The return of Jacky Robert to Pierrot brought a popular revival of traditional French bistro food. Robert’s own restaurant, Petit Robert Bistro, sticks close to the same formula, with only a few moves toward the more-upscale French style of his uncle and aunt at the lamented Maison Robert. One of the key factors in the formula is modest pricing, and so the food is not amazing, but it’s consistently good, and this attracts crowds. Whether those crowds burn out, especially at this tricky location east of Kenmore Square, is a question for the future, but certainly Robert has set up the option to try to take his broad customer base up-market. Meanwhile we have good, not great, French food, at moderate prices in a somewhat crowded and loud setting.

Two of the cleverest appetizers we tried were familiar salads. "Endive and radicchio salad dressed with mango, bacon, and mustard dressing" ($7) was all of that, but deconstructed, arriving as a heap of sliced-up endive, a single large leaf of bitter radicchio, a sauceboat of peppery dressing, a few slices of ripe mango, and a bacon strip. All the components were excellent, so you could make each bite of salad unique or as you pleased. A salad of "romaine heart, Roquefort vinaigrette" ($6.25) was mixed together, but stood out for the unusual combination and the quality of the cheese. "Hand-cut tuna tartare on gaufrettes potatoes" ($7.60), which one would expect to be unusual, is actually chopped raw tuna, minus the usual Asian spices, on homemade potato chips, with a nice salad in the middle.

Then there are regular French-bistro appetizers, such as escargots bourguignon ($6.50) and "assiette charcutiere" ($8.50). The former is six super-plump snails in the usual garlic butter, minus the usual nonsense of putting them back into shells and providing silly equipment for taking them out again. The latter, a charcuterie plate, is at its best with pâté, a smooth one and a rougher country pâté, both rich and satisfying. It was just average with pork-sausage slices, Italian-style salami, and some prosciutto-quality ham.

One way to keep prices down is to use the same vegetable garnish on most platters. The garnish we had was pleasant enough: truly excellent mashed potatoes with a sauté of green beans, onions, and carrot shreds. It went best with a special of "natural veal scaloppine Normande" ($19.75). This was politically correct veal, with enough color and chew to assure us that this calf ran free, producing meat more like European veal. (Robert also provides a vegan pâté and a dessert of silken tofu in basil oil.) The sauce was mostly cream and perhaps some well-cooked cider. The standard garnish also worked well with pan-seared skirt steak with shallots and shiitake ($19.75). Of three sauce options (bordelaise, poivre, or béarnaise), we chose bordelaise; the surprisingly sweet red sauce with sautéed shallots and mushrooms was just as good worked into the mashed potatoes as it was on the steak, an unusually thick and tender version of this flavorful cut.

The one entrée that didn’t quite work was "sautéed U10 scallops with garlic and tomato" ($17.25), mostly because there was too much oil on the plate. The U10 is the largest commercial size for sea scallops, 10 to a pound. The chef wants them cut in half at the equator, the better to sauté quickly, but he has to keep an eye on the line cooks using too much grease. This diluted the garlic effect and got on the beans, too.

For a plate with a different look, have the duck confit and Toulouse sausage with braised Savoy cabbage ($15.25). It’s not a lot of cabbage, but your potato and vegetables will be steamed whole, and the sausage and confit are tasty, if not as intense as their French ancestors. The skin of the confit duck is wonderfully crisp and a little greasy.

Seared tuna steak and seaweed salad ($16.75) was the only time we caught Robert dipping into the popular Asian-fusion pool. It was just a toe in, as the seaweed salad was merely a bit mounted in lots of mesclun, while the fine tuna steak had just a touch of soy sauce in the reduction glaze and on about one-quarter of the steak. Dry jasmine rice will fool no one.

Like Pierrot, Petit Robert has a wine list of French and American bottles, with the French wines often being the cheaper ones, as low as $20. Wines by the glass are a similar mix. We ordered something safe and versatile, the 2002 Château de la Chaize Beaujolais ($32). It has the classical strawberry aroma of the lighter Beaujolais, and is quite light in color, almost a rosé. Tea is a selection of bags. Coffee is French roast, even the decaf, which was rather good. Espresso and cappuccino are also available.

Desserts are by Kristen Lawson, a disciple of Lee Napoli (who is currently featured at Umbria, and has served a long list of fine restaurants, including Maison Robert). What Lawson hasn’t learned, or isn’t budgeted to produce, is the first-class pastry that Maison Robert used for that old Norman specialty, tarte Tatin ($6). Ours did have tasty apples on the pedestrian crust, but lacked the caramel topping that makes this dessert more like upside-down cake than like the usual fruit tart.

Lawson certainly got enough caramel topping on the vanilla crème brûlée ($5.50), with garnishes of shortbread and candied orange peel. More orange peel came with the Gâteau Petit Robert ($7), although the impressive garnish for that fine piece of chocolate cake is a spun-chocolate Eiffel Tower. The best dessert we had was lemon soufflé ($7), all pouf and a hit of tart flavor, modulated by a wild-blueberry compote on the side. My least favorite was a special on bread pudding ($4). The two big wedges were a hearty enough dessert, but I found the pudding rubbery. I’d order it again, though, for the superb vanilla ice cream that came with it.

The space, which used to be Il Bico, has been stripped to bare-brick walls and some others painted canary yellow. Tables are closer together, and the open kitchen and bigger crowds make it significantly louder (same tile floor). I’m never sure about the appeal of open kitchens — we can see the decorative copper saucepans, but we can also see that the line cooks aren’t wearing hats as they were taught to do in culinary school.

Décor is limited to an exhibit of food-art photography by Wild Bill Melton. These are more contemporary than the 1920s French posters one might expect, but not any more appetizing, really.

Service is generally quite good and unusually friendly, without obvious flaws. Food doesn’t come quickly, but the pacing doesn’t produce big gaps, either. Our party of five was assigned to a round table that was actually smaller than the square tables for four. There is no menu notation of the soufflé needing 20 minutes, but in fact the kitchen was able to rush ours out ahead of the other desserts. The veal special was erased from the blackboard by 8:45. I mention these kinks only to ensure that they get ironed out.

Petit Robert is so competent a restaurant that it is surprising that there aren’t more moments of real distinction. That may be a conscious choice, and it certainly hasn’t kept away the crowds. But if Petit Robert wanted to be famous for desserts, say, and increased some prices to do so, it would probably make a bigger splash.

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