Although the variant spelling of " bistro " would seem to emphasize urban French food, the real style here is country French, with a smidgen of New American, and a lot of the emphasis on local produce that is the real common ground of the best young chefs in France, the United States, Vanuatu, and anywhere else that human beings dine out for a treat. I remember writing early on of Stan Frankenthaler that he would have to reconcile the classical qualities he had learned from Jasper White with the populist tendencies of his Blue Room mentor Chris Schlesinger, but the truth is that both White and Schlesinger are fiends for local produce. The Bistrot chef, Tony Maws, worked for Schlesinger and the relatively Apollonian Ken Oringer at Clio. (He also worked for Wolfgang Puck and Mark Miller, and did a stint in France.) But once again, you can’t go wrong in almost any style working with good materials.

The theme at the Bistrot is certainly French, with an all-French wine list, French bread and butter to start, and a menu full of words like velouté, terrine, rillettes, confit, sorbet, and mousse. There are nods to Japan, Italy, and the Americas, but this is one place where your server will never appear in a france sucks T-shirt.

The local-produce theme figures even in something as radical as an appetizer salad of raw yellowtail with spicy sea-urchin vinaigrette ($16). This is five fingers of tuna sashimi around a salad of bitter greens, but the urchin roe on top (not spicy, not fishy, tasting mildly of the sea like a raw oyster) likely comes from New England. So do some of the stored vegetables in the salad composé ($9), which mixes greens with artful slices of black radish, daikon, carrot, pearl onion, and such.

Traditionally French are the terrine of foie gras ($15) and rillettes of rabbit ($12), which I sampled on the reviewer’s friend, a combination plate of " les deux " ($19). The terrine is a handsome slab of fatted goose or duck liver. Think liver-flavored Brie, sprinkled with chopped egg yolk. The rillettes, typically a fatty spread, are here done leaner and finer, cut by the server from a long Pyrex pan. The platter has the usual palette of condiments, which stand out by being vivid examples of their kind: homemade Dijon mustard with real bite, pickled shallots with a lovely flavor, Fleur de Sel sea salt in large grains, cracked pepper, minced capers for extra pungency.

My favorite appetizer, though, was the velouté of white coco beans ($12). This is a fine bowl of rich, creamy soup, its flavor balanced on a fulcrum of pepper between dairy cream and beans, with some bites enhanced by pearls of flavored oils or a few crunchy bits of fried fresh bacon.

Among the entrées, the knockout is the cheapest dish on the menu, the token vegetarian choice of wild mushrooms on polenta ($19; $29 with shaved truffles). What mushrooms! What polenta! The mushrooms are cèpes (Boletus edulis, " porcini " in less Francophone locales), my favorite wild mushroom, the woodsiest and most mushroomy. The dish offers whole little ones, obviously not dried, the kind I would set aside for special purposes on a good collecting day. The polenta is reinforced with cheese to a point of astonishing richness. There are some baby vegetables as well, but this is a daringly small vegetarian entrée, almost announcing the concentrated flavors by the size of the portion.

Roast breast of guinea hen ($31; $41 with truffle shavings) is a nice job, the meat only a little gamier than turkey or pheasant, garnished with a slice of foie gras, on a handsome pilaf of farro (the Italian spelt with large, barley-like grains). Roast breast and confit thigh of chicken ($19) is in some ways (the breast meat) even better, although the boned thigh has little of the spice or cured flavor I associate with the confit duck or goose of Southwest France. My guess is that a chicken with this light and flavorful a breast doesn’t have a tough enough thigh to get through the whole confit process, or perhaps it is a timing problem, as the confit ought to sit for a week or more to gain flavor. Meanwhile, what does the restaurant do with the rest of the chicken?

Olive-oil-poached halibut ($29) is a lovely piece of light white fish, obviously not fried or oily, so in what sense is it olive-oil-poached? This platter also benefits from a medley of winter vegetables including cardoons (looks like cooked celery, tastes like a mild artichoke) and slices of beet. These are significantly different vegetables than appear on either the mushroom plate or in the salad composé.

The wine list is all-French, and therefore necessarily somewhat expensive. It includes some Beaujolais in the $20s, but I was curious about the 2000 Sancerre rosé of François Cotat ($33). White Sancerre is one of the great food wines of France, a crisp, bone-dry sauvignon blanc that inspired Robert Mondavi’s original fumé blanc and many of the subsequent California sauvignon blancs. But the only time I’ve had red Sancerre, made from pinot noir, it was horribly sharp and bitter. The rosé leans strongly toward the white side of winemaking, with a pink blush color comparable to pink Champagne (which is also made from pinot noir treated as a white grape). The style, flavor, and aroma likewise lean to the white, so here is a dry wine that goes well with fish, but with a little deeper fruit to go with poultry or meat. Coffee at Craigie Street is excellent, and tea — including French-style elderflower and linden herbals — is served correctly in a filter pot.

Desserts are what are sometimes called " chef’s desserts, " rather than the product of a specialized pastry chef. Maws has a good hand with ice creams and sorbets. One of the best choices is three sorbets with a tropical fruit sauce ($9). Our night, the sauce was mango; the sorbets were a brilliant raspberry, a very lemony lemon with some peel flavor, and an intriguingly dry pineapple. The plate was decorated with kumquats and lime zest. But his crème caramel ($7) is merely a square of flan. Chocolate-mousse terrine ($9) is a good-enough slab, more like milk chocolate than bitter, but greatly improved by a white espresso-flavored ice cream. Likewise, the fruit crisp ($7) is good apple-pear cobbler, but with a great scoop of crème fraîche ice cream.

The space is three rooms below street level, probably once a basement apartment. Even with ochre walls, red banquettes, and framed French magazine advertisements, it seems more like a college club than a bistro or even a bistrot. This may be because Maws has added old books and antique furniture, or perhaps because he wants the restaurant to have a neighborhood feeling — the neighborhood being tweedy West Cambridge. Jazz singing, something American the French still love, makes some background sound. But one’s focus quickly shifts to the food.

Robert Nadeau can be reached at RobtNadeau@aol.com