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Best Of Boston 2005

Best of Boston 2005 Restaurant, General Excellence - North

There’s something to be said for a menu that riffs on both European and Asian culinary traditions, and that something is: delicious! Glory serves dishes you’ll remember long afterward, such as tuna tempura—crisp on the outside, cool on the inside—with a spicy dipping sauce. You’re also not likely to quickly forget the sincere service, complementary wine list, and exposed-brick dining room. 19 Essex St., Andover, 978-475-4811.

Best Of Boston 2004

Best Of Boston 2003

Fine food, ambience brighten Andover

Just when the restaurant scene seems to be slumbering, there's a discovery. Glory had been on my "maybe sometime" list for a while, put off repeatedly in favor of the new and trendy in Boston. Then a friend reminded me about this six-year-old Andover restaurant after she had gone for a birthday dinner. It was really very good, she said. So during the early days of a sleepy, drizzly August, Glory shot to the top of the list.

On a weekend night, Glory is bustling. The bar is full, noisy with people dining as well as drinking. The lounge -- what a dining companion called "the Ikea room," decked out as it is with cube chairs in bright prints -- rocks with a private party. The two-level dining room, eclectically decorated with harvest tables and antiques, is quieter, but still alive with the dinner-party feeling of a good restaurant.

It's one of the few hot beach-and-boating days of this summer -- and we've all spent the day outside -- so salads sound like a good way to start. A special of heirloom tomatoes lights up the plate with different shapes and colors, interspersed with basil and rounds of firm, creamy white mozzarella. This is a salad so often repeated that it only escapes the ubiquitous label if the ingredients are superb. Here, they are, and the result is a tribute to the tomato flavors we've waited so long to taste. Another salad spreads across a plate slices of Charentais melon, that French, orange-fleshed variety, along with slivers of prosciutto and halves of yellow pear tomatoes over arugula. The flavors melt into one another: the melon sweeter and more luscious than cantaloupe, the salty notes of the prosciutto highlighting the fruit, the yellow tomatoes adding a tingle of acid against the baby arugula leaves.

For a contrast, we nibble chunks of spicy chorizo sausage with manchego cheese, mild and nutty, and some slices of Granny Smith apple. Another evening, we try tuna tempura, the fish just barely seared with a wisp of crackly battered edge. With it is a flat disk called cucumber salad, whose bland-sounding name hides a kick. Yes, there's the soothing tones of cucumber, but there's also plenty of chili pepper heat and lemony bite. It's addictive and a great foil for the velvety tuna.

I'm reveling in this food, and curious about main courses. A thick cut of panseared striped bass arrives in a brick-colored sauce, opened mussels making a necklace around the perimeter. The fish is perfectly cooked and delectably moist; the sauce is so intensely flavorful that I search for more bread to slurp up as much as possible. A hefty veal chop stuffed with prosciutto and fontina cheese piles on the savory tastes, but is delicious nonetheless; sauteed artichokes, with their slight acidity, cut through the richness, and a topping of grilled scallions provides a pretty frill to the meaty dish.

Prime ribeye with Stilton butter and French fries strikes a more conventional tone, and a roasted chicken is a simple but well-prepared dish with its appealing accompaniment of little fingerling potatoes, baby carrots, and mushrooms.

Dinner ends with a dreamy almond lemon cake with lemon curd and fresh berries and good, if more standard, soft chocolate cake with enough embellishments -- espresso creme anglaise, vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce -- to induce sugar shock. The ice creams here are very good, especially a burnt sugar that graced an otherwise undistinguished nectarine and blueberry crisp.

Glory's waitstaff is friendly, efficient, and very accommodating, especially one evening when we start out in the lounge, move to the back patio and then retreat after dusk brings out hungry mosquitoes.