If you’re really hungry, the larger portion of red meat is the rotisserie leg of lamb ($18.75), sliced and a little dried out (just borrow some béarnaise from a companion). This also has a more filling side dish: scalloped potatoes with Morbier cheese. If you’re dieting, there’s the roasted salmon filet ($19.25), a dandy piece of fish served crisped outside and slightly underdone at the center, as it should be, with a foundation of braised escarole. Having second thoughts about the diet? That gravy boat of béarnaise is probably looking pretty good.
Even a complicated dish like the Poêlée Espagnol ($19.50), a codfish-and-mussel stew with chorizo and a Provençal tomato sauce, is nicely made, with nothing overcooked and a sauce of some complexity.
The wine list is mostly French. It’s good and short but made incredibly complex by the new trend of four-size pricing. We had a bottle of 2006 Petit Chablis “La Chablisienne” ($10/glass; $15/half carafe; $30/carafe; $49/bottle), and it was close enough to real Chablis: a tart, food-friendly chardonnay without much oak, but with some of the tropical-fruit aromas captured by modern winemaking. Cappuccino ($3.50) is very good, though hot chocolate ($3) and Canarino ($3.25) — think lemon-peel tea — were both delightful alternatives.
There are lots of desserts (all $6.75) from which to choose, and none are huge, so have fun. Apple Tarte Tatin is in season. Here the upside-down cake is done almost like a crêpe, with baked apples and caramel sauce instead of browning: same flavors, new route to get there. Baba au rhum was the largest of our desserts: two thick slices of cake with a rum sauce underneath and a boat of melted chocolate sauce to keep it from tasting like pancakes and syrup. The smallest dessert was probably crêpes flambé, which was flavored with orange and Grand Marnier. Any flames, however, were kept in the kitchen. The sleeper was “Far Breton,” a kind of custard tart with Armagnac-soaked prunes. It’s one of those flat pieces of pie to which you just keep coming back.
Service at Gaslight is fine. You may want to angle for a table in the far back, away from the bar. It’s not a quiet restaurant, regardless, but the soundtrack of Piaf and gypsy jazz would be worth hearing someplace quieter. The room is an old warehouse redressed with a wood ceiling, bottles of wine lined up on the walls where there aren’t tiles or distressed mirrors, and fans and globe lighting to evoke eternal France.
Even so, it’s the flavorful food, never outstretching the kitchen nor underestimating the diner, that takes Gaslight to the head of the class of all restaurants serving steak frites and onion soup.
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Robert Nadeau: RobtNadeau@aol.com
