New England Seafood That Goes Beyond Lobster Rolls

Summer on the Cape this is not. Dinner at Smithereens, which occupies a dark, subterranean space on East 9th Street, is closer to dining belowdecks on the Pequod. I once described the restaurant as a “galley-shaped warren with seawater-colored walls,” but almost a year into its passage, Smithereens, a cheffed-up homage to the foodways of New England (right down to the bottles of Moxie, older than Coca-Cola and the official soft drink of Maine), is worth a little claustrophobia.

After the restaurant opened last year, I found it to be inconsistent. On his seafood-heavy menu, Nick Tamburo, a former chef at Momofuku Ko (where he met Nikita Malhotra, his partner in the business and its wine director), was cooking with verve and creativity, but he seemed to have a chef’s, rather than a diner’s, abiding interest in the weird. For every delicious hit — a special of amberjack belly, say, crisped over binchotan and served with sea-lettuce vinaigrette — there was one that felt like an ambitious miss. A kind of bean stew thickened with uni. A lobster roll — flying a miniature Massachusetts state flag, no less — dialed up with lobster butter and lobster aïoli, served for some reason on an overcharred bun? I ended up recommending that diners treat Smithereens like an Eastern Seaboard sushi joint, going for the raw dishes and tactfully ignoring the fizzled fireworks.

Some restaurants work right out of the gate — like the similarly alcoveish Claud, which Tamburo helped to open — and some take a little time to find their sea legs. Smithereens, I’m happy to report, now has. The timing could hardly be better. As summer drags lazily toward its squelching conclusion, and I count the time unstuck to my shirt in minutes, not hours, we are solidly in the fish window. Spare me your strip steaks till fall. When Smithereens opened in November with page after page of Kabinett Riesling and a lone red listed (though a few more were hidden in the cellar for anyone who asked nicely), it seemed kinky. In August, an oasis of cold, electric white wine seems nothing but beneficent.

By total coincidence, I went to Smithereens recently with two sons of Boston. We were devouring a loaf of homemade anadama bread, rye-nutty and faintly sweet with molasses, when a black handkerchief of buckwheat crêpe landed on the table, showered green as Fenway with chives, the good stuff underneath: a maple-enriched pâté of smoked bluefish, beloved by Bay Staters and not many others. The Bostonians looked almost misty as one recalled pulling bluefish out of Buzzards Bay. “These are the best versions of Northeastern classics,” Sam said — even if they’re not classic themselves. A dish of “rice with quahogs” arrived, like a prodigal chowder. “If I put rice in my clam chowder, my father would ask where he’d gone wrong,” Patrick added, wincing. He also finished the bowl.

That’s the restaurant in a clamshell. Where it works, Smithereens sings. Thin slices of mild sea bream are lovely with sweet, musky tiles of Zerbinati melon, the Alfa Romeo of cantaloupes. A whole fried whiting — likelier to be found baiting a hook than on a fine-dining plate — is served with the dignity usually accorded to branzino, head and all. Striped bass garlanded with foam is a reminder that culinary-school technique can operate in a tiny downtown kitchen, though I found a simpler, Provençal-style swordfish with tarragon and summer squash more satisfying. My favorite fish of all was a splayed-open mackerel, another often-unloved sea creature, tattooed from the grill and sweetly perfumed with tamarind, allspice, and chile.

Even what doesn’t work gets credit for cleverness. There’s seaweed up and down the menu, snuck into Vermont butter and infused into the sea-lettuce vinaigrette. Did I need it in dessert? Candied seaweed with licorice-flavored pastry cream is a multistory little tower of sweet, saline funk, a fisherman’s napoleon, too odd for me. Likewise a celeriac-ice-cream float with homemade Cel-Ray. Both have been mainstays since the restaurant opened. Stick to the baked goods instead. Fall’s apple-cider doughnut has turned into summer’s blueberry doughnut, and it remains dusted with enough citric acid to make a sour gummy blush.

There’s an impressively broad drink selection overseen by Malhotra, an award-winning sommelier with a wonk’s taste for details. (Narrating its full origin story, she offered us, from the cellar, a relative rarity, a wine as exchange program between two masters: fruit from Klaus-Peter Keller in the Rheinhessen vinified by Julian Haart in the Mosel. The Bostonians were bug-eyed at the level of detail.) Malhotra and her team treat their wine list like a mood board, spotlighting whatever is capturing their attention at the moment to the exclusion of most, if not all, other options: Riesling to start, then a detour into Grenache, now Champagne. Several of the bottles on their list come with handwritten notes of endorsement from the team, like staff picks at an indie bookstore. There’s also a wider diversity of options by the glass than there were on my earlier visits, and a few thematically appropriate cocktails (a seaweed martini, of course), and a number of nonalcoholic alternatives.

Smithereens is not a restaurant for everyone. It might be an even better thing: a restaurant very much for some. If one night’s special of “fish head terrine” puts anyone off, consider that intentional, a way to separate out those who wouldn’t from those who would. It’s a small boat.