Brasserie Jo

A versatile restaurant and bar for Huntington Avenue -- by way of Chicago

by Robert Nadeau

120 Huntington Avenue (Colonnade Hotel) (617) 425-3240 Open for breakfast, 6:30-11 a.m.; for lunch, 11 a.m.-2:30 p.m.; and for dinner, 5-11 p.m. (Sunday until 10 p.m.) AE, CB, DC, Di, MC, Visa Full bar Valet parking $9 at lunch, $10 at dinner Sidewalk-level access

Brasserie Jo is the creation of French-born, Chicago-based superchef Jean Joho. The idea at his original Brasserie Jo, in Chicago, was to do less-formal versions of the homey Alsatian dishes of his youth, along with a solid menu of Parisian bistro favorites and a few knockoffs of the modern cuisine from his more expensive restaurant, Everest. Brasserie is the word for brewery in French, and also for a type of brewpub restaurant often featuring the more beer-friendly dishes of northern France, especially the semi-German cooking of Alsace and Lorraine.

This must all be amusing to Boston's own Alsatian superchef, Raymond Ost, who has done much the same thing at a higher level at Sandrine's Bistro in Harvard Square. A head-to-head comparison isn't all that important, because there's little of Alsace on the menu at Brasserie Jo. What we have instead is a flexible restaurant that conveys some Parisian character and delivers a few Alsatian delights as well. It is also an entirely serviceable bar with a variety of excellent martinis; a serious raw bar with several kinds of oysters; a potential power breakfast place; and -- with sidewalk tables and café windows -- quite a good place for a snack.

Dinner starts a little oddly, with a baguette loaf in a paper bag and a salad of shredded carrots. Do these fit together somehow? We are invited to order drinks, and drinks they have -- Alsatian beers, an all-French wine list, a list of custom martinis.

We settle in for appetizers, and the Alsatian choice is the best: Uncle Hansi's onion tart ($5.50). Think of a sloppy quiche with more onions than egg and you'll have the idea; here, the full flavor of stewed onions and nutmeg makes up for even the soggy crust. Shrimp and codfish brandade ($6.95) updates the texture of the Provençal dip with chunks of shrimp in the mild codfish-olive oil purée, and enormous, lattice-cut potato chips make delicate shovels. But the salty essence of this appetizer has been washed out.

Too much salt, on the other hand, will trouble some in the onion soup gratinée ($5.95), but the broth has flavor, the cheese broiled on top is for real, and there isn't that breadiness that ruins a lot of onion soups. An Auvergne blue salad ($6.95) was small but choice; whole and shredded leaves of endive came dressed with the eponymous blue cheese and tokens of walnut and sliced apple.

What's unusual for the late '90s is that here, entrées are where the major flavor statements are made. Duckling à l'orange ($18.95, Sundays only) tastes more braised than roasted, but the excitement is in the fried potato puffs alongside and the richly savory red cabbage underneath. Coq au vin ($16.95) is done as Burgundians do it (and as Alsatians do many other dishes), with so much bacon flavor it's unclear whether the wine marinade was red or white. Again, the meat was melting-off-the-bone delicious, and the little bits of fried dumpling you could eat with the sauce were irresistible.

When a master chef approaches the traditional Alsatian choucroute garni ($17.95), there's not much question which way to go. You don't enrich a platter of sauerkraut braised with three kinds of sausages, ham hocks, salt pork, two kinds of bacon, blood sausage, and liver. You lighten it up. Brasserie Jo makes a show of serving the choucroute from a covered orange saucepan set on a trivet at the table, but the dish hasn't actually been cooked in that pan -- it's assembled from separate components. Each of the ingredients keeps more of its own flavor that way but contributes less to the taste of the cabbage. In fact, the kraut is pleasantly sweet and a little crunchy, mercifully low in fat but perhaps controversially low in smoky, meaty flavors. For the meats in this version, Chef Joho has specified a couple of custom sausages that tasted too much alike to suit me, a cured pork chop, and a slice of mild ham. His major contribution is a quenelle (a meatball to all youse diner fans) of what I'd guess to be lean pork and apple. That's the yummiest morsel in the pot. So you have a choucroute garni you can eat, and still walk afterward, but at a considerable cost in variety.

The "Famous Shrimp Bag" ($18.95) is a Chicago story. Apparently the chef did this number -- shrimp, two kinds of rice, mushrooms, and greens wrapped up in filo and tied off like a purse -- as a special at his first restaurant, then put it on the menu when he opened Brasserie Jo. It's cute but not all that tasty; again, I suspect the ingredients have been cooked separately ahead of time, as the shrimp and rice are both done but not overdone, the flavor is predominantly that of the mushrooms, and the greens are almost crisp. Plus, the bag doesn't open with a burst of aromatic steam as would a real dish en papillote.

The wine list is all French and heavily Alsatian, with six rieslings and four gewürztraminers. Of the wines also available by the glass, I preferred the Trimbach gewürz ($2.75 for a tasting portion, $8 for a glass) to the Becker riesling ($2, $5.50). Chef Joho supervises his own microbrew, Hopla ($4 for a traditional pour of 0.3 liters); it goes down well enough with choucroute, but I think the chef should supervise the aftertaste a little more carefully. Alsatian bottled beers, like Krönenberger, are excellent on their own or with this food.

Desserts are good but hard to predict. My favorite was the "Pear Belle Hélène" ($5.95), not so much for its alcohol-laced poached pear or two scoops of pretty ordinary vanilla ice cream as for its excellent chocolate sauce. Crème caramel ($4.50) was creamier, lighter, and larger than our usual flans. Alsatian kugelhopf glacé ($4.95) is nouvelle cuisine of a kind. The chef has taken the usual kugelhopf coffeecake and replaced it with a slice of iced vanilla mousse with raisins, along with two terrific sauces: a raspberry purée and a pastry cream. The brioche bread pudding ($4.95) was our most filling dessert, quite dense with a wisp of anise flavor, we thought. There is a vertical decoration on this one (some kind of dull cookie), a chocolate-caramel kind of sauce, and some candied fruit.

A decaf espresso was fatally burnt but promptly replaced with a fresh one. Regular coffee and espresso were fine.

The ambiance is supposed to be '40s Paris; I wasn't there, but the sound level with shiny walls and tile floors seem to me more like '80s New York. This is a restaurant suited to so many uses, though, that a blurred concept is really no problem.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at robtnadeau@aol.com.