Dining Out: Ten Tables Cambridge

There's clearly something charmed about the semibasement space at 5 Craigie Circle. It's where Tony Maws built a national reputation with his Craigie Street Bistrot, and now it's where a new branch of the tiny Jamaica Plain restaurant Ten Tables has snuggled in as if it's always been there.

Ten Tables
5 Craigie Cir., Cambridge, 617-576-5444, tentables.net

CORBY'S PICKS
Green garlic and semolina soup ($9)
Chorizo with cannellini beans ($10)
Pork chop with Madeira jus ($23)
Broiled Moroccan swordfish and spinach with toasted garlic, pine nuts, golden raisins, and apple ($24)
Chocolate terrine with sea salt and Thai basil ice cream ($8)

A second location is often a bad idea—especially when, as in this case, it confusingly uses the same name and is double the size of the original. But just a few months after repainting the Cambridge space in earth tones, installing neat blown-glass hanging lights, and putting kraft paper on the tables instead of white cloths, chef-owner David Punch and co-owner Krista Kranyak have achieved a smooth operation. As with the old Craigie Street, the room can get noisy, and the generally warm service still has a few dropped-ball glitches. But the food does not.

In fact, there are already some great dishes at Ten Tables that give life to the "fresh-local-seasonal" concept (and at good prices, too). There are two in particular, one an appetizer and one a main. And it's the latter I can't stop thinking about. Everything about the broiled Moroccan swordfish ($24) is right—there's spice, salt, and sweetness, all in balance. The generous plank of fish is rubbed with harissa and cilantro; it's moist, though cooked through (or at least it was after I sent it back, since I feel about translucent swordfish the way most people feel about translucent chicken). I could have made a meal of the accompanying spinach with toasted garlic, pine nuts, golden raisins, and apple, except that it's so perfect with the fish. And a drizzle of red pepper jam with smoked paprika and honey plays out the full spice-sweet balance. It's a recipe I immediately wanted to try at home.

The appetizer, like the swordfish, has a flavor as pure as a clear stream: green garlic and semolina soup ($9), a wonderfully rich chicken broth infused with a sachet of herbs and poured over raw spinach. "The world's thinnest polenta," Punch calls it (cute, even if semolina is hard-wheat flour, not cornmeal); the milky opacity makes it look like a cream or at least potato-based soup. It's an idea he took from Alice Waters's The Art of Simple Food, he says, and he makes it even better by floating in it a six-minute egg infused with olive oil.