Le Bistro

Back to basics in a high-flying neighborhood

by Stephen Heuser

DINING OUT

Le Bistro 1287 Cambridge Street (Inman Square), Cambridge Open daily, 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Brunch served Sat-Sun, 10 a.m.-3:30 p.m. AE, DC, Disc, MC, TM, Visa Beer and wine No smoking (617) 868-1247 Small ramp from sidewalk level

An article in the New Yorker recently tackled a central mystery of the food world: why do restaurants tend to cluster together?

As a case study the author picked a certain bistro-encrusted Brooklyn street, but he could just as easily have chosen Inman Square, the quiet Cambridge neighborhood with a dinnertime seating capacity that would, by any normal measure, seem adequate for NATO.

A month ago yet another new restaurant opened here: a little storefront called, bluntly, Le Bistro. It represents two things Inman Square didn't have before: 1) a small, romantic space and 2) French food. With a stained-wood front lit by clubby carriage lanterns, it's quite a contrast to the sleekly urbane Jae's and so-downscale-it's-up-again East Coast Grill. It's also a contrast to the constant party atmosphere of those places, and to their 90-minute waits. The coffered wood ceilings and vintage French chocolate ads give it a subdued and cozy feeling; you sit down right away, and the service is cheery but mellow.

Le Bistro, it turns out, is run by the Moroccan family that owns Marrakesh (also on Cambridge Street, but farther east). The menu is staunchly conservative, even defiantly so on a strip where you can order chipotle-glazed chicken liver or caterpillar maki or ceviche in a martini glass. Here, it's as if you'd just flipped to the Classic Food Channel: steak frites, sole meunière, duck-liver mousse. You can even order fondue for two. There are occasional Moroccan touches, and the fondue set looks like Calphalon, but otherwise the place is very much a throwback. Even the name is a throwback -- "Le Bistro" would have sounded pretty trendy in the '70s.

One surprise: there's more Italian food than you might guess from the name. (Then again, maybe not: there's another Le Bistro in Revere, no relation, which serves almost entirely Italian food. Go figure.) There's a ravioli entrée, and also an appetizer called pain à l'ail ($7.95), which you might recognize as crostini: four slices of broiled bread with diced tomato and mushroom, flavored with garlic and sprinkled with blue cheese. A merguez appetizer ($8.95) showed some Moroccan influence: merguez is a spicy North African sausage, here served as four little finger-size sausages, spicy but not too hot, over a big pile of hearty braised broccolini.

There's also a touch of Belgium involved. The beer we drank was Blanche de Brugges ($5.50), wheat beer from a pretty medieval brewing town in Belgium. And there's a whole little section of the menu dedicated to mussels: a very Belgian idea. You can get a half-order for $7.95, full for $13.95. We tried a variant of the classic white-wine-and-garlic treatment: our bowl was towering with big, plump, fairly sweet mussels in a broth of shallots, white wine, and little curls of smoked bacon. (The menu did promise cream, and it wasn't particularly creamy, but it still tasted good.)

The appetizers all evinced a sort of mild competence that set the tone for the whole meal. An entrée of Chilean sea bass ($17.95) had a typically fine, low-octane taste. Sea bass's meaty blandness often makes it a platform for all kinds of weird flavors, but here the treatment was more conventional: spread with grainy mustard, then baked. The fish was cooked nicely, keeping its moisture and flakiness; the main flavor was the mustard, applied quite thickly in spots. The big pile of mashed potatoes in the middle wasn't particularly exciting. A few vegetables came on the side: carrots, green beans, cauliflower.

"Côte de sanglier" ($19.95) was a small rack of wild-boar chops, with small heads and long arcing ribs and a flavor much like broiled lamb. They came with three dollops of colored polenta. Some chunks of sautéed mushroom were there to play off the richness of the meat; on the side were beans, carrots, and cauliflower, just like the fish.

The menu here names the dishes in French; my favorite was called ravioli aux champignons sauvages, which conjures the wonderful image of savage mushrooms. (As the English translation explains, it's just wild-mushroom ravioli.) The pasta came in wide, round al dente pillows, flat on the plate, stuffed with mushroom purée and sauced with mushroom chunks. There was crisped thyme scattered across the dish and also a lot of salt involved, but this was the good kind of salty: flavorful and intense.

Don't mistake this for one of those places where "Le" in the name means everything's going to be small. We got a big piece of sea bass and a bigger pile of mashed potatoes; the mussels, even in a half-order, were enough for three of us to share as an appetizer. Even the pain à l'ail was one of those appetizers with the salad built in: a plate of mixed greens dressed with balsamic vinegar. We saw the roast chicken entrée delivered to a nearby table, and it was huge.

There are only two desserts: chocolate fondue (with fruit and pound cake for dipping) and chocolate mousse. We tried the latter ($6), a pretty cylinder of fairly mild mousse on a cookie-type crust. There were two straws of dark chocolate poking out of the mousse, and the whole thing was crosshatched with sauce that tasted suspiciously like . . .

Hershey's?

Hmm. In a way, that's sort of endearing. On the other hand, this is a restaurant, and you want the sauce to be something you can't find at home, some erotically dark and bitter counterpoint to the lightness of the mousse. Critiquing Le Bistro feels a little like digging at someone's home cooking. It's got the same earnest gourmet-ness you notice in people working out of Craig Claiborne, only your friends aren't charging $19 for fish when you eat their food.

Le Bistro very much has that feeling of a discovery -- that cute little place you know about in Inman Square that the masses haven't mobbed yet. It's not quite that; it's a little too expensive and a little too predictable. But it does fill a need, especially if you're not a fussy food person. I could imagine
sitting down over a pot of fondue, sharing a salad, watching the street slowly go dark. It could work, ma chère. It could be ours: the night of the savage mushrooms.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser@phx.com.

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