Tavolo makes room for more dishes at the table

There are a few questions you’re going to want answered if you go to Tavolo. Some of them have to do with the décor. For instance, who drew those whimsical chalk illustrations on the two walls painted with blackboard paint in the dining room? And where did those unusual light fixtures come from? And who makes those fabulous desserts?*

But we’ll get to those in a minute. The first thing you should know is that Tavolo is a Chris Douglass restaurant, and this is important because we like Chris Douglass. Granted, we don’t know him that well. But we do know that he’s a regular guy—a self-taught chef and a self-made man who cares about local food and the local community. He sources his produce from Serving Ourselves Farm, for example, which helps homeless Bostonians get job training. And together with young chef Max Thompson (pictured), he’s working on making Tavolo more of a “real restaurant,” as Thompson told us, and “less of a pizza place.”

In that vein, they’ve added a number of items to the menu, including a whole section called “Main Dishes” that includes a pan-roasted ribeye, as well as olive oil-poached halibut, braised short ribs, and other entrée options. And they’re hosting weekly pasta dinners on Wednesdays, highlighting a different region of Italian cuisine each week.

As I found out, Tavolo is a fine place to spend an evening. Highlights from a special food bloggers’ dinner I attended included a watermelon-feta salad flecked with mint and basil (pictured above) and gnocchi with pancetta, pecorino & fava beans (pictured at left)—whose flavors reminded me of split pea soup with bacon. We also sampled slices of sweet golden zucchini from Ward’s Berry Farm that had been lightly breaded with semolina and fried, as well as roast duck breast with a sweet red currant sauce (pictured below). A family-style dish of Max’s meatballs, made from a mixture of beef and veal, came alongside. My only complaint was a tendency toward too much salt in a couple of the dishes. But my favorite part of the meal was dessert: a simple blueberry pound cake that was toasted and served with fresh whipped cream (at bottom).

By then, I’d learned that a local Japanese artist had spent a lot of time on a ladder drawing the little chalk creatures on the blackboard walls, which were treated with a fixative to keep them from smudging. And the light fixtures, which snap together to form different shapes, had come from Nichole Carroll, a local restaurant designer who graduated from RISD. The dessert, meanwhile, was a product of Max Thompson, from whom I was lucky enough to get the recipe below.

Fruit Pound Cake

Enough whole eggs to equal one pound or 16 ounces (measure them!)
1 lb. unsalted butter at room temp, cubed
16 ounces white sugar
1 cup all purpose flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup blueberries, or summer fruit of your choice

Cream eggs, vanilla and sugar, then add the butter a couple of pieces at a time until just incorporated. Add flour until just incorporated, then carefully fold in fruit.

Bake in buttered and floured loaf pan @350 degrees until toothpick comes
out dry, approximately 30-40 minutes. Let cool for ten minutes, then unmold and cool briefly on a wire rack. Serve warm with whipped cream.