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Hours: Sun., Tues.-Thurs. 5:30 -10 p.m.; Fri.-Sat. 5:30 -11 p.m. Reservations accepted. No smoking.
Noise level: Small room can get noisy in center.
Good Choices: Cauliflower-leek soup with lobster vinaigrette, apple, Roquefort timbale; hamachi with chive sauce; seared scallops, potato mousseline and foie gras butter; salmon with verjus vinaigrette; roast halibut; braised lamb shank with white beans and gremolata; chocolate pudding tart; root beer float in honor of Brighams.
Prices: Appetizers $6-$10; main courses $16-$23; desserts $6, $8 for cheese course.
Credit cards: MasterCard, Visa, Diners.
Access: Fully accessible.
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LUMIERE
1293 Washington St.
West Newton
(617) 244-9199
Restaurant reviewed 04/22/99 by Alison Arnett
Lumiere is a most captivating restaurant, engaging all the senses from the moment one pushes the spoon-shaped handles at the entrance down to tasting the first dish.
Owners Jill Goldman-Leviton and Michael Leviton, the chef, carefully crafted long-held dreams into this little gem, open just two months in West Newton. Nothing seems left to chance, and all the little pieces work well together. The food is really lovely, nothing outlandish or outre, but almost all of it good to eat.
There's always something to look at in the room, designed by architect Sandra Fairbank, always a detail to notice, to cause a smile. The light gleams through translucent shades that look like sheets of music or handwritten letters. Beautiful gauze-like fabric covers the windows and doors; the shadow of a fork cleverly decorates the simple menu; Scrabble tiles mark the restrooms. The wine list proffers reasonably priced wines that are interesting and work well with the food. The wait staff is quiet, cheerful, and attentive.
Far from making Lumiere seem too tightly controlled or mannered, the result is relaxing; the diner gets a feeling of buoyancy, of confidence.
In a phone interview, Leviton says he and his wife had a simple bistro in mind, a neighborhood spot with reasonable prices, a place where people would return again and again. However, his cuisine is much more evolved than that explanation might indicate.
The first spoonful of the cauliflower-leek soup proves the point. The silken concoction tastes clean and vegetal and incredibly rich against the tongue. A clump of lobster spritzed with rice wine and ginger gives the soup depth, the sweetness of the shellfish made tangy with its seasonings. It's just soup - and has only a small amount of creme fraiche in it - but in taste it's quite a many-layered creation.
Another appetizer of hamachi with sprinklings of caviar is all about simplicity. Oh, there's a little salad underneath the fish and a bright green sauce of chives around the edges, but fish stars, as brisk on the palate as the sea itself. A timbale of apples and Roquefort cheese with beet juice vinaigrette assertively calls for attention.
An elaborate combination of seared scallops, mushrooms, potato mousseline truffle vinaigrette and foie gras butter flies in the face of simplicity. But this dish, one Leviton says he created first at Up Stairs at the Pudding when he was chef there, bowls over any complaints about excess. The dish sings of luxury and it's wonderful. As our table shares the towering dish, one after another of us sigh or exclaim or practically moan as we sample this feast of flavors - the muskiness of mushrooms against the fluff of potato, the voluptuousness of foie gras smack against the slightly sharp truffle vinaigrette. At $15 for an appetizer or $25 for an entree, this is the most expensive dish on the menu. We would gladly eat two.
Leviton's attentiveness really shows up in entrees where he pulls incredible depth of flavor from simple ingredients. The skin of a lovely piece of salmon is crisp and salty, the fish moist. A sauce made of verjus, the juice of unripened grapes, adds a barely acidic, barely sweet finish to the fish. But my favorite part of the dish is the ragout of potatoes and leeks. The potatoes are cut into perfectly uniform little logs and are simply blanched. They taste like potatoes, like spring and are wonderful.
Roasted halibut is clean and gentle on the tongue with a thin, delicate dark sauce, matched by peas, asparagus and tiny fava beans studded with bacon. On an earlier visit, I tasted roasted cod in a much heartier treatment with braised fennel and roasted tomatoes and chard in strong, dark fish broth. The effect was bold and warming, just right for a cold evening.
Leviton changes his menu often but in subtle ways. The roast chicken of several weeks ago, succulent but very straightforward, was accompanied by potatoes, mushrooms and little pearl onions; now the chicken puts on spring clothes of morel mushrooms, more of the tiny favas, peas and asparagus. Braised lamb shank holds over into these still cool evenings, meltingly tender meat playing off tiny white beans perked up with a gremolata of parsley, garlic and lemon zest and a fleeting taste of mint.
As much as I like Leviton's sensibility, a few dishes stumble. Finding a well-rounded vegetarian dish can be daunting. One of potato dumplings with root vegetables, cauliflower coulis, and a lemon-caper brown butter has lots of elements, and is very rich and filling. But the lingering flavor impression is only of creaminess, and in the end the dish was rather dull. He does a fine job with steak, perfectly rosy albeit a little heavily salted. The garlickly creamed spinach is delicious, tasting like the vegetable and not like mush. But the fried potatoes on top, pale noodles looking a little like extruded processed cheese, need more crisping and a deeper degree of browning.
My sense of mild disaffection continues into some of the desserts. An buttery apple tart sports an excellent crust as do several other tarts. A tasty root beer float, offered up to evoke the spirit of the Brigham's ice cream parlor that used to be here, is a clever idea, especially since comments bounce around the room all evening from Newtonites recalling the room's "one scoop or two" days. A bittersweet chocolate pudding tart is intense and indulgent with heavy shavings of white and dark chocolate. I love the burnt sugar ice cream with a strawberry-rhubarb tart, but the fruit leaned too much to sweet and not enough to the tartness of the rhubarb. A dessert that sounds refreshing - candy-like tuile cradling burgundy granite and perched like a wing over slices of grapefruit and orange - would be except for the nut and corn syrup tuile. The sweet confection sticks so firmly to the teeth that eating another bite of it seems inadvisable. And that disappointment leads me to question the whole dessert - the flavors don't mesh well.
Better to stick to the classic tarts, I decide on my most recent visit as I contemplate the room, now thinning out. The space is a little cramped at times when people are manuevering a way to the tables and the wait staff is weaving through with plates. The room can be noisy at the center tables in front of the exposed kitchen.
But Lumiere is a place where one wants to be - for Leviton's food, for the warm ambience, for the feeling of a venture well-conceived and executed.
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