Celeste — Restaurant in Somerville

We had a spectacular experience sitting at the bar for dinner. With an open kitchen and a cozy atmosphere and the attention of the server at the bar if was as best as anyone can expect. The space is small and there is a regular flow of clientele in and out. The kitchen staff clearly work well together with good spirits throughout the evening. We arrived at 8 and the pace was still brisk.

As for the meal, we shared two appetizers and two entrees. The appetizer was a Blue cod ceviche which was an ample portion served with a flavourful sauce and large corn kernels and roasted pumpkin seeds. The second appetizer was a papua with a pickled cabbage topping topped with a large prawn prepared with a marinated and seared on an open fire. Both were mouthwatering and prepared us for the entrees.

The entrees we picked was a steamed eggplant dish which was essentially a mixed vegetable steamed with an excellent sauce that we fished using spoons as if it was a soup. The sauce had a pleasant heat the fresh vegetables had a perfect texture of just enough crunch. The eggplant in particular had been steamed to take away the rubberiness but still firm that it could be help on a fork. The last entree were four large seared scallops served on a type of rich fettuccine (and me description doesn't do it justice) with a buttery sauce.

We both enjoyed cocktails including a couple of Pisco drinks (mine with a request to make it spicy) as well a cocktail with ginger beer. All of them done before our eyes and wonderfully presented and garnished. We also had a little wine for the scallop course and two whites were offered that we could taste and choose from. The evening came to an end with a small complimentary shot of pisco. Their pisces are from Peru.

All in all a...

Went on a Sunday night so perhaps this was a fluke, but the food was entirely mediocre. Menu is also rather limited. I worked in Peru for a number of years so while not an expert, I’ve eaten a lot of Peruvian food, both good and bad. This was bad.

The 5 dishes we ordered were uniformly bland, sloppy in presentation, and totally uninteresting. Everything was drowned in heavy sauces. Most perplexingly, our fish ceviche arrived with no hint whatsoever of lime. Not in the sense that we would have liked a heavier lime marinade - there just wasn’t any at all. The scallops with fettuccine and huancaina came in an undersized bowl with 4 minuscule scallops covered in an absurd quantity of a heavy sauce that tasted only of white wine, butter, and cream - basically a cheap alfredo sauce. The tacu tacu had a small scoop of hard and flavorless rice/bean mixture that was served in a casserole dish filled with a much too thin sauce which again tasted exclusively of white wine, butter, and cream. It had the color of a macho sauce, but none of the flavor. The causa was fine, but the potatoes a bit too dense and, again, the sauce on them overpowering and bland. No brightness or fusions of flavor in anything. We finished the ceviche because the fish was at least fresh and well cut, but left almost all of the other dishes.

Setting is fun, albeit a bit spartan and the seating very tight. Impossible to get up from some tables without knocking into the table next to you.

Service was friendly, but amateurish. We had to remind our waiter about little things we had requested, one never came, and no one ever checked in to ask about the meal. Our entrees also arrived at completely different times.

I hope my experience was a one-off, but I wouldn’t bother with a...

tl;dr Celeste is amazing! Amazing authentic food and great, friendly and non-pretentious atmosphere. Everyone should try it!

Service: the service was great -- everyone was extremely nice, helpful, and they struck a nice balance between attentive but not too bothersome.

Food: definitely the highlight of the experience (as it should be). The food alone places this restaurant in the top 5 of Boston/Cambridge/Somerville for us. We tried two appetizers, Causa de Atún (I think that's what it was called) and the fried Yucca with vegetables, as well as two main dishes (in the picture), ají de gallina (top) and locro con salmón frito (bottom). Everything was delicious, but my personal highlights were the fried yucca and the ají de gallina -- they were so good!! Very original flavors, not something you can get at any kind of restaurant honestly. We will for sure come back again to try out other options, considering how delicious what we tried was. The food all seemed very authentic and made on the spot. We also tried two cocktails which were good.

Place/atmosphere: I think another highlight of the experience was the place itself. When you enter it seems as if you're entering a very casual and inviting diner style place, something we didn't expect, but were pleasantly surprised. There is plenty of light (during the day, not sure at night) and minimal decor, all complemented with good, mostly Latin American, music. There is zero pretentiousness (although they deserve it) to the people or the place. Another possible demonstration of their authenticity is the fact that most customers are Spanish-speaking, implying that many local Latin Americans are flocking there to eat delicious food from, or...