There’s a long menu of sandwiches, club sandwiches, and burgers, all likely pretty good. The one I had was a special on a clam roll, which was loaded with fresh belly clams — a seafood that can’t be faked — fried crisp and not too greasy. You could pay $25 for this in certain toney establishments and it wouldn’t be a bit better. Well, maybe the tartar sauce would be better. Steak fries, too, since they always suffer in a small kitchen that fries fish (at lower temperatures). But the cole slaw wouldn’t be, and they wouldn’t give you pickle chips and a small green apple.
Dinners are even larger and come with a choice of two sides. Your options include a mashed butternut squash with maple sweetening; a decent baked potato (with portion-control sour cream); plain steamed broccoli; overdone peas and carrots; a salad with a few modern leaves and red-onion rings, but that dreadful slice of tomato and another of cucumber; and baked rice so bland I’m not sure that kids would eat it.
You can enjoy the squash and the potato, or even the salad, because you have a Montreal rib eye, a huge boneless entrecôte done to order with a coating of cracked pepper. (Or you can spend another dollar and get the 24-ounce porterhouse.) For $11.95 — this is not a typographical error — you can also have the sirloin tips with onions and green peppers. They aren’t amazing sirloin tips, but they’re close enough. A wild swordfish special ($15.95) was not as good as the steak, but still very good and very large.
Pasta isn’t served al dente, but it’s large and well flavored. I tested a pasta carbonara ($12.95) made with gemelli (double-helix shaped) instead of the usual spaghetti. The egg doesn’t stick well to the larger pasta, but the bacon and peas provide the classic flavors, and the portion feeds four.
Galway is a bar, but again so retro that it’s a beer bar where the featured draft recently was Pabst Blue Ribbon ($2.50). We stuck with Guinness ($3.50) and bottles of Magners cider ($2.50). Coffee is available, but if you ask for decaf, you’ll get a packet of Sanka and hot water.
As for desserts, cappuccino-mousse cake, which is mostly chocolate and cut into small wedges like a pie, is outstanding. And a cannolo (listed as the plural “cannoli” on the menu but served as one on the plate, $2.95) was freshly made and rather good. But strawberry shortcake ($3.95) was back to the ’50s: a square of white cake with strawberries in syrup, whipped cream, and — yes! — fudge ripple ice cream. It’s a flavor that time forgot, totally weird on strawberry shortcake, and totally in keeping with the Galway House.
The décor at Galway runs to very old sports memorabilia, odd ’60s and ’70s nostalgia, such as a picture of Jim Morrison, a few posters, an MBTA Red Line sign (even though we are on the former Arborway Green Line), and some parlor lamps that belong on a movie set. The atmosphere is no-nonsense and uncrowded, which makes the noise more tolerable. I’m not sure exactly how to rate a restaurant with four-star steaks and minus-two-star trimmings, but I did think, in this season of excess-cheffery and bonfires of the Benjamins, that you should know about it. Old values, in all their wisdom and folly, still exist in Jamaica Plain.
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Robert Nadeau: RobtNadeau@aol.com
