Aquitaine

Look out -- the beaches of Normandy are storming us back

by Stephen Heuser

569 Tremont Street (617) 424-8577 Open Sun-Wed, 5:30-10 p.m. Thurs-Sat, 5:30-11 p.m. Beer and wine AE, MC, Visa Up one step from sidewalk level

Zut Alors! The French are colonizing restaurants here at record speed, as pâtés and rillettes and tiny little pickles nudge aside all that caprese and bruschetta and aceto balsamico we've been fed for the past several years.

Should we worry?

Nah. Have another piece of foie gras. We can be bought.

It's true that traditional French food feels a little dowdier than the various perky Mediterranean fusions we've come to expect on menus. But French cooking (like pretty much any cooking) can be vivid and terrific, especially when you strip it of its airs and pretensions and froofy haute-monde associations. And for people my age, who weren't really paying for our own dinners the last time French food enjoyed any meaningful prominence, it even feels kind of novel.

Aquitaine, the South End's new restaurant-of-the-moment, isn't a temple to the formalities of haute cuisine, but on the other hand, you wouldn't exactly say that it's stripping French food of its airs. The revived cool of tout qui est français was probably very much on the minds of Seth and Shari Woods when they opened their second restaurant, right across Tremont Street from their first, the excellent Metropolis Café. Metropolis was -- is -- a little gem of a creative French-Italian place, converted from an ice-cream parlor, where everything feels exact and special and nifty. Aquitaine is, in all respects, a bigger statement. The space, formerly Botolph's on Tremont, has been transformed into a swanky-sleek haunt of tall windows and vintage posters, with dark-wood wine racks reaching for the ceiling; the tablecloths are linen and the waiters wear the white shirts and black vests of our midcentury Parisian imaginations. The menu feels -- well, not generic, but thematic. It's consistently good, which means everything has started clicking since the first reviews rolled in late this summer. The place has buzz. It has a full reservation book and not much space for you at the zinc bar. The food is not what you would call surprising, but then not everyone likes surprises.

The salad of baby lettuce with goat cheese ($7) could have been served at any modern bistro: crisply fresh frisée and dandelion, modest amounts of vinaigrette, crumbles of goat cheese that are ample but not gross. Not till the arrival of the fabulous caramelized-onion-and-gruyere tartlet ($7), headily topped with full-flavored bacon, do we start to suspect what's going on behind this recent wave of Francophilia.

Call it the New Comfort with Fat. I read in Parade magazine last Sunday that Nabisco is upping the flavor in Snackwell's cookies by reintroducing, into these fat-free snacks, a measure of fat. Yum. Seth Woods, here at Aquitaine, has figured out the same thing: he's upping the flavor in restaurant food by reintroducing bacon.

Also by reintroducing foie gras, not as a solo element but as an ingredient. For instance, the roasted-pumpkin bisque with seared foie gras ($9) is a startlingly luxuriant soup, grainy and buttery-rich, with a chunk of velvety foie gras dropped in the middle. And an entrée of duck- and-foie-gras ravioli ($17) is a profound experience in four pasta wrappers, served with black chanterelles and a truffled Madeira sauce. (This is, more or less, food from the Périgord, a region in France's central plateau where -- if we are to believe the food scholar Waverly Root -- the diet consists mostly of various combinations of truffles and foie gras. And the Périgord is a part of France's Guienne region, a name that's an ancient corruption of Aquitainia. Get it?)

Aquitaine does call itself a bistro (actually a "bistrot"), so we don't, in spite of the A-list clientele, expect everything to be quite so truffly. And indeed, there is the "coq au vin" ($16), updated from the classic version in which chicken is cooked in red wine. This is chicken in white wine, half of a small but very plump little hen served on whipped, lightly garlicked mashed potatoes, with pale wax beans and braised red pearl onions. The chicken itself was buttery, and parts of it tasted excellent, though some of the meat in our bird was a bit dry.

The other great classic of the bistro kitchen is steak frites, a/k/a steak and French fries. The version here ($17) is fancified to remarkable effect, with a hanger steak seared on the outside, left deeply red in the middle, and sliced under a demi-glace involving black truffles. The steak itself is small, but the flavor is like steak squared, with the throaty power of the meat deepened exponentially by the pungency of the truffles. After finishing the steak you want to sop up that sauce with every lingering one of the excellent sea-salted fries.

All the really memorable dishes I had at Aquitaine worked like that steak: moderately sized, with booming low-frequency notes instead of the spicy, acid high notes of Mediterranean cooking. The dishes that were less thumpingly rich were also a bit less exciting: roast salmon ($18) with a salad of yellow beets was nicely prepared, but seemed almost workaday on the same table as the duck ravioli, much as the white-wine chicken did next to the hanger steak. One mildly flavored dish that stood out was an appetizer of fried sweetbreads ($9), presented on a cloud of whipped potato with colorful highlights of purple (potato) and green (scallion). The result was a handsome arrangement that didn't overpower the taste of this very delicate organ meat.

Delicate is not a word you'd use to describe the "trois chocolat" dessert ($8). Imagine an egg of chocolate mousse perched on a dense, flaky-crusted chocolate pudding cake. Imagine drenching the whole thing in bitter chocolate sauce. Imagine a single mint leaf perched on top. Yow. This is a dessert to share. The other dessert we tried was a pineapple gateau ($7) that was also, interestingly, the one fusion-food moment we encountered at Aquitaine. The cake itself, with its nicely caramelized top of pineapple, wasn't exotic, nor was the vanilla cream served with it, but the fragrant cardamom ice cream on the plate lent the whole thing a sexy whiff of Southeast Asianness.

My one real complaint about Aquitaine isn't the food, and it isn't even the wait. (One night we had reservations and were seated promptly; another night we didn't and had to wait an hour. On a Wednesday.) It's that for a restaurant ostensibly focused partly on wine -- "Aquitaine Bar à Vin Bistrot" is what the ads say -- the bar to entry is so high. For one thing, there are vanishingly few half-bottles, which usually provide a less expensive ticket to good wine for parties of two. For another, the 20 wines available by the glass range in cost from $6 to $14 -- a price range that undoes a lot of the good that Aquitaine does by charging only $17 for something as impressive as duck-and-foie-gras ravioli. The food is special enough, and the crowd big enough, that no one here has to worry about niggling points like this. That, mon cher, is what reviewers are for.

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