Review: Midlina Bridges Worldly Cuisines in Canton

Walk into Midlina, the new restaurant on Boston Street in Canton, and you’ll see a long, well-stocked, and inviting bar, a spiral staircase leading up to the second floor—and a series of metal helmets, prominently displayed, as if in the medieval wing of a museum.

The helmets are from owner Karim Kiriakos’ own collection, sourced over a lifetime of world travels. It’s these travels that are the inspiration for his first restaurant, rather than, say, a reference to jousting, Maryland’s state sport.

Midlina is dark and cozy, with a playlist of retro tunes and a creative cocktail list. There’s also an actual speakeasy upstairs, Poe’s Tower, the entrance of which is a moving bookshelf (that spiral staircase is decorative and not for customers) through which you must be delivered by a staff member. But though it feels like a bar, Midlina is a restaurant, and an experimental one at that.

Kiriakos has hired Cyrus Keefer, a journeyman chef with a long résumé (Fork & Wrench, Birroteca, The Red Star, Kneads) to run his kitchen, though Kiriakos, who has his own long résumé as well as a culinary school diploma, could probably have done it himself. (When the chef recently called out sick, Kiriakos took over the stoves.) The pair have dreamt up an innovative menu of creative, even occasionally odd dishes, which Kiriakos imagines as a kind of itinerary from those travels.

The name of the place, Midlina, is also a signal to this, taken from the name of an actual footbridge between the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates, on Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula. Thus the menu includes dishes as far-ranging as a vegetable tagine laced with the Moroccan spice ras el hanout, gambas a la plancha, paella, fusilli Amatriciana, tandoori octopus, and escargot tacos. Yes, escargot tacos.

“That was my idea,” Kiriakos tells me early one evening just as the dining room is filling up. He explains that he told Keefer, “Make me like escargot.” Apparently, it worked, though I’ve not yet tried them (as not even a good mole sauce would make me like escargots). But what I have tried has been expertly prepared, quite delicious, and definitely novel.

The fusilli Amatriciana is a gorgeous treatment of the famed Roman dish, composed of house-made pasta, a dense red sauce laced with the Calabrian sausage paste N’duja, and topped with both a hefty spoonful of burrata and a branch of roasted on-the-vine cherry tomatoes. The tomatoes are sweet explosions that make the dish next-level good. This is the only pasta dish on the relatively short menu, which seems to have resulted in a concentration of both attention and flavor.

The seafood ceviche is similarly focused, an artful bowl of tender shrimp and octopus—cooked sous-vide then finished on the grill—accompanied by long strips of fried plantain chips. One dish not to be missed is the simplest, an appetizer of rice-paper chips, a pile of sliced jamon serrano, and little bowls of romesco sauce and smoked garlic aioli.

Keefer is very good with sauces, and he zaps most of his dishes with excellent iterations of them. That smoked garlic aioli also makes an appearance with the skirt steak, which comes draped across a mound of thin fries cooked in beef fat and topped with a verdant version of chimichurri sauce. And the gambas a la plancha, which is to say grilled shrimp, is paired not only with crunchy disks of sweet potatoes but with copious amounts of both red and green chile salsas.

The happy-go-lucky approach to sauces is one of the highlights of Midlina’s menu, and works better than Keefer’s sometimes heavy hand with spices. Both the shrimp and the ceviche are a few notes too busy, and the vegetable tagine is so dosed with ras el hanout that it obscures the spring vegetables. Hopefully, he’ll lighten it up, as there are too few tagines on menus these days, especially ones as pretty as Midlina’s.

Midlina has only been open for a few months, so like most new restaurants, it’s still a work in progress. Kiriakos is experimenting with “chef’s table” nights, where Keefer cooks tasting-menu dinners; there’s live music three nights a week upstairs at Poe’s Tower, where diners can order the full menu as well as from that cocktail menu (espresso martinis, smoked Old-Fashioned, Empress gin fizzes); and there are weekly prix-fixe and wine bottle specials. There was even a recent masquerade party.

The often-changing menu also includes a weekend off-the-menu special: an elaborate mixed-grill plate of lamb chops, quail, skirt steak, and kofta kebabs, a dish that Kiriakos says he makes regularly at home.

Kiriakos, who was born in Egypt and moved to Maryland as a kid, is an alum not only of the now-closed Baltimore Inernational College’s culinary program but of years working with the Atlas Restaurant Group. This experience makes for a hands-on approach, as he’s often running the floor as maître d’ or working behind the bar.

Opening his own restaurant, he says, “Has been my dream since I was in middle school.” There’s a kid-like playfulness to Midlina, both on the menu and in the décor, that makes the place a great deal of fun. And after dinner, even if you opt out of a nightcap, be sure to check out the swinging-bookshelf secret door.

MIDLINA: 2206 Boston St., 410-775-4094. HOURS: Tues.-Thurs. 5.-10 p.m.; Fri., Sat. 5-11 p.m.; Sun. 2-9 p.m. PRICES: Appetizers: $19-28; mains: $32-60; desserts: $16; prix-fixe: $60. AMBIANCE: Upscale but fun.