Avenues Bistro gets bigger, goes smaller — and tastes better

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I wouldn’t call Joe Birch, the chef-owner of Brookside’s Avenues Bistro, the most laid-back fellow I’ve ever met. In fact, he’s usually so busy that he doesn’t so much walk through his dining room as he vibrates across it, a couple of millimeters off the floor.

But Birch maintained an almost Zen-like composure when it came to the storefront adjacent to his restaurant, occupied for 34 years by a Baskin-Robbins ice-cream shop. See, for eight of those years, Birch wanted that space. A lot. Not long after he opened Avenues Bistro, in 2006, he realized that what he had envisioned as a cozy little boîte would eventually require an expansion. But there was nowhere to go, unless he could get his hands on the 1,200 square feet of ice-cream real estate just on the other side of the wall.

Last year, Birch’s patience paid off. Baskin-Robbins moved to a new space, a couple of blocks east, and with the stroke of a pen, those 1,200 square feet were his.

“I waited eight years for this,” Birch says. “I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the space.”

Two months ago, Birch opened the doors to his renovated but not necessarily larger Avenues Bistro. He has added 40 seats, concentrated in the new L’Cove wine-bar space in what was the ice-cream shop, but he has also removed 60 seats from what used to be a claustrophobically narrow dining room. Working with local designer Eric Negrete, Birch has managed to keep the intimacy of his original restaurant, but the new Avenues is far warmer and more accessible. The colors are more inviting, the artwork better, the configuration of tables and banquettes smarter. (One thing that hasn’t changed: a highly skilled serving staff that makes even the busiest shifts seem effortless.)

The menu has been much revised (twice), in both the dining room and at L’Cove, replacing a number of Birch’s heavier entrées with less costly tasting plates. The entrées are noticeably smaller — by 25 percent, Birch says — but they aren’t stingy, and the prices feel generally right.

If Birch wants to sell more food, he may be on the right track. Knowing that the entrées are a bit more petite than I’m used to only encouraged me to supplement my meals with more starters. I went straight for the “Bistro Tasting Plates” (the new menu has roughly as many categories as the Academy Awards) and chose bacon-wrapped dates, which arrived lolling in a mahogany brew of brown sugar, Madeira and balsamic vinegar. They were delicious, if at first jarringly sweet. (I would almost consider the dish a dessert option.) Looking for a savory starter to balance all that intense lushness, I asked for the skewers of grilled filet mignon, which come with a vigorous chimichurri. They were intriguingly seasoned and tender the night I sampled them. Mission accomplished.

Then it was back to sweetness, with a creamy blend of goat cheese and thyme served in a glass jar with an amber slick of honey on the surface. Happily, this starter comes with a jumble of salty pink prosciutto (and toasted ciabatta on the plate), making for a one-stop dish that combines sweet and creamy with salty and yeasty. It’s an especially well-executed idea.

The next category I addressed: “Choice Tasting Plates.” That sounds a little generic, and I narrowed my wary eyes still further on something labeled “chicken osso buco.” Chicken? Osso buco translates as “a bone with a hole” — which, in my book, precludes drumsticks. If I was going to order an oddball meat dish, it was going to be the 6-ounce “petit filet steak,” for $15. It’s a hanging tender, not a true filet, but the one I ate was deftly prepared — slightly chewier than a traditional filet but flavorful enough to make the price fair.

Mind you, there is an honest-to-God filet (8 ounces for $32), and you’ll find it under the category billed “Prime Plates” — 12 dishes that more accurately might be called “Meals Formerly Known as Entrées.” It’s here that the portions are less robust than what Avenues turned out a year ago, though the dishes aren’t preciously small nouvelle cuisine-style frustrations, either.

Birch’s house-made, Portuguese-style sausage, the mildly seasoned veal-and-pork linguiça, was so fresh-tasting when I tried it that I half-expected it to oink when my fork sank into it. The hunks of sausage could easily have stood alone, but the accompanying sauces, a pink rémoulade and a horseradish aioli (easy on the herb), classed up the dish. The crispy polenta fries on the side were very fine, too.

The pork tenderloin at Avenues has been given that great American “Florentine” treatment, with a generous stuffing of spinach, onion, garlic and goat cheese (a combination you’re unlikely to find in Florence), but it’s tasty as hell. It wouldn’t take much persuading for me to order it again the next time I’m there on a brutally cold night.

Birch puts his own shell-free spin on a classic French scallop dish, coquilles “St. Jacques,” blanketing the pan-seared crustaceans (and a few shrimp, Birch says, to “bulk it up”) in a rich, delirium-courting demi-glace of brandy, veal stock and butter — probably more butter, in fact, than you’d find in a pound cake.

On that note, I sampled just one dessert over my three visits to Avenues, and it was my only real disappointment. The crème brûlée on Birch’s menu should really be called something else. Cracking open the burnt-sugar crust, I spooned up a sticky, cornstarch-heavy concoction that looked and tasted like butterscotch pudding. I suddenly missed Baskin-Robbins.

Birch, of course, will never miss Avenues’ old days. And he shouldn’t. His restaurant looks better and feels more comfortable than ever before. Diners have already noticed, too — Birch says January was an unexpectedly booming month. Most important, the menu is much improved, even if it’s distractingly category-oriented. As for me, I would maybe label the whole damn thing “Anything But That Crème Brûlée.”