A Little Bit About a Lot of Things

Located off route 128 in Newton, the Indigo hotel hosts the steak house Bokx 109. The Indigo moved into what used to be the Holiday Inn, next to the Riverside train station. A company out of New Jersey bought it and gave it a 20 million dollar renovation. From the outside it still looks like a Holiday Inn, but when you go inside you are surprised at how clean and modern things are. The hotel has close to 200 rooms and they were all booked the night we went to dinner. A cop outside told us to drive down the road to a business park and wait for the shuttle to pick us up. This has already put me in a foul mood, have the valet take my car and make him take the shuttle to the parking lot. So we oblige and we stand in a dark, almost empty parking lot until the shuttle comes. We have no idea where to wait, we see one shuttle just drive by the office park all together making this quite the confusing ordeal. We finally get on to the shuttle and arrive at the hotel. We walk downstairs to the host stand where the host is telling the single gentleman in front of us that without a reservation there is no possible way that they can seat him. We he walks away, the host looks to us-I mention that we have a reservation and he over does the ‘thank you for making a reservation’ spiel. Meanwhile the restaurant is buzzing, but not filled up, the table beside us remains empty for our entire meal-which makes me upset that the gentleman before us couldn’t get a seat.

We are hear for restaurant week which is so polarized, either you love it or you hate it. I used to love it, but I think I am beginning to switch sides. We are sat in the back of the restaurant near the windows that look out on to the pool. The pool looks like a great place to spend the day, very modern, something straight out of a travel brochure or a movie. They have a modern fire pit going as well as cabanas on the deck.

Our server is slow to come over.  I order the restaurant week menu while my dining companion orders off the regular menu. He gets the chop salad and I start with the fried oysters.

The salad is good-a decent size with good flavors (Boston lettuce, hard egg, cheddar, tomato, cucumber, red onion, 1000 islands). The oysters are dregged in cornmeal which gives them a little more texture. They’re good but the sauce they are served with is lacking, I have trouble finding the corn flavor. (corn succotash, green onion remoulade)

Moving on to the main course my dining companion gets the pork rib eye chop with a side of fries (duckfat fried truffle ketchup, garlic aioli) and I get the barbecued bevette steak (corn, tomato, summer mushrooms, blue cheese fritter).  The pork is good-perfectly coked, firm and quite moist all the way through. The fries, which I expect to be divine, are lacking. While they are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, there is so much salt and pepper on them that I can only manage about 4-which if you ask me, is a real shame. The bevette steak, also known as a flank steak, is usually a tougher cut of meat so many people use moist cooking methods. The steak is quite good-it is in fact moist and tender. The barbecue sauce is tasty with a little sweetness to it. The blue cheese fritter is forgettable, while a cute addition to the dish, it doesn’t offer anything to enhance the meal-it’s bready inside with only a faint flavor of blue cheese.

I will say this, when I go out to a meal, not only am I paying for a good meal, but I feel like I am paying for an experience, ie. good service. We arrived at 7:30 and didn’t receive out entrees until 8:30. There wasn’t a good flow to the meal and we were ravenous by the time we got our meals. All I can say is, good thing there were pistachios and bread available.

The dessert was  the bright spot of the meal for me. I had the peach crisp with candied walnuts and speckled vanilla ice cream. The crisp came and I was pleasantly surprised. The ‘crumble’ and the peaches were mixed together instead of the crust, peach and crumble setup. The peaches were tasty and the cumble on top were crunchy and cinnamon-y.

The meal ended with a surprise. A complimentary basketball sized ball of cotton candy. There’s just something about cotton candy that makes you smile-you feel like a kid again. I wonder what it is about steak places and cotton candy, because David Burke’s in Foxwoods does this as well.

I think that I would have to try Bokx again before I made the decision if I like it or not-perhaps order a more substantial steak and see what that is like. The pool area is definitely a cool place to go with girlfriends for the day-it beats the pool at the Colonnade if you’re planning on going somewhere and paying for a pool.

Bokx109
399 Grove Street, Newton MA 02462

http://newtonbokx.com/

Tags: newton, restaurant, steakhouse