FOLLOWING ITS OWN BEAT
Berklee’s B3 serves Southern-inspired fare with side of live music
At B3, a new Southern-inspired restaurant and live music joint in Boston, everything comes together in perfect harmony. That's true of the menu, an excellent assemblage of dishes devised by chef Nicolas Swogger that punctuates Deep South-skewing plates with notes of more international influence. And it's true of the lineup of musicians performing in the space nightly: talented students from Berklee College of Music, which owns the glass-encased ground-floor space that houses B3, an abbreviation for Back Bay Beats. In a city with relatively few restaurants hosting live music regularly, it's a cool and clever creative collaboration.
“Food, music and art are my three favorite things, and this brings them all together,” said Swogger, covered in tattoos that testify to his passions for hardcore punk and graffiti culture. On the food front, though, his tastes have a bit more twang. Swogger spent most of his formative years in Mississippi, where he earned his first head chef role by age 18. The Magnolia Stater later worked under James Beard Award-winning chef John Currence at his upscale Creole restaurant, Boure, and with acclaimed chef Vishwesh Bhatt at Boure's sibling restaurant, Snackbar.
Three years ago, Swogger moved to Cambridge and took a role at the beloved, now-shuttered Southern spot Hungry
Mother. These experiences honed Swogger's fine dining chops, elevating his approach to Southern cuisine — a “misunderstood” genre, Swogger said — well beyond oft-associated fare like fried chicken.
Swogger serves plenty of smart standouts at B3. His grandmother's buttermilk biscuit recipe sandwiches pimento cheese and country ham drizzled with Tabasco-honey. He takes a classic hoppin' john, a Southern staple of Carolina rice and peas, and unexpectedly adds crisped pork cheeks. Chicken pot pie is deconstructed for a contemporary approach to the comfort dish. Head-on shrimp is laden with punchy Creole spices and served with pickled Fresno chilis and a red pea and collard green minestra. And in the lamb tagine, super-supple meat falls like butter off a shank and into a vibrant couscous with golden raisins, dates and mint.
“I like to punch people in the face with flavor,” said Swogger with a chuckle, flexing that proud punk pedigree. As his tagine suggests, not all the flavors are rooted below the MasonDixon line. There's a smattering of global inflection, said Swogger, who spent a few years growing up in Japan, where his military mother was stationed. Snackbar's Bhatt, an India native, imparted to Swogger an appreciation for the spices of the subcontinent. And the chef said he is inspired by the West African and Caribbean culinary traditions that arrived to the American South via the slave trade.
“In some ways, Southern food is America's original fusion cuisine,” Swogger said.
A fusion of sonic styles characterizes the music programming at B3, which will soon host nightly live performances by Berklee students, who also manage the music-club-quality light and sound systems for the restaurant's so-dubbed Center Stage, a slightly raised platform in the middle of the dining room.
It's a great opportunity for young artists to get paid practice sharing their pro-level talents for real audiences, said Michael Borgida, the Berklee administrator who manages the B3 lineup. This is the only Berklee collaboration of its kind in the city, he said.
“It's all about the real world experience,” Borgida said. “And it's also an amazing opportunity to show the worldclass music talent that we have here.” Each week will feature two acts — one booked for weekdays, the other for weekends — in genres ranging from jazz to R&B to folk to acoustic rock. The music may serve as unobtrusive background tunes during dinner service or be more of a focal point during special events.
The B3 space itself is also a stunner, featuring a cocktail slinging front bar bathed in music-video-like colored lights, a rear red accent wall covered in backlit instrument cases, and cymbals repurposed as lighting fixtures. The look is clearly high-end, not Hard Rock Cafe, and befits the surprising, sophisticated Southern-inspired food that Swogger serves. Sound the trumpets: We have a hit on our hands.