Latitude 43
25 Rogers St., Gloucester
978-281-0223, latfortythree.com
Hours: "High Season" 11:30 a.m.-midnight daily; off-season 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. daily
All major credit cards accepted
Handicapped accessible
As you may have heard, McT's in Gloucester is gone, and what's in its place is a new concept restaurant that falls somewhere between high-end fusion and the
Latitude 43, named for its location, is fusion thanks to dishes such as fried oyster salad with sweet potatoes, and sushi that combines ingredients such as goat cheese and spinach. It has the spirit of the Cheesecake Factory - and I mean that in a good way - thanks to a mind-boggling menu that has everything from the sushi, to basic Gloucester-syle fried seafood sandwiches for under $15, to pastas for over $15, to soups such as butternut squash and coconut milk bisque. Even vegetarians should have a number of plates to choose from.
This restaurant, opened in December by the minds behind Alchemy in Gloucester, Cala's in Manchester, Indigo in Hamilton, and Zoës in Beverly Farms, should be a hit this summer for tourists and locals looking for new cuisine. It's the largest restaurant in the aforementioned pack - about twice the size of Alchemy and the rest - and offers four concepts at once.
Interiors are expansive and include a casual bar with a pool table. The center of the dining room is a sleek sushi bar where you can sit on the floor and look down at the chefs who work underneath the tables as if they're a pit orchestra.
We started with the quesadilla ($8), which is packed with chipotle-honey barbecued beef and topped with the freshest of salsas. It's a plate that could easily be a meal.
Next up was sushi. From a long list of options made of ingredients such as scallops, soft shell crab, and organic chicken, we went for the Philadelphia roll ($9) and the harvest roll ($15).
Latitude's Philly roll is made with salmon, avocado, and goat cheese. My dinner guest liked it enough, but said he prefers ordinary Philadelphia rolls, which have cream cheese instead of the goat cheese. I disagreed. For goat cheese lovers, Latitude's take on the roll is a pleasant surprise.
The harvest roll, made of hearts of palm, avocado, endive, cucumber, seaweed, mango, asparagus, spinach, radish, and ginger-peach puree, may not have been the tastiest dish, but it was gorgeous. It looked like a miniature version of a beautiful landscape in "Lord of the Rings."
A more filling appetizer was the oyster salad ($11 for half-portion, $17 for a full portion), which was a pile of mesclun greens, fried oysters, shredded sweet potato, and caramelized onions. It was the only fried seafood we tried, but based on the taste of the oysters, this place does it right.
Entrees probably weren't necessary after the appetizers, but we tried two. My companion went with one of the 11 options under the baked seafood section of the menu, the local haddock and jumbo sea scallops ($22), which was well-cooked, and topped with an almost sweet blend of bread crumbs and lemon sherry sauce. The plate came with potatoes and a buttery squash puree.
The grilled seafood section of the menu gives you a list of fish options to pair with a sauce of your choice. The tuna ($24) with mango mint and pineapple salsa had zing, but I regret not going for our server's sauce of choice of marinades - Cajun blackened with lemon vinaigrette.
We let our server choose our dessert. Torn between carrot cake ($7) and a traditional chocolate plate ($7) called the "messy sundae," he steered us toward the carrot cake, which was topped with delicious frosting and served with caramel ice cream.
Sure, we miss McT's, but having a place downtown that has good carrot cake, sushi, baked seafood, pasta, beef, nachos, burgers, fried chicken, corn fritters, veal, and a French dip sandwich isn't the worst thing, right?
MEREDITH GOLDSTEIN
