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Aspire

As its name suggests, Aspire has high hopes, but it’s unclear how the city’s newest venture will make its culinary mark.

Photography by Angel Tucker

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Aspire

311 Westminster Street, Providence, 521-3333, aspirerestaurant.com. Open seven nights a week. Reservations accepted. Wheelchair accessible. Valet parking at Hotel Providence entry. Cuisine Ethnic American: a little bit of everything, from New England clam chowder to tuna with Thai pesto. Capacity The dining room and bar can each hold about a hundred people. Vibe Self-consciously, but not thoroughly, trendy. Price Appetizers $7–$11, entrees $16–$32, desserts $7–$12. Karen’s picks Tuna tartar, steaks, cappuccino mousse cake. The wine flight (three pours for $9) is well worth the price.

Key Fair Good Very Good Excellent Half-star

The hotel restaurants of yesteryear—cold cereal and tuna melts—met their demise well before the turn of the twenty-first century. Now they target business travelers, locals looking for a night out, and even two-kid families who want something a little edgier for dinner. Not surprisingly, such restaurants have taken on a seductive, more opulent vibe to lure the style-conscious crowd, with spaces that look more like Vegas interiors than club-sandwich dispensaries.

The Hotel Providence—under new ownership since last year—has finally renounced L’Epicureo’s faux Renaissance paintings and full-size piano, replacing them with a palette of crimson velvet, white leather and multi-hued chandeliers and christening the space Aspire. With nearly two hundred seats, however, the trendy aesthetic can only assert itself in the most cautious manner. Where Chinese Laundry and Temple sell sex with brash enthusiasm, Aspire seeks to draw those under twenty-one as well as over sixty, and their predicament shows: A dimly lit bar is tempered with flat-screen TVs, the nightclub visuals with a conventional menu.

While Temple added a strong dose of Portuguese influence to its cuisine, Aspire turns to Asian inspiration to round out its recognizable Italian and New England dishes. White miso soup sits alongside clam chowder, unagi-glazed shrimp next to calamari. Japanese continues to thrive as America’s exotic comfort food, allowing some international play in a menu that’s designed to please rather than challenge. The tuna tartar appetizer ($11) has a familiar—albeit appealing—sensibility. The tartar tower is orthodox, though the wasabi-tossed tobiko roe adds bite to the mild fish, as do pickled cucumber strips and a slightly crunchy wakame salad.

A few appetizers border on kitschy, including the unagi shrimp ($9), which don’t actually incorporate eel but, rather, are bathed in the same sweet glaze that tops unagi maki. The result is a very sweet teriyaki-style snack on shredded Romaine lettuce. Arancini (fried risotto) is a standard presentation, with large spheres of arborio stuffed with robiola, “that big Italian bacon” as a young server called pancetta, and sides of both basil and tomato sauces ($8). It may win over those who only eat what they already know, but the dish is muddled in both texture and flavor. Caesar salad, blue mussels and Point Judith calamari round out a list of dishes well-known to customers of any demographic.

Entrees are delineated as “earth” and “ocean,” an effort to stylize traditional dishes such as steak and short ribs in the former category, and grilled littlenecks with cavatelli in the latter. Steak frites (offered with a flat iron for $19) is among the most flavorful of the entrees, thanks to a rich peppercorn demi-glace, and one that would, in fact, satiate pre-theater bustle and late-night cravings. Short ribs ($21) were short on braising time given that the connective fat sat completely intact. Its base of white polenta was undersalted, its texture slightly delicate for such a hearty piece of meat.