Side Street Cafe
42 Maple St., Florence, 413-587-8900
Mon.-Thu. 5-9 p.m., Fri.-Sat. 5-10 p.m.
Entrées $16.95 to $23.95
Two waitresses with silky black hair come to the table. One performs a halting rendition of the special, the other is just shadowing. “Tonight’s entrée is peppercorn-encrusted tuna with braised fennel,” says Andrienne. “It is with sweet peppers, potatoes and oven dried tomatoes with a gamekeeper grilled shallot butter sauce.” (This gamekeeper, is he a tuna wrangler?)
Side Street Café in Florence is all about transformation. In what used to be a strip shop (the kind that strips paint off metal and wood) and then a deli on Maple Street in Florence there’s now a high-end lunch place that has grown a dining room with flattering lighting and sophisticated bar. The Monday night we were there a modest turnout included people murmuring at the bar and several tables of well-heeled types.
The menu is fun, the portions are very generous and the well-prepared food has an attitude. The chef, Pat Shannon, formerly of Tavern on the Hill on the Holyoke-Easthampton line, is swinging for the fences. All the Side Street fare we tasted is good and the portions generous; wineglasses were filled to the brim. Always welcome was warm bread delivered to the table, multi-grained yet delicate bread with a hard crust, served in a wrought iron cone as soon as we sat down.
Most outstanding in a field of great food was an appetizer simply called asiago and roasted garlic polenta. Served with wild mushrooms and creamy leeks, the polenta was cooked and cut into triangles, fried and enhanced with a wonderful leek sauce that was quite rich due to the addition of a sharp yet creamy cheese filling. Some might find the addition of cheese excessive, but the dish was very satisfying and could easily suffice as a main course.
Here and everywhere, salads have become more than a healthy lunch for dieters. The Side Street Salad consisted of arugula, frisee, avocado, marinated cucumber, fire-roasted peppers and smoked almonds with a mustard herb vinaigrette. This salad, because of the peppers, was amazing. The addition of the smoked almonds with a dusting of something spicy was not extraneous. The lush avocado brought everything together. A warm beet salad featuring braised fingers of beets, carrot, red onion, spinach and goat cheese and adorned with a toasted fennel seed dressing included a cunning addition of jicama, just because.
As for main courses, the aforementioned tuna special did indeed feature a wonderful sauce that the gamekeeper has clearly perfected. The tuna was delicious with a blackened, peppercorn crust embracing pink, barely cooked fish. The restaurant’s signature pasta dish was bowties with shrimp, chicken and fennel sausage, spinach, oven dried tomato and roasted garlic in a light cream sauce—a tad goopy, but that’s cream sauce for you.
Menu items that looked intriguing for future reference included coffee-cured duck breast, sugarcane skewered pork tenderloin, cumin- and coriander-dusted New York strip and truffled shitake and butternut squash risotto, as well as Lukasik farm free-range half chicken (high locavore points for a roasted chicken entrée using poultry born and raised in South Hadley).
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