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Everybody loves Sal Parco, the restaurateur behind Mustard Seed and several other area restaurants, and I am certainly no exception. The commitment to quality, affordable food with friendly service in a casual setting is a noble cause. Recently, I had heard/read lots of positive things about Parco’s down home, family-style creation, Boulevard Diner, so I was pretty anxious to try it. Despite all this, I ended up leaving particularly unimpressed.

That being said, Boulevard certainly did have some strengths. The place really has a nice, welcoming atmosphere. This was great because we had just come from the Charleston Pet Fest where we were standing outside sweating for about two hours, so we needed to eat somewhere where being a little disgusting wouldn’t be frowned upon. The atmosphere carried over to the service as well. Our server was affable and paid plenty of attention to us.

As far as the important stuff (food) is concerned, there was one major success. We started our meal with, as we frequently do, with an appetizer of fried green tomatoes. The tomatoes were thinly sliced and had a really nice crisp exterior. With such thin slices, one might expect that the batter would overwhelm the tomato flavor which it is supposed to accent, but Boulevard handled the ratio perfectly. They were served with a shrimp remoulade sauce that was excellent. The sauce had chunks of shrimp and sweet pickle relish and seemed like a more tangy, upscale version of Big Mac sauce. My only complaint about the dish was that at $6 you would like to expect more than five slices of tomato. Actually, I’d be fine with five slices, but $4 seems like a reasonable price to me. The comparatively high price of our appetizer is surprising because everything else on the menu was a pretty good bargain.

For our entrees, I had one of the daily specials, the tortilla crusted flounder over cheddar grits with pineapple-chipotle slaw and green tomato pico de gallo. Sounds awesome, right? I’ll admit that it’s an interesting idea in theory, but I didn’t think it was executed very well. Everything was served in a shallow bowl with the various parts stacked on top of each other. This caused the flavor of the fish to be totally lost among everything else on the plate, particularly the grits. It also didn’t help that the piece of fish was really thin, so I never felt like I really got a decent chunk of it to taste it on its own. The pineapple-chipotle slaw was okay, but the chipotle flavor drowned out the pineapple, and the green tomato pico de gallo was indistinguishable. I’m not trying to say that the dish was terrible, because it wasn’t, but it really wasn’t any more than mediocre.

My friend got the fried chicken with green tomato chutney, squash and onions, and mashed potatoes. She wasn’t particularly impressed either. I tried the chicken and it was fine, but at a place that specializes in home-style favorites, you would hope this would be something they would nail. One crucial aspect of good fried chicken that was absent was the crispiness you want to have in the outer layer. We also found the chutney to be too sweet and not something that worked very well with the chicken. In fact, we think all the moisture in the chutney was the culprit behind the chicken’s missing crispiness. The potatoes, again, were just decent, and I wasn’t a big fan of the squash, which my friend felt had been overcooked.

The good news is that none of the entrees are too expensive. My flounder was only $9 and the chicken was just $7. I was tempted to try the desserts, which included options like coconut cake and M&M cheesecake that looked fantastic, but we were both a little too full.

When it came down to it, for me Boulevard Diner was a victim of its own hype. It had been talked up so much that I went into it expecting much more than it was capable of delivering. While I don’t believe Boulevard is an establishment that should be featured in all of the Charleston dining guides like it has been, it certainly would be a welcome alternative to the overpriced chain places like Applebee’s and Ruby Tuesday. If you’re looking for an affordable, casual place for an early weeknight dinner, I’d give it a shot, but it’s not on my short list of places to take visitors to Charleston who I’m looking to impress.

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