'Tis the gift to be simple

By Paul Reidinger

THE SWIFTNESS WITH which the local restaurant business has registered the change in the city's – the country's – economic and psychological circumstances has been head-spinning. Closures. Pared-down menus, with pared-down prices. Even pared-down names. Home, the new incarnation of JohnFrank, is about as pared down as it gets in the name department; in its monosyllabic, Anglo-Saxon bluntness it's every bit the match of Dine, Grub, and Soups. The only real surprise about Home – the name – is that someone didn't think of it earlier. And now someone has. But don't worry: you can still call your recession/terror war café Nest, or Cocoon.

The downsizing of the restaurant's name neatly matches up with a simplified menu and much-reduced prices. Even at the end of the summer JohnFrank's main dishes typically cost in the high teens. Home's menu doesn't quite cut those prices in half, but pretty close. The most expensive item on offer, steak frites, costs $12.95, and only a few other dishes are even more than $10.

So that is striking. What is more striking is that Lance Dean Velasquez is still in charge of the kitchen (and now the business, having become a principal), and that means the food is astonishingly good – worth considerably more, in fact, than what they're charging for it. Velasquez has bounced around so much in the past few years (working at Epicenter and NeO, to name just two ill-fated ventures where he cooked) that the chronicle of his wanderings sometimes threatens to eclipse the fact that he's a great chef. His Home menu is like a greatest-hits album: one lovable dish after another, familiar and inviting (oh, all right, comforting) yet with an artful twist here and a flourish there to avoid the blight of all comfort cooking, staleness.

The overall gastronomic effect is very much like that of a good Parisian bistro or brasserie – not in its Frenchness (no blanquettes de veau; Velasquez's references are, if anything, Italian) but in its renderings of classic dishes that make up a good part of our cultural fundament. Pot roast. It isn't glamorous, but it's something a lot of us grew up with, and Home's version ($11.95) is exquisitely tender and topped with a dollop of horseradish cream – a little touch that wasn't always part of Mom's six o'clock special.

A roasted half chicken ($10.95), agleam with bronze skin, arrives atop a bed of pureed potatoes (a subtly fancier cousin to the mashed variety) and mushroom velouté (essentially a chunky gravy). Somehow I don't picture Home making quite the same triumphal fuss as certain other places about the glory of its roast chicken, but really, with its crisp skin and juicy meat, it couldn't be improved on.

The best place to do a bit of cross-cultural grazing is in the smaller plates. The side dishes – broccoli in white cheddar cheese sauce ($4), macaroni and cheese ($4.50), among others – are purest Americana. But among the appetizers is a plate of ceviche ($9.95) made from local halibut and served with guacamole, sour cream, crisp tortilla strips, and shreds of fennel – an adroit combination that would make the cut at most restaurants. And some elegant touches do turn up in the main dishes. Under a piece of roasted mahimahi ($11.95), for instance, you'll find a bed of marinated farro – beads of pasta, like Israeli couscous except oblong instead of round.

The mood: raucous. Lots and lots of club bois and gym-bunnyish types, drawn no doubt by some combination of Home's newness, proximity to the Castro, and abrupt affordability. JohnFrank was full of handsome, fortyish gay men in dark casual clothes who plainly had the means to drop $100 or so on dinner for two. Now that that same dinner costs about $50, the young are flocking in, though not to the point of exclusivity. They bring excitement, of course, but also a good deal of sound; Home is, if anything, even noisier than the quite noisy JohnFrank.

I found myself repeatedly being touched by service staff, who would lay a guiding hand on my shoulder, as if steadying a passenger on a ship in rough seas. In other contexts I might have found such contact disquieting – physical contact between men almost always carries a strong charge of either sex or violence – but in the expansive, friendly queerness of Home the gesture seemed to be more about simple warmth, a human reflection, you might say, of the food itself.

The warm simplicity of Home closes a circle whose etching began several years ago with the transformation of the old Church St. Station into a modestly upmarket Boston Market and then the rather fancy JohnFrank: onward and upward, the old American aspirational story. Home somehow manages to capture the best of the previous incarnations (the street signage emphasizes "takeout") while achieving a taste and an aura all its own.