SMOKED BLUEFISH CAKES Like meaty crab cakes, served with peppery mayonnaise dressing. |
| Highland Kitchen | 617.625.1131 | 150 Highland Avenue, Somerville | Open Sun, 11 am–1 am, and Tues–Sat, 5 pm–1 am | AE, MC, VI | Full bar | No valet parking | Street-level access |
At the Green Street Grill, chef Mark Romano stepped into the very large sandals of John Levins and his spicy Caribbean menu. Romano’s next menu, for the relaunched and renamed Green Street, was a complete (and rather successful) shift to locavore gastro-pub. So when I heard he was opening his own place in Somerville, I was both curious and interested. Now, in his own restaurant in a quiet stretch of Somerville, he seems to have combined the best of all his experiences to turn out a menu that goes from diner to bistro without missing a world beat. There’s some pretty good American roots music on the jukebox, too, but the restaurant is already so popular that on two weeknights I could hear very little of the music over the din of happy diners.Food starts with sourdough bread and sweet butter. Smoked bluefish cakes ($8.95) were on the Caribbean menu at Green Street Grill, though I don’t think bluefish migrate south of the Carolinas. Here they’re like meaty crab cakes, and served with peppery mayonnaise dressing. Rhode Island–style fried calamari ($7.95) have red and green (not-too-hot) hot peppers fried right in. The squid are sweet, the frying is fresh and crisp, and the accompanying dip is a fiery romesco. A special appetizer platter featured two diver sea scallops ($10.95) on top of a terrific hash of chopped artichoke and potatoes, with a tapenade of sun-dried tomatoes on top. I loved the hash but didn’t love the tapenade, so I didn’t eat that part.
You could also just have one of the inexpensive little plates of bar snacks, such as marinated olives ($3.95), which gave us four kinds marinated in lots of garlic and bay leaves.
A cup of Texas chili ($4/cup; $6/bowl) was heaped with cheese, chopped scallion, sour cream, and a wedge of excellent corn bread. Underneath all that was some piquant no-bean chili, full of cubed and chopped meat. (The rule about chili is that mine is the best in the world, and yours is, well, not the best in the world. But I’ll eat this.) For a vegan appetizer, you could have one of the vegetable side dishes, such as broccoli rabe ($3), sautéed to bittersweet with lemon and garlic. Or you could have the vegan soup of the day ($3/cup; $5/bowl), which on my second visit was cream of broccoli rabe. (I guess I was the only person who ordered it as a side vegetable the night before.) It was even better as a soup, the cream base cutting some of the bitterness and leaving a bowl of light-green goodness.
My favorite main dish was flat-iron steak ($18.95). This is a new way to cut shoulder meat into a few remarkably tender and flavorful steaks. Romano does this one au poivre, though the pepper is actually a distraction for those who don’t love the spice. Fried potatoes are phenomenal; the other garnish is a heap of cress. Scrape the gravy off the steak and onto the French fries, and it beats Montreal poutine!
