Good as gold
Chris Lutes and Matthew Curtis have a Midas touch. They opened Miracle of Science 13 years ago near MIT, and gave it chemistry lab counters and a menu written for geeks in mock periodic table code (''Qc" means chicken quesadilla). The high-style Audubon Circle Restaurant & Bar, close to Kenmore Square, arrived seven years ago, with a similarly simple menu. And Cambridge 1, perhaps the best of the lot, opened four years ago in a former firehouse near Harvard Square, where you can get the finest grilled pizza in town.
Now the pair has opened Middlesex Lounge next door to Miracle. Middlesex, launched three months ago, inhabits an unadorned and cavernous space, with 9-foot-tall doors, warehouse-high ceilings, and light flooding in through a wall of windows. Rather than chairs, everyone sits on grey-flannel-covered benches that look like spiffed-up gurneys, and are actually on wheels, so they can be moved as parties expand. Small square coffee tables are all the space you need for food. Almost everything at Middlesex is eaten with fingers. It's an all-appetizer menu, meant to be shared while you drink, dance, and hang out.
Like they have at their other ventures, Lutes and Curtis have introduced a small -- tiny, really -- but brilliantly conceived menu. At lunch, long banquet tables are regular height, and the place is a high-class cafeteria with soups, salads, and pressed sandwiches. The tiny coffee tables come out for dinner, when 10 dishes grace the menu. And depending on your luck, a gracious waitress will appear -- or possibly one who knows nothing. ''What kind of blue is that?" we ask when the cheese plate ($12) is set down. ''Blue," comes the answer. (It was Bleu de Basque.)
Delicious, crisp tortilla chips were offered with delectable tomatillo sauce and a hand-chopped, limey guacamole ($5). Succulent jerk chicken ($5 for three pieces, $6.50 for four), woven onto skewers, came with a mildly sweet mango sauce. Plump grilled shrimp ($8.50) on watercress leaves were accompanied by a sauce of hot and sweet mango, apricot, and dried pineapple. These came with tiny two-pronged wooden forks, a step up from ordinary toothpicks. The same forks were speared onto porcini ravioli ($9). Beautiful squares of thin pasta, packed with deliciously musty mushrooms in a garlicky cream sauce, the ravioli were too cumbersome for this presentation.
But Rhode Island clam chowder ($7.50), in a round take-out container with a wooden spoon, was just right. No cream or tomatoes here, just lots of sea taste and lovely bits of salt pork. The best morsels were 10 tiny tacos of pulled pork ($8) and the Kobe beef burger ($14), sandwiched between grilled slices of Iggy's sourdough. Cooked to order, this was spectacular beef with only a dab of onion jam and black pepper. Diners can accompany these delicious dishes with selections from a good list of wines by the glass.
The clientele at Middlesex tends to be a younger, cocktails-oriented crowd, which comes to dance and party and check out an array of top-notch DJs (who usually start spinning around 9 p.m.). The crowd may not have come for the food, but they're lucky -- when the urge hits for a snack, they have uncommonly good morsels to choose from.
