South End Buttery

VEAL DEAL The rosemary-and-tomato-braised veal — the meat cut into strips and done up in a slightly creamy sauce — has slow-food depth.

Given bakery roots, you expect something hot and fresh in the breadbasket and get it: meltingly delicious focaccia. This is a buttery, and here’s the ramekin of sweet butter. Another bakery treat lurks in the golden-beet salad ($8): two Yorkshire puddings! So much for the salad as diet food. It’s otherwise notable for handsome leaves of Bibb lettuce, a classical vinaigrette dressing, and the interplay of chunks of golden beet and Maytag blue cheese. The Caesar salad ($8) is rather traditional, with homemade croutons and a decorative fried radicchio leaf atop a stack of romaine spears reassembled into something resembling a whole heart.

Pan-seared Jonah crab cake ($11) isn’t very seared, but crab fans won’t care because it is almost all meat, and really more like a warmed salad with lots of arugula, shaved shallots, and some shredded celery root. The soup of our day was Vidalia onion ($8). Instead of the usual oversalted beef stock and overloaded cheese, it had a mild, sweet-onion stock, a sprinkle of Romano, and a slice of baguette.

Entrées — usually the highest mountain for a take-out joint that’s growing into full restauranthood — are smooth as a cricket pitch. Something like rosemary-and-tomato-braised veal ($18) already sounds flavorful, but has actual slow-food depth. The veal, which might even be breast meat, is cut into strips, truly braised (which is to say it’s been browned before stewing), and done up in a slightly creamy tomato sauce with more garlic than rosemary. It sits on some very garlicky sautéed spinach, over soupy polenta, which makes for a comforting and delicious medley of the browned and the simmered. At the other extreme, where marketing trumps technique, is the grilled New York sirloin ($29): just a terrific piece of beef, done as ordered, with a bit of glaze. It’s served with oven-fried potatoes and watercress — all food where the chef does just enough to stay out of the way of natural flavors.

Penne Bolognese ($16) is rather last year’s dish done to next year’s standards. The pasta has some chew, and the meat sauce has the light richness of several meats chopped and cooked down into a real Italian ragu, then enriched with some cream. Two light eaters could share it. A special halibut ($28) was a superb piece of white fish, overly undercooked when it came out, on a platform of tabouleh with cold boiled shrimp. Because we are in what was once the heart of Boston’s Syrian-Lebanese-immigrant community, I demand fresher lemon in the tabouleh out of respect.