Quiet comfort, Portuguese style

Paella Valenciana is one of the specialties at Tony Amaral's Cambridge restaurant, Con Sol. (Globe Photo/Aram Boghosian)

You won't find many restaurants on the stretch of Broadway between Cambridge's Inman and Kendall squares, though you will find garages and carpet stores and a beauty shop named Glamourama. Perhaps this unlikely location is the reason the sweetly simple Spanish and Portuguese restaurant Con Sol looks so desolate on both nights we visit. We wonder briefly, as we step through the front door, if the kitchen has closed for the night.

But Con Sol, in the small brick building that once housed another Portuguese restaurant, Atasca, is still serving, just largely undiscovered since it opened last year. Don't confuse Con Sol with the trendy new tapas restaurants springing up in hip neighborhoods and suburbs. The decor is not flashy and the menu is not expansive (nor expensive). No baby eels or cod cheeks here. This is the kind of restaurant you might find on a narrow Spanish street, a handful of tables, the owner sauteing shrimp in garlic and olive oil in the back.

And that's what happens, here, too. Tony Amaral, who learned to cook in his father's longtime Somerville restaurant, P.A. Seafood, owns the restaurant and makes the food. Tapas occupy about half the menu; the rest is larger plates. The most expensive item on the menu is $14, and that's for paella Valenciana, an admirable version of the Spanish classic that Amaral learned to cook at P.A. Seafood, with clams, shrimp, scallops, chicken, and chorizo, delivered in a round dish the size of a small pizza.

Paella de horta ($10), a vegetarian version where eggplant, asparagus, and peppers are substituted for shellfish and meat, seems a bland substitute for the real thing. The dish begs for the fiery punch of the chorizo and lacks the drama of clam shells yawning wide.

The tang of garlic always hangs in the air at Con Sol. One of our favorite dishes is the sopa de ajo ($3), a garlicky tomato base with a surprise at the bottom: a perfectly poached egg. The cordonizes ($7), a small quail glazed in a port wine sauce, is a rich treat. Octopus and comfort food seem an unlikely pair but this is it: polvo guisada ($8), a hearty stew with a thick-tomato-based sauce and potatoes.

At his father's restaurant, which opened in the early '70s, Amaral started by peeling potatoes, then waiting on tables, and eventually cooking in the kitchen. A lot of the dishes he serves at Con Sol he learned working with chefs at P.A. Seafood, which turned in a nightclub in the '90s. (The P.A. stands for Portuguese American, and his family's homeland is a strong influence on the menu.) One night, seeing our young son gazing at a picture of the Azores hanging on the wall, Amaral stops to chat and says, "My daddy was born there."

Amaral buys nearly everything fresh, which means not every dish on the menu is always available. One night, the kitchen is out of clams. Another, montaditos ($5), toasted bread with pork and cheese, is not available.

Drinks are one weak spot at Con Sol, where the sangria tastes a bit pallid, neither sweet nor particularly like wine. Perhaps it is made with one of the wines sold by the glass, which are also disappointing. Con Sol needs to work on its wine list and its music, which is inexplicably not playing one night, leaving the restaurant extremely quiet.

Once Amaral gets a permit for the brick grilling pit in the front of the restaurant, the place won't feel quite so forlorn.

But mainly Con Sol needs one thing: people.