Not Your Average Joe's

You've got a stone-hearth oven. Now use it.

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Not Your Average Joe's (617) 926-9229 55 Main Street (Watertown Square), Watertown Open Mon-Sat, 11:30 a.m.-11 p.m.; Sun, 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. All credit cards Full bar Street-level access via rear parking lot

The menu asks, "Who is Joe & why is the food so good?" I have my doubts that there is a Joe, and perhaps the best answer to the second question is: "It just seems that way because it's relatively cheap." To judge from a couple of visits to the Watertown location of this mini-chain, some of the food, alas, is not-your-average because it is below-your-average. Enough of it is above average, though, to make this a good "training wheels" restaurant for young diners working their ways up to more-pretentious neo-bistros. And if NYAJ's would just make better use of the stone-hearth oven at the center of the restaurant, there would be a whole new answer for that second question. I mean, if I had a 700-degree oven in my house, I'd do everything in it.

One thing they do use the oven for is a superb, heavy Tuscan bread. It's served with rather ordinary oil, suitably improved with a lot of garlic and some red-pepper flakes. If I had the oven to make bread this good, I would serve a lot of stews, but this kind of restaurant never serves stew. Stew drips, and the young target audience likes not to look dripped upon.

One of the reasons I am convinced there is no real Joe is that his presence would provoke more menu puns, like "Nacho Average Joe's." There are no nachos on the current menu. There is, however, a delicious version of coconut shrimp ($7.50). Six shrimp, dipped in shredded coconut and fried on skewers, are prettily served with the skewers radiating from a half of a pretty good navel orange. (Given the price of navel oranges this year, I ate it happily.) They aren't enormous shrimp, but six is a fine count, the frying is grease-free, and the dip of marmalade laced with hot peppers is just about perfect.

Soup of the day ($3.25) on one visit was a gazpacho flavored with coriander and hot pepper; it was above average for June, but below average for August. Caesar salad ($3.75/$7.95) is one of those postmodern jobs with one big crouton and an "asiago tuile" -- the salad's total cheese ration gathered into a thin, triangular wafer. But the thing you want to take out of the mix is the dressing -- though it had some anchovy flavor, the pre-dressed romaine lettuce was already wilted at an early dinner. The "average house" salad ($3.25/$4.95) with the dressing served on the side is a better deal; for another two dollars, the "not your average house" gets you baby greens instead of iceberg lettuce, and a balsamic vinaigrette.

In addition to the bread, NYAJ's uses the oven for thin-crust pizzas that have innumerable topping permutations. After trying the basic "Joe Schmo" ($5.95/$8.95), with "mozzarella, tomato sauce, chopped garlic, and herbs," I can report that the crust comes out with an excellent crunch but not much flavor, despite a bit of char on the bottom. And the tomato sauce is too sweet. Even the young target audience can tell when pizza's not quite right, so this is an important area in which to do some research.

"Dry-rubbed half roast chicken" ($10.95) is the kind of dish many critics use as a litmus test for chefs these days. Those critics will not like this restaurant if they get a chicken like mine: no spice rub, no herbal flavors, no crust or crispy skin at all, and no taste of the promised marinade. The meat was tender and juicy, but not very flavorful. Obvious suggestion: use the marinade, use the dry rub, roast the chickens in that fancy oven. If not: use a free-range or kosher chicken with more intrinsic flavor, and charge more. Also, the spinach served underneath wasn't "sautéed" as promised -- although I enjoyed the raw spinach leaves, some cooked by the hot chicken and flavored by its juices. And no problem with the garlic mashed potatoes.

A special on sirloin tips that I ordered medium-rare came medium-well. I still liked those mashed potatoes, and the al dente green beans were also good, but I couldn't discern much grilled flavor -- so maybe they should make this dish in that oven.

"Vegetable stir-fry" ($8.95) indicates that Joe is below average when it comes to vegetarian food. Ask around -- underdone broccoli is cool, but underdone eggplant isn't. Let's say that the standard for this kind of platter -- six vegetables served on soba (Japanese buckwheat spaghetti) -- is set by Jae's. Despite a good flavor of ginger and sesame, this doesn't even approach the benchmark.

NYAJ's has a fairly extensive list of draft microbrews, although you can skip the UFO hefeweizen ($3.95 a pint). This light wheat beer served with lemon would be suitable summer drinking if it didn't have a spoiled aftertaste. Stronger ales are safer on draft, is Nadeau's rule. Joe's root beer ($2.50) is bottled and rather sweet, like IBA. Joe's ginger beer ($2.50), also bottled, is not as biting as Jamaican versions.

Desserts are large and sweet, and not all of them involve ice cream, which places them somewhere between real dating-bar food and gourmet-pizza-chain desserts. The chocolate torte ($4.95) is an entirely serviceable wedge of fudge, although I didn't find many of the "sun-dried cherries soaked in brandy" that the menu led me to expect. Real chocolate people won't mind.

Fresh fruit and sorbet ($3.95) fell badly short, however, and this is just the sort of thing that will be ordered by the person who is already disappointed by the vegetable stir-fry. The fresh ripe seasonal fruit was pineapple, which is seasonal, but was not very ripe. I had an excellent supermarket pineapple at home, so I know it could have happened. In June, there are also good berries, nectarines, and kiwis. The sorbet flavor of the day was red wine, hardly the best one can do on any day in summer.

The room in Watertown has a lot of style, once one accepts that it's loud, multicolored, and open. The ceilings are high, the floor joists are painted silver-gray, and the brick walls are painted in shades from the '50s: lime green, brick orange, yellow. The hanging lamps are also intense hues: cobalt blue, purple, chrome yellow, green, bright orange. There is a lot of simple iron sculpture: stick figures for decoration, cut-out table jacks for the pizza. Cherry-wood trim on the tables is a nod to renewable resources; the walls are covered simply, with five tall hanging mirrors in wood frames.

We noted some service problems, but several servers were obviously new, and training was being given on the job. One night, the lapse between main dishes and dessert was so long that we had to cancel dessert and leave. Plates were not cleared well, either. (I've been seeing a lot of this lately; it may be the point at which overtaxed servers begin to calculate that they can skip a step.) Of course, one could say, "It's a dating bar. Get us our drinks and something salty, and we'll entertain ourselves." But this won't work for the many kinds of diners these restaurants need to please in order to survive in the suburbs (not to mention in Watertown Square, near Stellina and La Casa de Pedro). That kids' menu isn't an afterthought; it was a forethought. And with a little more thought (repeat after me: "It's the oven, stupid"), Not Your Average Joe's could be well above average, with branches from here to Lake Wobegon.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.

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