Restaurant: Kitchen on Common

Last night, we decided to celebrate the vernal equinox by finding a new locavore restaurant and trying it out. My husband selected Kitchen on Common in Belmont's Cushing Square. I drove there directly from work and was hit with a deep sense of deja vu: Kitchen on Common happens to be located just two doors up Common St. from my former workplace, Firespout, a dotcom company long since gone bust.

Kitchen on Common's web site touts it as a restaurant that specializes in excellent food made from local ingredients. They list the following companies as their partners:

• Gretta Anderson/Belmont Farm CSA – Belmont, MA
• Iggy’s Bread of the World - Cambridge, MA
• Baer’s Best Beans - Hamilton, MA
• Vermont Butter & Cheese Company - Websterville, VT
• Coming Soon - Tea from The Thymely Gardener - Belmont, MA

I'm curious to know where the lamb I ordered came from, though there are certainly plenty of local sources. I think I'll email them and ask for the sources of all the ingredients in our meals.

Kitchen on Common turned out to be a small, homey restaurant with about eight tables and two servers, one of whom looked like he may have been related to the owner who was working in the kitchen. My husband had called ahead, and the restaurant had arranged to have a table for us - a kind couple actually moved from a table for four to a table for two for us. They started us with a basket of Iggy's bread, fresh and tasty, but we would have enjoyed it more if we'd had knives with which to spread butter on our bread.

We ordered macaroni gratin and maple-roasted carrots for the kids. My husband and I started with split pea soup. I ordered the Grilled Lamb Steak with Sauteed Cabbage & Israeli
Cous-Cous Risotto, and my husband ordered the Farfalle with Roasted Mushrooms Pecorino and Roasted Garlic Cream, both of which are right up our alleys: my favorite meat is lamb, and my husband loves creamy sauces over pasta.

The food was amazing, consistently excellent. By far the best dish, surprisingly enough, was the carrots. The maple glaze roasted into them was not excessively sweet and served instead to accentuate the natural sweetness of the carrots. My husband and I gleefully finished what the girls could not.

Similarly, the macaroni gratin was some of the best mac'n'cheese I've ever had, with a nice sharp pecorino romano. My one complaint there is that the romano may have been too strong for the girls, because they inexplicably failed to eat it all.

The spilt pea soup, by contrast, was a little disappointing. I think that if it hadn't followed such excellent dishes, it would have been fine, but by comparison it seemed bland. I had expected the bacon to give it a good salty base, but I ended up adding salt, which I almost never do.

Our main dishes, when they finally came, were also wonderful. I never knew that cabbage could taste that good, but it was utterly marvelous, and I actually liked it more than I liked the lamb. The lamb, while tender and cooked perfectly medium as requested, was somehow boring in comparison with the other offerings, like the lovely Israeli couscous, about the size of tapioca with a firmer consistency and in a nice, savory sauce.

The farfalle pasta was surprisingly wonderful due to the excellent quality of the mushrooms. I'm pretty sure they had been dried, but they were moist and tender in the dish with a wonderful wood flavor that was not overpowered by the sauce. I completely fell in love with the dish, and fortunately my husband similarly fell in love with the lamb, so we ended up trading dishes.

For dessert, we got one chocolate chip cookie and one raspberry oatmeal bar. They were served heated, gooey and delicious. It's a testament to how good the main dishes were that we had to take some of the dessert home.

This might have been one of the best meals I had ever had if only the fabulous food had been matched by the service. But the service was frankly terrible. We had no silverware and no water even well after we had ordered our food. Our waitress failed to take our drink order, so we had to wait until she had brought the water to order chocolate milk for the girls and San Pellegrino for my husband.

The food came out very, very slowly. We had them bring out the girls' food first, which turned out to be a horrible mistake because it was another half hour before our main dishes came. Meanwhile, the girls got more and more restive, loud, and cranky. My almost-two-year-old, who is cutting her two-year molars, became increasingly inconsolable. When our food finally came, we had to fight to get the waitress's attention to order dessert so that the girls would have something to munch on while we tried to finish our meal in peace. But then, of course, they heated the desserts, which meant that we were largely done eating by the time they came.

We did not even check the bill, just paid the tab and a straight 15% tip and fled. Now, I know our children were loud and disruptive, but that's exactly when a server should pay more, not less, attention to the table. Keeping the food moving and the kids happy makes dinner a more pleasant experience for everyone in the restaurant. And even if we hadn't had the kids along, I would have considered the service slow. There was actually one couple who had arrived before us and were still there as we left, likely because we rushed to get out as quickly as possible.

This actually seems to be a common theme: we've had a similar experience at Stone Hearth Pizza. It seems like a restaurant can be either local or family friendly but not both, unless you want to pay exhorbitant amounts of money and go to Henrietta's Table. And even then, that's cheating - there's a nearby hotel lobby where high-energy children can run around and burn off the calories they've just consumed. At one point in our meal, my husband turned to me and said, "I miss Boloco," referring to the failed restaurant in Davis Square with a nice kids' corner, now taken over by Green Tomato II, which still has the kid's corner but offers miserable cafeteria-style food.

Ultimately, while we loved the food at Kitchen on Common, we were seriously disappointed by the service. It would be fine for a leisurely meal for two adults, but it's a terrible venue for kids. If you want to your kids to dine on their fare, I recommend takeout.

Readers' Challenge: Where is your favorite place to eat with your children that offers local fare?