Café Louis

Can you reverse direction and still maintain speed? Maybe so.

by Stephen Heuser

234 Berkeley Street (Back Bay), Boston (617) 266-4680 Open Mon-Sat for lunch, 11:30 a.m.-3 p.m.; "intermezzo" (pizza and dessert only), 3-5 p.m.; and dinner, 5-10 p.m. Closed Sun. Beer and wine AE, CB, DC, MC, Visa Lift access

A restaurant in a clothing store? Don't laugh. The original Café Louis (1995-1997) was pretty darn good: like its host, Louis Boston, the tiny café delivered its Newbury Street clientele a swanky kind of quality that had the whiff of not just the expensive, but the exclusive. Where else could you find escargot in a puff-pastry pillbox? Sauternes sorbet? Nowhere in Boston, that's for sure.

Chef Michael Schlow's reputation rose quickly, and soon he struck out on his own, as famous people in tiny cafés are wont to do (this fall he's going to open a downtown restaurant called Radius). When he left, the owners of Café Louis did something unthinkable in the normal restaurant world: they shut the place down rather than keep it limping along without its star chef. It reopened six months ago with a new layout, new minimalist décor, and not just a new menu but a totally different philosophy of food. Schlow's work was small, sculptural, and distinctly French in inspiration; the new menu, supervised by George Germon and Johanne Killeen, owners of Al Forno in Providence, is all about Italy and wood-oven roasting. The old Café Louis was seared foie gras and truffled venison; the new model is grilled pizza and roasted clams with orzo. It's very different, but only a boor could think the place has come down in the world.

The new décor is greatly streamlined from the old version; mustardy walls and asymmetrical parchment lampshades have been replaced with high, unobtrusive track lighting, flat-to-the-wall sconces, and walls painted an almost clinical hue that my girlfriend says is "pale araucana green," a color invented by Martha Stewart. The door to the tiny bar is framed in brushed stainless steel.

The food, though, is much less austere than before. That grilled pizza ($14), for instance, looks terrific but you would never mistake it for sculpture: a wide irregular half-moon of superthin dough, crisp on the bottom and chewy around the edges, is topped with ricotta cheese, olive oil, corn sliced off the cob, and slices of brilliant red tomato. The palette is all red and yellow and white; the flavors hit both the fresh high notes of tomato and corn and the smoky bass notes of grilled dough. In a stroke, it stakes a credible claim to local pizza supremacy. It's on the lunch menu as an appetizer, but it could just as easily work as a light lunch for two people.

The same goes for the Café Louis antipasto ($14). A white oval plate is lined with thinly shaved prosciutto, on top of which are carefully set dollops of white-bean paste, fine-diced eggplant caponata, cumin-marinated black olives, roasted red onion, a tiny wedge of quiche, three rounds of fresh white mozzarella, and a dollop of something orange and oniony and pungent. It was an energetic Neapolitan table gone all self-conscious on us, with handsome results.

A dinner salad of very fresh lettuce ($8) -- not mesclun, just torn green-leaf lettuce -- was dressed in vanishingly small quantities of olive oil and vinegar, and was just enough to split between two.

In a dinner special, roast pork loin ($23) was sliced into herb-crusted medallions and arranged around a pile of silky, butter-rich mashed potatoes. The meat was so tender it cut easily with a fork -- unusual for pork -- and proved so delicate-tasting that the fruit chutney served alongside threatened to overwhelm it. A dish of rigatoni ($16) gave us a new sense of possibility for pasta in red sauce. The ridged tubes were coated with what the menu described as "herb-infused Piemontese sauce," a clearly tomato-and-basil-based sauce with a fruity and aromatic quality that surprised us. Our waiter explained that the ingredients had been puréed raw, then tossed with cooked pasta to warm them up without cooking out the summery-sweet flavor. The dish was simple and, except for some curls of scallion, unadorned; it was hard to imagine how it could have been better.

At lunch, the same kind of early-harvest vigor showed up in a tomato sandwich -- er, "toasted panino" ($12) -- with thick slices of ripe tomato layered with white mozzarella and leaves of arugula, all between two slices of fluffy grilled white bread. A "littleneck clam and spicy sausage roast" ($18) was a dish of orzo in a salty, intense tomato sauce, surrounded by tiny roasted clams in open shells and spiked with slices of very peppery sausage.

A lunch special of scallops consisted of five behemoth scallops, pan-roasted brown on the ends and cooked just to the point of firmness. They were underlaid with peeled sweet orange segments and slices of brilliantly crimson roast beet; it was yet another dish with lots of chromatic life and a satisfying focus on the quality of the basic ingredients.

I expected to like the flavors at Café Louis but feel weighed down at the end of the meal, and to the kitchen's credit, that second part didn't happen. In all of these dishes, something in the preparation -- or rather, something not in the preparation; I suspect oil -- meant that we could eat full meals without that feeling of heavy excess. This carried through to the desserts, which were rich without feeling dense, sweet but not cloyingly so. Peach upside-down cake ($8) was slightly less caramelized than it might have been, doughy on the inside with thinly sliced peaches across the top. A strawberry-rhubarb tart ($13), almost a small fruit pizza, had a flaky, gnarled outer crust that was much lighter than it looked. On the playful side was a "croque-mademoiselle" ($10), two slices of brioche spread with dark chocolate, sprinkled with raspberries, and sautéed. The result was like a chocolate French-toast sandwich.

Café Louis, like Louis itself, is not a pleasure for the hoi polloi. The scallop lunch special -- whose price was never announced by our waiter -- turned out to cost $25. Wines by the glass start at $6 for a light Prosecco and climb to a whopping $30 for a glass of Gaja barbaresco (which isn't necessarily overpriced, mind you: it's on the wine list at another restaurant I visited this week for $375 a bottle). Even the little things add up: pineapple juice with soda water cost $4 a glass. Tea appears in all sorts of highly wrought incarnations (chamomile, mint, quince, "Casablanca," "Eros" . . . ) for $3 to $5 a pot.

A word about the staff: though we had a strange lapse in service -- our very solicitous waiter one night simply forgot to mention one of our courses to the kitchen -- they were so damn nice. The solicitous waiter improvised a batch of decaffeinated iced tea. The hostess at lunch made heroic efforts to find us a taxi, placing call after call on a day when rain was causing hour-long delays. The guy in the valet booth ran across the sweeping driveway and out into Boylston Street to find us one sooner. Nobody offered us dry socks from Louis, but then again, we didn't think to ask.

From time to time I get letters and e-mail asking for more vegetarian news. Here's a start: the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival will be held this Saturday, October 3, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center. The organizers promise free admission, free parking, and a range of vegetarian activities: food sampling, cooking demos, speakers, and the like. The Lewis center is located at 1350 Tremont Street, in Boston; the nearest T stop is Roxbury Crossing. For more information, call Evelyn Kimber at (617) 424-8846 or e-mail foodfest@mit.edu.

Stephen Heuser can be reached at sheuser[a]phx.com.