Sibling Rivalry – Boston, MA

Sibling Rivalry had been on our list of restaurants-to-try-for-the-first time for a long time, it was just a matter of finding the right reason to go. An early birthday celebration for the wife would become a perfect chance to check this spot off of our list. The restaurant has a pretty good reputation in town…we met a bunch of the wife’s friends for drinks after dinner and when we told them where we had eaten, most people proclaimed their love for the SB.

The concept behind Sibling Rivalry is that there are two brothers doing the cooking. Each brother has a portion of the menu devoted to his creations so when you open the menu, under both the appetizers and entrees pages, you see each chef’s name and list of the dishes that they created, with each chef getting equal representation on the menu. I think it’s kind of an interesting idea but I’d like to see them take the rivalry a bit further. As a diner, you don’t really see the chefs interacting at all and you don’t really get the sense that there is any real competition between the two of them…isn’t that the point of a rivalry? From the diner’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter which chef’s dishes you order, it doesn’t seem like anyone is keeping score. And if you order one chef’s appetizer, you don’t have to order an entree from the same chef. I don’t know, the whole concept feels a bit too gimmicky for my taste. It might be cool if they added a bit of an Iron Chef flair, which could force each chef to use the same basic ingredients and come up with 2 totally different menus. The diner would then pick which chef’s menu they want to order from. At the end of a month of competitions, the selections from the diners are tallied and the losing chef has to wash dishes or be forced to wait tables for a night or something like that just to really show a sense of actual sibling rivalry to patrons. After the meal I couldn’t really remember which chef’s creations we had selected.

So how was the food? Well, I will say that both of our appetizers were excellent. The wife ordered something called lamb brix, which was basically ground up lamb served in a hot, flaky crust…almost like a beef patty but filled with lamb. It might’ve been deep fried, it seemed a bit too oily to have been baked. However it was made, it was really tasty. I ordered papardelle pasta that was served with a brown sauce that included rabbit, assorted varities of mushrooms, and green olives. It was phenomenal. It came out piping hot and was really earthy and hearty, just what I like.

For dinner, the wife ordered halibut wrapped in shoestring potato pieces, which was then fried and served with a cauliflower flan, some artichoke pieces, and a rich cream sauce garnished with truffle slices. The fish was perfectly cooked and very moist and the flan had a really nice texture to it, with just a hint of cauliflower flavor. I thought it was a clever and really good dish. I ordered the pressed duck, which is one of their most well known and loved dishes. I have to say, as much as I love duck, I wasn’t crazy about this dish. The duck had great flavor and the skin was nice and crispy, but I prefer my duck to be a bit more on the medium rare and juicy side of the spectrum. I’m nitpicking here, but given what we paid for dinner, I was a little underwhelmed by my entree. We also ordered the popular chick pea fries as a side, which were ok, but felt a bit like filler. I tried one and didn’t really feel like I needed any more.

For dessert we ordered the Meyer lemon cheesecake, which was more like a custard than a cake. It was a bit like a cheesecake reinvented and it was served in a crispy cup (made from something sweet, but I couldn’t tell what) instead of on a more traditional graham cracker crust. I actually liked the dessert even though it was not what I was expecting when we ordered it. I think the wife was a bit turned-off by the consistency of it and was really hoping that we’d be presented with a slice of more traditional cheesecake instead of something so ‘loose’.

We had a good meal at Sibling Rivalry and I’m glad that we were finally able to check it off our list, but I don’t really feel a big desire to go back just yet. Our meal was a bit pricey (we ordered drinks too), so that might be influencing my opinion a bit. I also think we were hoping to be blown away and so perhaps our experience suffered a bit because of high expectations. The restaurant changes their menu all the time and the service is friendly and attentive so who knows, we may feel like revisiting at some point in the future but right now, I feel that we have too many other places to try before paying Sibling Rivalry another visit. I’ll give it 3 stars.