Le Gamin

The South End gets a hip new maison des pancakes

by Stephen Heuser

(617) 654-8969 550 Tremont Street (South End), Boston Open Mon-Sat, 8 a.m.-midnight; and Sun, 8 a.m.-8 p.m. Beer and wine license pending Cash only Down several steps from sidewalk level

If you eat out a lot, you could be forgiven for wondering whether the city's chefs were in the vest pocket of the French tourist board. As a reviewer, I started the year eating trout meunière and pork rillettes at Truc and wrote most recently about foie gras and coq au vin at Aquitaine. This week it's crêpes and croque monsieurs. On deck for December: the new Dunkin' Éclair.

No, not really.

But this crêpe thing is for real. Dinner crêpes spent some time on America's collective front burner 20 years ago, finally becoming so democratized that then-Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis proclaimed his favorite restaurant to be the Magic Pan, in Faneuil Hall. The crêpe probably didn't stay trendy for long after that; nothing French can become too popular without losing the cachet that makes people want it in the first place. So crêpe restaurants disappeared entirely until last month, when Le Gamin opened in a little below-ground space at the corner of Tremont and Waltham Streets.

Of all the restaurants peddling Francophilia in this part of the South End right now, Le Gamin is the least expensive and somehow the most French-feeling, with its black-and-white tile floor and black-and-white photos of Paris and banged-up road signs lining the walls. Coffee comes in bowls, not cups. Sugar comes in little paper tubes. Payment is in cash. You wouldn't guess, sitting in this attractive but unprepossessing café, that this is the first Boston outpost of a trendy New York chain -- or that one of its New York cousins, Les Deux Gamins, is famous for being patronized by supermodels. The crêpe, I guess, has come a long way since 1978. You never saw Kate Moss at the Magic Pan.

Foodwise, a crêpe restaurant is a brilliantly simple idea: one pot of batter and a whole lot of dicing and you're set for the night. The two cooks here ladle unsweetened buckwheat batter onto a round iron griddle and fold the resulting pancake into a rectangular pocket. This simplicity (plus a soupçon of seriousness about quality) means that Le Gamin, without being at all ambitious, can manage a consistency that eludes much more expensive restaurants.

The savory crêpes are filled with one or more of the handful of ingredients on the menu. There are no sauces and no toppings. The crêpe itself is thin and brown, with a bit of moist sponginess; it works as a blank but substantial slate for the cheese or chopped ham or leeks tucked inside. The single-ingredient crêpes (say, sliced spicy sausage, $6.50) are good but fairly austere; anyone in the mood for a more rounded package might prefer a combination, such as ham and cheese ($6.50; the ham is thinly sliced and chopped deli ham), or goat cheese and leek ($7.50), or the appropriately named crêpe complète ($7.50), which has ham and cheese mixed with a little egg. Each plate is a balanced (if modest) meal, since it comes with a very fresh little mesclun salad topped with an excellent mustard vinaigrette.

Le Gamin gets more interesting when you move beyond the crêpes to the sandwiches and salads. (There's also a nightly dinner special, which started too late to be included here.) A tomato and mozzarella sandwich ($7.50) was flavored with pesto and took on a bit of probably unintended texture from a burnt corner on the toasted bread. The croque monsieur ($7) is a French quick-food staple, ham and cheese grilled till melted; a merguez-moutarde sandwich ($7.50) consisted of a spicy lamb sausage sliced lengthwise, and laid between two pieces of bread with a few strips of roasted red pepper and a little mustard. All very good, as long as you check your normal American expectations (spreads, lettuce, cheese) at the door.

The most elaborate dishes here, interestingly, are the salads, which seem to benefit from all that effort the cooks save by not having to whip up ingredient-heavy dinners. Each salad comes off like a little country picnic. The smoked salmon ($9), for instance, was really delightful, with a round wall of smoked salmon circling a cold potato salad, all piled with mesclun greens with a few straws of chive arcing up and out. Around the edge of the plate, quarters of boiled red potato alternated with tomato wedges. A goat-cheese salad ($8) was less fancy but also good, with goat cheese melted on toasted rounds of bread, arranged around more of that excellent mesclun. The "salade Gamin(TM)" ($9.50) raised expectations with that little trademark symbol, but it didn't quite fulfill them: a decent ratatouille (stewed onion, tomato, squash) and very nice grilled squash were accompanied by an indifferent pile of cold chicken. It almost looked like sandwich ingredients laid out with no bread.

Desserts consist mostly of crêpes made from a sweet batter (dessert crêpes, unlike the savory kind, contain vanilla and a little sugar). My favorite was the simplest: citron sucre ($3.50), a crêpe dusted with sugar and flavored with a squeeze of lemon juice -- sweet and tart and light. There are plenty of more-elaborate desserts on the menu, but none quite achieved that unassuming synergy. One was filled with chestnut cream; another with sliced banana and topped with chocolate sauce. There's also a flambé crêpe ($6), topped with a jigger of rum or Grand Marnier and set aflame. I tried the rum version, which tasted . . . well, like a crêpe soaked in hot liquor. But hey, flaming food is always fun. One final nice touch is the list of unusual hot drinks: in addition to coffee, there's a big, steaming bowl of grog ($4.50), a milk-and-rum punch ($4.50; trust me, it's good), and Valhrona hot chocolate perked up with Grand Marnier ($5).

With its modest prices and short but reliable menu, Le Gamin fills a genuine need, not just for South Enders but for anyone (like me) who despairs that the world of under-$10 meals consists of too much bad bar food and too few quirky, sharp little places like this. Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way: one recent weeknight, we arrived at about 7 p.m. to a half-full restaurant, and by the time we left 90 minutes later -- the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction having played from start to finish as we ate -- there was a line five deep waiting for a table.

The second time we ate there, sneaking in just before the early Sunday closing, we had a long meal that left our party very much alone with the staff by the end. Nonetheless, the owner was gracious about letting us order dessert -- he practically insisted we try something -- and also was gracious as he informed a steady stream of disappointed passersby that the restaurant was closed for the night. The last of these was a black-clad twentysomething woman who opened the door at 9:25 -- ignoring a sign telling her the restaurant had stopped serving dinner well over an hour earlier -- and pleaded for a table. "I work for Boston magazine and everything!" she said in a voice audible across the room.

The owner, with a tact equaled only by his taste in reading matter, smiled and politely sent her on her way.

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