As seen in Stuff at Night, June 2003

A star is born at Pekng Tom’s.
A review by Louisa Kasdon Sidell

If you go to a lot of restaurant openings, you know. Whether the opening is soft or splashy, raucous or beneath the radar, from the moment you walk through the door you feel whether the restaurant will be a success. When the vibes are not there, I never know what to say to the eager and financially overextended chef, because the outset, or it ain’t . At Peking Tom’s Longtang Lounge in Downtown Crossing, it’s definitely there. Even on a “mock service night” for the friends and family of the chefs and wait staff, it is clear that Marc Orfaly and Michael Conlon have a bona fide hit on their hands. Peking Tom’s is Soho and chic, very New York in down-and-dirty Boston location.

There is a raw bar (serving sushi, oysters, a tuna martini, and clams ceviche), a regular bar, a lounge, and a dinning room – all finished with a polished, pan-Asian pop-culture flair. And the food is truly great, with the best Chinese chicken wings, pork-and-pineapple fried rice, and spare ribs I have ever eaten. It’s hard to write this and convince myself not to have the chair and head back downtown for a little snack – it’s that good.

When I first heard about the project, I did not have high expectations. The concept sounded loosey-goosey and very hard to explain. High-end lounge-y with great food? A slick atmosphere, heavy on reinvented Chinese appetizers and a lot of fun Polynesian drinks – like mai tais served in ceramic tiki-god tumblers and other tropical drinks like mojitos. Not a bar, not a bistro. Lots of nots. I wasn’t all that excited about that location (formerly Hibernia), either: a side street of Summer in Downtown Crossing, best described as across from the Good Life and next door to JJ Foley’s. I was worried for my friend Marc Orfaly. I though he could do better with his second project after Pigalle. And what does a French technique chef know about Chinese food anyway? But I was wrong. And I had not met Michael Conlon, a real pro who owns the Blarney Stone, Paramount, and the 21st Amendment. It’s a great palming with great possibilities.
A slightly graying, mid-30s, lanky guy in a red polo shirt, Conlon is surprised low-key for someone who grew up in the bar business. (His father owns the Blarney Stone.) He had a sense that Boston needs more alternatives to the “traditional appetizer-entrée-dessert kind of eating. Places that have challenging food and are fun. Cool, happy places with friends, likeable staff that let people eat and drink through the evening rather than just sit down to a meal and go home. We hire for personality more than experience. It’s more work to train them, but the end result is terrific.” The floor staff buzzes around in red Puma bowing shoes, ferrying scorpion bowls and perfectly constructed little dishes that look like edible pornography. Conlon says that people who know him and his other establishments “are totally blown away when they come to Peking Tom’s. They come here expecting dark wood, and they get bento boxes and bamboo floors.”

Conlon hired Kristine Irving of Koo de Kir to do the design for Peking Tom’s. It is her first restaurant space, and she has successfully melded the every-item-matters feel of her retail store with the needs of the restaurant. There’s neither too much design nor too little. It’s an approach that emphasizes having a few great objects and letting the food do the rest of the work. The space features a sort of neo-Asian, modern reinvention of the classic Asian-restaurant vocabulary, with lanterns and bamboo furniture, enough red to remind you that the designer knows the difference between tongue-in-cheek and tacky, and walls full of colorized posters of smiling girls with rosy cheeks and manclaring collars. Peking Tom’s is much more fun than most cool places in Boston are allowed to be. You could even feel comfortable there if you forgot to wear black or had to come straight from work and looked like a stiff…