who comes to George from Back Bay Bistro. The beets strike the right note of sweet and vegetal against the acidity of the vinaigrette and the crunch of fennel.
A smoked trout plate plays its assertive flavors against the more neutral taste of a fat potato cake, its only flaw being its beige-on-beige presentation. A big bowl of steamers, served with hunks of corn on the cob and nuggets of sausage, does have a plain but homey charm and would have been just right to evoke summer shore dinners if the grittiness of the clams didn't intrude.
A dish of macaroni and cheese has some faded peas but otherwise is a rather gluey and enormous mass of starch. At $15, it's the lowest-priced entree, but even hearty eaters would have trouble getting through it.
Haddock, crisply fried in tempura-like batter so that there's almost more crust than fish, would benefit from a sharper dressing than the tarragon mayonnaise that accompanies it. And though the grilled corn on the cob is tasty and seasonal, the sauteed greens are overcooked to mush.
Grilled salmon, the warhorse of the moderately priced menu, gets a boost from chowchow, its mustardy pickled carrots, onions, and other vegetables strong enough to flavor the fish and the hominy under it. Something like that might have been a better partner for baked bluefish, which is missing its appealing brashness and instead could be any mild fish. It's boring and a lost opportunity -- you might as well have baked rainbow trout, fine in its mildness and saved from tedium by chunks of bacon.
Soto does a good job with meats, from a mustard-glazed roasted pork loin to a respectable grilled ribeye steak with au gratin potatoes. The best by far is beer-braised pot roast, benefiting from slow cooking in its robust and concentrated flavors. The meat juices gild the potatoes and other vegetables, and a judicious amount of horseradish cream adds zip.
All of this might add up to a homey meal away from home if the service were more consistent. One night it's fine, from the greeting to the dessert of a dense chocolate cake with chocolate ice cream. Another evening, we have to wave our hands in front of the two hostesses chatting with each other to get their attention so that we can be seated. The meal is punctuated by one woman arriving to take the order and then another coming by to ask the same thing.
Finally, the first asks if we'd like coffee, and we ask to see the dessert menu. A few minutes after she walks back toward the kitchen, the second comes striding over from the hostess stand plunks down the bill. Although the night is still fairly young, we feel defeated and dessert doesn't seem tempting anymore. So we pay the bill and walk out into the night.
George, with a chef who understands the concept of comfort food for today's casual restaurantgoer, has potential. But casual shouldn't mean careless, and some tweaking of the food and sharpening of the service would help.