Prose

The spark of imagination lights up a not-at-all prosaic restaurant in Arlington

by Stephen Heuser

352a Mass Ave, Arlington; 648-2800
Dinner: Tues - Sat, 5 to 10 p.m.
Lunch: Tues - Fri, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Sunday brunch: 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.
Beer and wine
AE, MC, Visa
Sidewalk-level access

Plain butcher-block tables, cornflower-blue wainscoting, a handful of photos scattered around the wall. I certainly liked Prose -- liked it a lot -- but you wouldn't exactly call it the ultimate in fine dining. The ultimate in clever cooking? Maybe. Prose, whose logo has a little dictionary-style macron over the "o," is every bit as clever about its cooking as its typography. It's a nice spare corner spot (actually a converted spaghetti house), but not the sort of place you'd go if you wanted to be fawned over by waiters.

It is, however, the sort of place you'd go to try something you've never had before, perhaps something you never imagined would even be made. The restaurant is very much the work of its eccentric chef-owner, Debbie Shore (formerly of the Black Crow Caffè), who opened it in May. If you've never heard of Prose, and I hadn't before a few weeks ago, that may be because it has operated in the media shadow of a neighboring restaurant in Arlington: Flora, which opened just a bit earlier with more space and much better media connections. But Prose, whose dining room you could stack a few times into Flora's elegant renovated-bank space, serves a much more distinctive menu, and even seems to be building its all-important suburban client base. On a recent Saturday night, we ate among a solid crowd, no line but every table full. (And there may never be a line, since, unlike a lot of its competitors, Prose does indeed take reservations.)

It's a good thing Arlington can support two quality eateries, because Prose is a very worthwhile restaurant. The service can be a bit erratic, which seems characteristic of a lot of chef-owned places so closely focused on food, but it's friendly enough. And the first time we visited, our meal ended with a half-hour conversation with the chef. She had no idea I was in the restaurant-reviewing dodge, but was eager to talk about her place, about why she's in Arlington instead of Boston proper (rent!), and about the challenge of staying afloat until word spreads to enough people.

The Prose idiom is what you'd call New American, which means a freewheeling synthesis of all sorts of ingredients and traditions. A couple of times the results were just too much, as with a dish of fettucine with leeks, artichokes, broccoli rabe, garlic, goat cheese, and almond oil ($14), which edged toward gloppiness. But, for the most part, we found Prose on-target, innovative, and even surprising.

The dishes I liked best were the most outré, the product of either a penchant for risk-taking or an uncommonly confident hand. We had a soup, for instance, that was listed on the handwritten menu as containing tomatillos, apple, ginger, and cream. With a description like that, you don't know what to expect; it turned out to be a rough, surprisingly hearty soup, playing the sour of the tomatillos off the sweetness of the apple, with the ginger adding an almost chiliesque electricity to the taste. Somehow, in the balance, the soup didn't taste exotic, per se -- not quite like anything else I've had, but not a shock to the system, either.

I'd say much the same thing about the grilled Chilean sea bass ($17), which came in all kinds of stuff. The fish was nicely charred on the grill, served with a list of ingredients that read like the produce aisle of a Bread&Circus -- cilantro, blood oranges, chili pepper, baby bok choy. The whole thing was arranged over couscous in a sherry-clam broth, and, as excessive and theme-blurring as it all sounds, the net result was good fish in a vigorous stew, a crazy mélange of heat and fruit and grain anchored by the quiet substance of the grilled white bass flesh. The same experience in a slightly toned-down form was a grilled-chicken dish with apples and molasses and mustard in the sauce ($15). Actually, the mustard was "roasted garlic mustard," but by the time that many flavors have entered the picture it's hard to tease them apart. The starch component here was a rich mound of mashed potato.

The meat-'n'-potatoes end of the menu one night was a tender grilled ribeye steak ($16), which was charred and rubbed with a spice mixture and served with a dark demiglaze. The fries -- sweet-potato wedges -- were cooked to that ideal point where they have crackly skins and a soft interior.

If any of this sounds good, and it should, a warning: the menu changes quicker then O.J.'s alibi. I visited on a Wednesday night, then the following Saturday, and the only two items still on the menu the second time were the salads (a caesar, $5, and mesclun, $4). We saw a few ingredients and ideas resurface: wild-mushroom polenta under a very nice rainbow-trout fillet one night ($16) and then on its own, with goat cheese, in a beautifully lush appetizer the next ($7). The kitchen seems to sustain a remarkable pitch of inspiration, though its commitment to novelty places some limits on the menu: it runs to about four appetizers and five main courses per night. A menu that short can be a liability for some diners, but, in a room the size of Prose, it made us feel like we were trusting ourselves to the hands of a personal chef.

One con of Prose is that the desserts, on limited inspection, aren't up to the standard of the other food on the menu. We missed being able to order a chocolate torte one night, as the kitchen had run out, but both tiramisu and a promising-sounding pistachio-pear mousse were a bit on the bland side.

The wine list, though, was plenty adequate, bypassing big-name producers for slightly more interesting wines from California, Australia, and southern France. Happily, about half of the 24 wines are available by the glass, and -- pleasingly for a restaurant that might not be prohibitive but certainly isn't cheap -- except for a few special bottles, the list tops out in the mid-$20s. The beer selection is short and sharp, with boutique beers from San Francisco, Maine, and the Alsace (!). And parking? Hey, just pull up on Mass Ave. There are some advantages to suburban living.