Salts

A small and promising newcomer keeps the cold at bay

by Stephen Heuser

798 Main Street (Kendall Square), Cambridge
(617) 876-8444
Open Tuesday through Saturday, 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Beer and wine
Amex, DC, MC, Visa
One step up from sidewalk level

The dumpling is a winter food ordained by God. Starchy, meaty, invariably warm, a dumpling goes down with the easy goodness of children's food and sticks to your ribs till the next snowmelt. I had never heard of the Ukrainian dumplings called vareniki until I ordered them at Salts, and now it's my personal resolution to eat dumplings once a week until at least March.

Not to suggest that Salts is a restaurant dedicated to dumplings. It doesn't serve dumplings on their own at all, in fact; the vareniki, for instance, were served with lamb. But the spirit of those dumplings -- companionable, warm, vaguely Eastern European -- infuses the place, and somehow, a few weeks after my last meal at Salts, that's what remains with me.

Salts, between Central and Kendall Squares, occupies a spot with some history: its inviting, understated space has been home to a series of inventive little bistros, most recently Anago, which has since moved into the Lenox Hotel, in the Back Bay. The prices here are at the upper end of what you might ordinarily pay for bistro fare; high enough (some entrées creeping over the $20 line) that you expect plenty of expertise in the kitchen, but not so high as to discourage the kind of homespun experimentation that characterizes a good American bistro.

When it's good, Salts can be almost exquisite in its balance of comfort and ambition. The appetizer special one night was a little mound of plump sea scallops huddling in the middle of a plate, bound together with a leek ribbon. The scallops were done with a delicate touch, seared on the outside and silky-soft on the inside, surrounded by a cloud of hearty creamed cauliflower and a ring of deep-green parsley sauce.

Much the same homey-gourmet character infused an appetizer of wild mushrooms ($8.50), a wild jumble of earthy-tasting oyster and porcini mushrooms laid with leek strips on a round, soft blini. The blini, a kind of buckwheat pancake borrowed from Russian cooking, was our first signal that Salts takes its inspiration less from Italian or French standards than from those found farther east. In this case, the blini got a little lost among the 'shrooms and the surrounding parsley sauce, but it didn't distract from the forest-floor heartiness of the dish.

More experimental, but no less comforting, was the duck prosciutto ($8.50) -- peppery and moister than Italian prosciutto, which is normally made from a cured pig's leg, with a texture somewhere between ham and bacon. The Italian tradition is to serve prosciutto with a bit of melon for contrast; here the contrast came from a dollop of cranberry sauce.

Our second dumpling sighting came in a dish of cider-sage consommé ($6). The soup, despite the bits of sage leaf and the spaghetti squash floating around like noodles, didn't quite come together for me -- cider eaten with a spoon? -- but I loved the dumplings: soft-skinned, with a filling of black walnut and pumpkin.

Part of the pleasure of a restaurant like Salts is the personal attachment you develop for a place this small. There are 17 tables in the restaurant; the waiters refer to the chef by first name (I've never met the guy, I couldn't help thinking) and recite the specials as though they were telling you about their children. The second time I visited Salts, the hostess remembered me from a week earlier -- and trust me, she wasn't recognizing a restaurant reviewer.

The menu begins with a little encomium to salt itself, the traditional token of hospitality in some cultures, and that idea seems to suffuse the operation. Everyone goes to great pains to be welcoming. On one visit I was undercharged by one glass of wine; I pointed out the omission and was thanked for my honesty by what seemed like every waiter in the house -- and then they left it off my bill anyway.

The risk at a restaurant that prides itself on that sort of generosity is that the food can sometimes lose focus: the impulse to provide overrides the contrary drive toward precision. This was a slight problem with an entrée of chicken roasted in a pastry crust ($16.50): the chicken, so moist the crust became a bit floppy, was served on a profusion of mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, carrots, and other vegetables. The bottom of the plate held a grainy mustard sauce with the consistency of broth, which lent a pleasant sharpness to the accumulation of soft flavors but also flirted with ingredient overload.

An interesting experiment was a fillet of sturgeon ($20.50), another item usually associated with Russia. Here it is served with Brussels sprouts, square potato-dill dumplings (again, the Russian influence), and a sauerkraut-like slaw of red cabbage. Sturgeon is an intriguing fish to order in restaurants; it's been so rare for so long that no standard treatment seems to have developed yet. (It's farm-raised in the US now, which is why it's a little more common on menus these days.) The texture is somewhere between salmon and swordfish, but its meaty taste is slightly fishier than salmon. This fillet was nicely done, quite moist on the inside, with the mild flavor accented by a dill sauce on top. My quibble with the dish was the brightly colored sauce of horseradish and yellow beet that underlaid the fish; what could have electrified the palate came closer to electrocuting it.

One more nice thing about a bistro like this: when you order a vegetable dish, you feel as if you've really had your vegetables. A plate of roasted and grilled veggies ($14.40) came in yet another broth, this one quite sweet, with parsnips, carrots, turnips, and Brussels sprouts ladled around a central timbale (i.e., cylinder) of orange squash purée and ricotta cheese. It came with two big wedges of flatbread, which had the texture of grilled polenta.

Of all the entrées we tried, the most precise and lovely was the lamb ($19.50). Slices of roast loin, left delicately rare on the inside with a peppery crust on the outside, circled the plate; in the center was broth again, herbal and meaty, with a mound of buttery spaghetti squash atop a nest of kale. And this is where the vareniki came in: just two of them, pinched closed like wontons, with a pumpkin-colored skin and a stuffing of wonderful spiced eggplant -- each a little self-contained world of cold-climate vigor.

Desserts, all $6, were very much in the spirit of the other dishes. The bowl of chocolate soup (!) was drop-dead rich, warm and deep in color, like liquid pudding; afloat in the chocolate, to add excess to excess, were squares of cinnamon pound cake. Just as rich, and just as unusual, was a tapioca crème brûlée: a layer of grainy tapioca below the usual seared custard. The lightest dessert we tried, if you can call it light, was slightly misnamed: "pear with wine strudel" is what the menu calls it, but it was the pear (sliced and fanned out) that had been poached in wine; the strudel was the expected pastry roll of apples and nuts.

The wine list at Salts comprises about 40 bottles, strong on French and American wines; prices by the glass are a modest $4 to $6. One nice feature is that several wines are available in half-bottles; we enjoyed the Ridge Geyserville Zinfandel, which was the most expensive half-bottle at $23. The wine came a little warm, even for a zin, but our waiter was more than accommodating when asked (with a food snob's precision) to have it chilled down about 10 degrees. Warmth is important come late fall, but everything in its place.