Seamen's Inne has given way to Latitude 41 and a gourmet menu

August 19, 2010 12:00 am • Last Updated: April 10, 2015 2:23 pm

By By MICHAEL COSTANZA

The menu at Latitude 41° in Mystic is what you'd call fancy. If you want chicken, it will be crispy-skin chicken with Boursin polenta and heirloom tomato salad. If you'd prefer salmon, it will be served with sweet potato hash, roasted pepper and parsley salad, and a yuzu vinaigrette. If you order the fettucine, your noodles will come with not just mussels, but cockles, char-grilled corn, and habanero chive broth as well.

If you eat in the bar, you can get a skirt steak with green beans - only they serve haricot verts, French green beans. And the bar is called the tavern, which isn't French but does sound fancier.

Even the French fries are fancy - "truffle fries" sprinkled with truffle salt, parmigiano cheese, and herbs and served with rouille aioli.

These exotic flavors are the work of executive chef James Klewin, a Griswold native who made a name for himself cooking at the casinos, most recently as executive chef at Todd English's Tuscany at Mohegan Sun. With Klewin in charge, Latitude 41°, which is Mystic Seaport's renovated and reinvented Seamen's Inne, looks determined to take on Mystic's trendy restaurants.

Foodies will find plenty of reasons to get excited about the menu. When I read The Day's profile of Klewin this spring, I couldn't wait to try his goat cheesecake appetizer. A cake of herbed goat cheese, creamy and slightly spongy, more gamey than tangy, sat atop several slices of roasted golden yellow beets with clear walnut oil and deep red beet syrup drizzled around the plate. Clover-like sprouts and pieces of walnut topped the cheesecake, along with a crispy shard of citrus walnut brittle, which exploded with flavor, tart and sweet. The plate offers plenty of entertainment for $12. I found myself trying to arrange the ingredients on my fork differently with each bite, looking for the perfect proportions of taste and texture. My only wish: another piece or two of the brittle.

An entrée of mahi mahi promised as many and as interesting ingredients. Cooked masterfully and still a touch pink inside, succulent fillets sat crisscrossed upon the plate with a salad of crab meat and tiny Mandarin slices, an artichoke puree, and a lighter, slightly spicy sauce. The menu also advertised pan-roasted salsify, which supposedly tastes like oysters and which I was eager to try, but the kitchen had substituted fingerling potatoes. As with the appetizer, each bite of this dish could be arranged in so many ways, but the ingredients never sang together in harmony and never rose above ordinary. The crab meat contained a few papery bits of shell, and the cold salad and the warm fish clashed. For $26, I'd have preferred a juicy swordfish steak.

I ordered the shepherd's pie ($16), which is available only on the tavern menu, to take home to share. Potato puree, corn, and minted peas (really nothing minty about them) soaked up the mouth-watering juices of slow-braised lamb. Note: real lamb, not ground beef. This dish was a hit but a few dollars too expensive.

Though certainly polite, the wait staff seemed confused and disorganized throughout the meal. No fewer than four waitresses tended to each table in the dining room, and I was never sure who my waitress was. After I'd already ordered from one, another waitress arrived to take my order. Once I had finished the appetizer, still another waitress began clearing away all of my silverware, apparently thinking I'd finished my entire meal. A fourth chatted with me a couple times about the goat cheesecake and seemed to know the menu well. Meanwhile, the kitchen had fallen behind. Each dish arrived slowly, and the family at the table beside mine grumbled a bit after waiting nearly half an hour for their desserts.

But during my lunch visit in the tavern, my meal went smoothly. For starters, I savored every spoonful of the pub-style onion soup - a deep, rich earthy broth of ale-braised onions. Sourdough croutons and aged English cheddar added sharpness. At $8 a crock, it was a little pricey but an outstanding set-up for the main course.

A Latitude burger ($12), cooked perfectly to order at medium-rare, oozed delicious drippings of its own juice, the carmelized goodness of applewood bacon and more ale-braised onions, and gooey, blue-cheesey Stilton aioli. Topped with handsome leaves of butter (or Bibb) lettuce and heavily seeded sesame buns, this burger needed not a drop of ketchup or any other common condiment. The bartender kindly delivered it with the truffle fries rather than ordinary fries, at no extra cost. Right away these fries tasted like something special, with the light dusting of truffle salt and parmigiano imparting a pleasantly subtle flavor.

Ordered alone, the fries cost $6 and come with a rouille aioli that the bartender was raving about it. He offered to go get some for me to try. Orange-red and mayonnaise-thick, mildly spicy and generally made with saffron and chilis, the sauce tasted irresistibly of sundried tomatoes. All in all, the soup plus burger plus truffle fries plus rouille created a phenomenally savory umami experience.

Combined with the bartender's interest and the friendlier prices, my lunch in the tavern far surpassed my meal in the dining room. Mystic already has plenty of restaurants with steep prices, unsteady service, and food not quite as sensational as their menus suggest. Hopefully, Latitude 41° can do better than that.