Vietnamese food caught in the middle.
Such was my experience at Boi, a Vietnamese restaurant in the East 40s that's elegant in its aspirations but ultimately unmemorable. On a frigid Saturday night, my visiting parents, sister and I filed into Boi's warm, railroad car-shaped dining room. I should have known that the smart décor and the proliferation of upscale types at neighboring tables were harbingers of things to come.
Perhaps unjustly, at Vietnamese restaurants (and at most Asian restaurants, for that matter), I look forward to gratis hot tea. Like red sauce Italian or wooden bowls of fried won ton wrappers with duck sauce, the tea ritual may be something injected into foreign cuisine by the American appetite, but that doesn't change the fact that when I go out for Vietnamese, I want tea.
I ordered some from the waiter, a nice guy with dark, spiky hair and intelligent eyes. He returned with four rattling cups and saucers. Flung over each rim was a flaccid pouch on a string.
"They're Mariage Freres," he said, mispronouncing the name. "It's supposed to be very difficult to get here."
When I was working as a hostess at a Boston restaurant, we served Mariage Freres tea. That's one place where I know I can find it. I'm also fairly certain that if I really wanted Mariage Freres tea, I could probably get it elsewhere, too. As a rule, I am turned off when it is suggested that I assign value to something simply because it is "difficult to get here." Mad cow disease is said to be difficult to get as well.
The tea, the only kind served at Boi, was the tutti frutti-tasting "Marco Polo" (or in fancy speak, black tea flavored with Chinese and Tibetan fruits and flowers), which cost $4 a cup, about as much as a no-frills Vietnamese lunch in Chinatown. In another snafu, the "hot" water at Boi was actually lukewarm. During this whole transaction, we tacitly acknowledged that this act of pretension did not bode well for the meal to follow.
We were right, to a degree. To echo a sentiment seen in this space last week, the conflict here is between food that doesn't make the mark and a staff that happens to be wonderful. Everyone we dealt with was a pleasure, and the atmosphere was thoughtful and sweet. It's just too bad that after witnessing sincere effort and ambition, our consensus remained that the restaurant didn't fly.
Our meal was family-style: an appetizer, two salads, a side dish, a large soup and an entree to share. Six dishes in total, which sounds like a lot, but wasn't. Portions at Boi are slightly precious, and don't pack a punch on the quantity scale. The side of tofu xa, spicy lemongrass-crusted bean curd ($5), was two thin slices of tofu in a lemongrass sauce. Although the sauce was layered with flavor and showed off the skill of the chef, the bean curd itself was bland. Plus: Two slices?
The salads we tried, goi tuyet with sea mushrooms, shrimp, crab meat, celery, cabbage, tomatoes and cilantro tamarind vinaigrette ($12); and goi ga, cabbage salad with chicken and onion in a citrus dressing ($8) were very fresh, and had some unexpected flavor moments, like the clean smokiness of the crab in the former and the sharpness of the Vietnamese cilantro in the latter. Though not exactly disagreeable, the salads were for the most part forgettable. Cha gio, crisp squares stuffed with shrimp, crab, pork, shitake mushrooms and jicama ($7), deserved more credit. What we expected to be just another gratifying dumpling turned out to be an interesting packet of concentrated flavors. After savoring a bite, my mom and I both sensed a surprising effect, as though the chef managed to reduce the meats to their pungent essences.
The dish that managed to silence our chatty family was the expertly prepared old standby, a delicious pho bo: Vietnamese beef broth with slivers of beef, rice noodles, green onion, and Asian basil and coriander ($11), in a portion large enough to yield a small bowl for each of us. Unfortunately, the entree that followed, grilled lemongrass pork with rice vermicelli, mixed lettuce, mint and roasted peanuts ($15), brought us back to the Vietnamese lunch counter. Sure, it was good, but even better at $5 in Chinatown.
The meal's final noteworthy item came in the dessert course. Jackfruit toffee pudding with vanilla ice cream ($7), from Citarella's pastry chef, has already been written up for its merits, and holds up to the hype. The dense, sticky pudding was rich with cooked sugar flavor, and the vanilla ice cream was fantastic. Less impressive was the sesame gelato sundae with caramel tahini sauce ($7). The gelato was overpowered by the bitter sesame of the tahini, which wasn't toned down sufficiently by the caramel. Perhaps the flavor of sesame could shine in a non-sesame-on-sesame combination.
On paper, the textures and flavors of our third dessert, lychee fruit gelee with ganache and banana ($7)?the freshness of lychee and gelee, the bitter heaviness of ganache, the starchiness of banana?sounded fabulous. On the plate, the lychee gelee was a series of gloppy alien green scoops, the ganache was cloyingly buttery, and the banana was marrowy and slimy. This pastry chef obviously has skills. He should boot this item off the menu and replace it with something worth eating.
Boi deserves credit for trying to take Vietnamese food to the next level, but the dynamic that brings flavor and texture together to make a truly satisfying dish was missing. I've had high-end Vietnamese that works; I've had low Vietnamese that's thrilling. Until Boi hurtles its in-between status, a meal here isn't worth straddling the line for.