Dunwell's Steak House

There's something to be said for utility

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Dunwell's Steak House 1271 Boylston Street (Fenway), Boston Open Sun-Wed, 5-10 p.m.; Thurs-Sat, 5-11 p.m. All major credit cards Full bar (617) 424-1441 Smoking section Street-level access

I once worked in a local corner of a multinational corporation with a man who would say, "While the great dinosaurs clash, small mammals live out useful lives in the understory."

It turned out not to be true of us, but it certainly applies to Dunwell's and the Fenway Howard Johnson Hotel, where Dunwell's is located. Neither is a dominant creature, but both are very, very useful and deserve to lead productive lives feeding and lodging people who visit the hospital area, the neighborhood, the nearby art museums, or that dinosaur baseball park they have over there. (I also liked the previous restaurant in this hotel, Pranzare, for this same usefulness.) As a subplot, the wave of new fish restaurants has been accompanied by a small backwash of steak houses, a form that looked to be facing extinction 10 years ago.

The West Fenway now has more restaurants than ever, but it is still somewhat underserved, especially in the summer. Dunwell's should help fill that gap. Because it's a hotel restaurant, the menu is deliberately versatile. Besides steaks and seafood, there is a children's menu, wraps, salads, sandwiches, appetizers, entrées, linguine and pizzettes with various toppings, and desserts. This is a lot to ask of a small kitchen, but we found no letdowns on the serious side of the menu. The décor, alas, really is a jumble. The banquettes are upholstered with Holstein spots -- whoops, wrong kind of cattle. There's bare brick, but no ferns. The ceiling of one dining room has a lot of triangular canvas hangings. Sails? We might have a view of the motel pool if they opened the shades after sundown, but we're otherwise kind of landlocked. Disco background music? What foods are associated with disco?

The breadbasket sets the tone: the buns are hot, but they have a uniform, mechanical look and a pasty, bread-machine texture. That said, the management has worked up white, whole wheat, and a type with bits of olive, in a commendable effort to give an impression of luxury.

There's nothing at all wrong with the New England clam chowder ($3.95), "homemade and dairy free." It has a distinct flavor of clams, a good proportion of clam meat and potatoes, and a starchy thickening that approximates creaminess without occluding the clam broth. Crab cakes ($5.95) are small but choice, with lots of meat and measured condiments. The plate is enlarged with a spread of corn-off-the-cob salad. The Mediterranean salad ($6.95) is huge, and decorated with quality ingredients such as red onion, pitted kalamata olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and roasted red pepper. Of the various dressings, blue cheese is entirely competent. A special appetizer of steamed mussels was nice and fresh, with an enormous amount of garlic in the broth. What else matters?

Steaks and seafood are served steak-house style: large, without vegetables or starch. This inflates the tab, but side vegetables are available in large portions for a few dollars, so the hit isn't too bad. Sautéed spinach, for example, is $2.25, again loaded with garlic, and apparently cooked to order.

So how about those steaks? Filet mignon ($16.95), cooked rare to order, was meltingly tender and had a good beefy flavor for the cut, which tends to emphasize texture over flavor. A special on Delmonico steak ($16.95) was described as being a daunting 16 ounces. I reminded a companion that this kind of rib steak probably included a bone, and that we were talking about uncooked weight. Even so, this would be a double portion for many diners. It was quite tender, done medium-rare to order, and flavored rather like prime rib, which is exactly what it is. The sauce of wine and portobello mushrooms was very good.

Seafoodwise, I tried the baked stuffed scrod ($16.95), which featured a lot of buttered crumbs and some Florida rock shrimp. The sweet little shrimp were excellent and the crumbs were really too much, but the big news was that the fish actually tasted like fresh codfish. If you like scrod, there's been a flavor drought, with some of the larger fish restaurants using the phrase "fresh scrod" on their menus to distinguish the real thing from the current staple of frozen Alaskan cod.

A special on salmon Florentine ($14.95) had a nice tang of vinegar, maybe a little ginger, and a lot of tomatoes, with a little spinach as a sauce, probably enough to qualify as a side vegetable. I actually preferred this to the creamed-spinach "Florentines" of the '50s. The piece of salmon was the rich, farmed kind, here handled properly for what salmon is now like.

We rushed off before dessert, but dessert is not something this kitchen is concentrating on, with a list of strawberry shortcake, cheesecake, mud pie, chaos pie, and Häagen-Dazs ice cream. For $2.95, take the ice cream.

Service was good, and our server had a sense of humor, as well as strong opinions about the menu, allegedly based on her own tastings. You have to check the sports section before going to Dunwell's, but at the moment it's possible to walk in on most weekday evenings when there isn't a game, and we were seated early (before theater) on a Saturday after a day game.

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

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