Lumière

Now is the winter of our food's content

by Robert Nadeau

DINING OUT

Lumière (617) 244-9199 1293 Washington Street, West Newton Open Tues-Thurs, 5:30-10 p.m.; Fri and Sat, 5:30-11 p.m. Di, MC, Visa Beer and wine Street-level access via rear parking lot

So Lumière opens in March, and right away it's the best restaurant in Newton. It gets crowded and the prices increase a little bit, but it basically rises to the challenge of instant popularity. Now it's summer, and an abundance of farmers' market vegetables are challenging the chefs in another way: will they be able to make something better than just anyone's tomato sandwich or boiled sweet corn?

The answer, from chef Michael Leviton, is "sometimes." As I read the plates, Lumière's food will be transcendent more often in the winter than in the summer. I can predict with assurance that Leviton's winter menu will deliver, not because his food is heavy -- au contraire -- but because his best effects seem to rely on winter materials such as endive, celery root, mushrooms, tea, scallops, and duck. I often advise chefs to hit the farmers' markets in the summer, but for this chef it might be better to turn up the air conditioning and warn all the customers (who have reserved well in advance) to bring sweaters.

The restaurant sends its first food message with whole loaves of French bread and sweet butter: it is more than just the name here that is French. This does not include a strict, typically French loyalty to seasonal food, though: our most stunning appetizer was celery-root soup ($9), a vichyssoise-esque cold summer soup made with a winter vegetable. Illusion in food, however, is a typically French trait, and this soup had a marvelous illusion of cream. Leviton also adds a postmodern trick: a tiny crabmeat-celery-root salad in the middle of the soup as an island of tartness.

Endive-and-apple salad with walnuts and Roquefort cheese ($10) is composed of winter ingredients, but is perfectly delicious and refreshing in the summer, if no more than the sum of its excellent ingredients. Arugula salad ($7), with shaved fennel, mushrooms, and parmesan, is on season and full of complementary shapes and contrasting flavors. But panzanella ($9) is an Italian bread salad that depends on fresh tomatoes, and the red and yellow tomatoes at Lumière were ripe but not so aromatic as they should have been in the second week of August. I would also suggest a simpler bread than the whole wheat used, fewer cukes, and perhaps a little more of the fresh basil.

The most stunning entrée, to my taste, was seared sea scallops ($25/$15 as an appetizer). These are deep-sea scallops, and again are not especially attached to midsummer, although there are fewer in the winter. They come in a vertical stack of food, accompanied by "exotic mushrooms" and creamed potatoes. There are only four scallops, but they are almost the size of baseballs, and each is so perfectly cooked -- truly seared on the outside, not overdone within -- that you can savor them at length. The mushrooms my night were mostly shiitake, buttery-textured mushrooms that melded into a continuum with a little foie-gras-flavored butter, the scallops, and the potatoes.

With sautéed monkfish ($18), Leviton was not so fortunate. The fish isn't full of flavor to begin with, and Leviton eschews the French-sauce treacheries that improve it. An excellent tomato salsa and a lively zucchini-onion chutney were good foils, but the basic thrust was dull. Halibut ($20) is a better fish, but again not epochal; it pales in the shadow of its side dishes, in this case a fine pile of buttery-woodsy wild mushrooms.

"Moulard Duck Breast; Cherries, Spinach, Ginger, and Foie-Gras Emulsion" ($24) sounds like a knockout, but I was able to get up after the mandatory eight count. The points were scored by the slices of rare duck breast, lean and juicy as any red meat. The spinach was lovely, just buttery enough without being greasy. But the cherries were pitted sweet cherries -- not the sour cherries the French long ago paired with duck for their contrasting acidity. The ginger was a no-show. On the other hand, the foie-gras emulsion was one of two savory sauces -- the other a reduction of roasting juices -- contrasting brown and cream on the plate, rich and savory on the palate.

Lumière's wine list, a particular focus of pre-opening press, is expensive, international (though substantially French), and includes a lot of fine bottles. Since the restaurant spent a lot of time picking the wines and is too small for a full-time sommelier, it should add some description to its printed list, or suggest some pairings on the food menu. We had a 1998 Hamilton-Russell Chardonnay ($33) from South Africa, which proved to be very French in style, crisp and oaky at the same time. It's a great food wine, and it wouldn't take many adjectives to tell us why, nor more than a phrase to remind us that the southern hemisphere has spring vintages, so the wine is a half-year more mature.

Coffee is good, but it's the tea service that really shines, from the collection of beautiful Japanese individual iron pots to the estate pickings and special herbal teas offered. Desserts ($7) are either too complicated or not complicated enough. Only a summer berry compote cooked up like a no-bread pudding was really satisfying -- and had no need of the goat-cheese ramekin included for contrast. Plum-and-pear tart was just fine, mostly because of the fabulous crust. "Caramelized peach-cornmeal cake" came down to being a sweetened cornbread -- and made me long for the superior Massachusetts peaches available in farmers' markets but not in evidence here. A death-by-chocolate concoction of bittersweet-and-milk-chocolate mousse with caramelized bananas was, again, winter food.

Thought went into every aspect of Lumière, and many of these thoughts were wise. The lamps with shades of musical scores are witty, even though they refer to no particular theme. The architecture is full of details, such as the spoons used as handles on the front doors, but the room is unpretentious -- a wood floor and simple tables with serious salt and pepper grinders -- and no nonsense. (Well, I guess the candle with a gold-bead screen is nonsense, but it's fun.) In a year of tight labor and sketchy service, Lumière's servers are able and well trained. What doesn't fit with the finely tuned food is the level of noise at the bar -- they are marketing to people of a certain sensibility and a certain age here, after all. The jazz background music goes with the lights, if not with the food. (French jazz -- Django and Jean-Luc Ponty -- maybe.)

Lumière looks, sounds, tastes, and costs urban, and I can't tell how that will play out in its suburban location. It is quite possible that the sheer quality of the enterprise will bring along the audience faster than it burns out the owners.

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

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