Five Horses Tavern

^{Photo: JOEL VEAK}

Ever since the end of baseball season '04, Bostonians have believed that even the most obstinate curses can be reversed. And we have no doubt the folks behind Davis Square's Five Horses Tavern (400 Highland Avenue, Somerville, 617.764.1655) harbor similar feelings about hexes of all kinds, baseball or otherwise. After all, the space that they revamped, remodeled, and reopened in September has changed hands four times in the last eight years. But the honchos at the helm of the tavern's house and kitchen (Dylan Welsh and Aaron Sanders, respectively, who used to clock in shoulder to shoulder at Bukowski Tavern) have met the challenge head-on: their pub-inspired menu smacks of imagination and heart, and their 36 rotating taps are the stuff that sudsy dreams are made of.

And if our meal was any indication, the plague has indeed been lifted off their equine-branded house. Test the newly de-jinxed waters with some pizza ($5 during lunch hours, plus a few extra bucks for toppings), featuring a garlicky thin crust topped with anything from fiery mortadella and pork belly, if you're feeling carnivorous, to whipped tofu and shaved shiso, if you're living life on the veg.

Or dig into the K.F.C.G.H. ($16), a neat play on traditional English pub food infused with a little love from the southernmost parts of the good ol' US of A. Your pipin' hot plate will arrive bearing a whole fried Cornish game hen - which by some act of wizardry is at once crisp and juicy - seated alongside slightly spicy jalapeno-cheddar mashed potatoes and lip-smackingly gooey pork belly mac and cheese. A few more helpings of that, and Five Horses might just convince us that curses really don't exist.

Except for those ones we get in long forwarded emails from our mothers. Those we secretly always believe.