1665 Beacon Street (Brookline)
We love, love, loved the interior of Ribelle. If a room’s aesthetics has any impact on your ultimate enjoyment of what you are about to experience (as far as food is concerned), this one does not disappoint. From the menus clipped to cardboard cut from wine cases to the rustic-meets-urban servingware, it all tread the line of pleasing…just right.
In July we found our way to Brookline, and due to our rather circuitous route there, were extremely pleased to discover that Ribelle makes ordering wine easy on its guests–you pick a number from a list of rather wittily rendered descriptions and then each bottle is presented at your table: Et voila! You didn’t have ponder regions or vintages or stumble over names or varietals in front of your friends. It sounds silly in the retelling but we promise it is perfectly satisfying in the moment. And the service in this case was perhaps the best of our BCC experiences yet. Our waiter was attentive and friendly (and perfectly capable of pronouncing the actual names of the wines we immediately chose to imbibe).
Our Ribelle experience again predated BCC minutes, so we cannot share the exact dishes we consumed. In general, we found our selection of shared first courses interesting, but there wasn’t an “oh, OH” experience in the bunch. I believe a duck liver pate pleased us most. We then shared two pasta dishes–served in large, simple bowls and significant enough in size to split between four. And here, yes, was the reason to return (besides the visual appeal of our surroundings and the wine list): They were fantastic.
Sadly, it was a case of going one more round when we’d already had our thrill of the evening: The dessert wines chosen didn’t please and the dessert itself paled in comparison to its pasta predecessors. Ribelle, so cool in so many ways, couldn’t quite close the deal.
The Boston Cocktail Club 