Simple magnificence

IN MY DREAM OF Provence, I'm walking down a country lane and chance into a cafe, half-tucked under a bridge and marked only by a rustic homemade sign. Inside, upon the concrete floor with its chipped red paint, sit a dozen slate tables with mismatched chairs. Here and there a jelly jar spills over with tulips; a candle flickers in a wine bottle adrip with wax. Mostly I see light streaming in the windows and bathing the room in oyster white. I sit down, breathing in fragrances of good zinfandel and French press coffee; I sip my lemon water.

I wake up in the Boat Street Cafe.

Boat Street Cafe
909 NE Boat St, 632-4602
lunch Tue-Fri, dinner Wed-Sat, brunch 10:30-2:30 Sat-Sun
no credit cards; wine and beer

For the four-plus years that this little spot under the University Bridge has escaped my notice, it has been quietly enchanting a growing list of loyals with its hearty interpretations of French classics. Original owner Susan Kaplan started small, with lunches and brunches and the occasional supper, only expanding into regular dinner service when demand all but required it.

Last March, Kaplan sold the cafe to prot駩e Renee Erickson, and suddenly—despite its quirky obscurity—the Boat Street Cafe became quite impossible to miss. Whole buildings at the UW across the street would empty out at lunchtime as professors began trotting down for Erickson's balsamic- or aioli-kissed cheese baguette sandwiches and ni篩se salads and sardine plates. One almost always had to wait for a weekend brunch table, latecomers often missing out entirely on the fast-selling red pepper and basil cheese strata. And dinner . . . well, dinner.

Let me tell you what dinner is like at the Boat Street Cafe.

Upon arrival in the flickering rustic space, you are presented with a little loaf of hot bread alongside a pat of butter and marinated ni篩se olives swimming in a fragrant pool of citrusy, rosemary-infused olive oil. You peruse the menu as you break into this wonderful bread and you note that the wine list is uncommonly fine for its affordability. At the same time you realize that you want all seven appetizers. At length you settle on three and remark what a restoring place the Boat Street Cafe would be for a little nip and a nosh after a particularly punishing day at work. Your waitress smiles and tells you that's why they added the wine bar across the room.

The plate of pears with Gorgonzola and roasted walnuts ($6.50) is a generous chunk of the creamy cheese with sweet spears of fruit and walnuts, roasted in-house, that seem to gush with oil. Erickson's chicken liver p⴩ ($6.25) is fluffy and sweet with currants, served with cornichons and melba toast and spicy chutney over oiled greens.

Impossibly, the steamed Penn Cove mussels ($6.50) topped them both. I admit I was disappointed when they came to the table lolling in their shallow pool of creamy broth; the Northwest purist in me likes my fish barely sauced if at all. But boy, was I narrow-minded. Erickson's Provencal rendition tenderly steams the mussels in Dijon cream, a treatment that respects, even adores, the subtle flavor of the shellfish. (Awkwardly, the beards were left on the mussels.) In response to our rather embarrassing capacity for bread, which we kept wanting to swab in our appetizer juices, our waitress kept us generously supplied while raising neither her eyebrows nor the tab. (Now that's a classy joint.)

Erickson's dinner list is rooted in French tradition, but not stiflingly so. Pork tenderloin ($13.50) arrives tender in a savory herb rub with a noble blackberry sauce, alongside zucchini and potatoes. The fresh fish fillet of the day was salmon ($13.50), lightly steamed and topped with a green cr譥 frae made of spinach and scallions and anchovies. Until tasting this dish, I'm not sure I fully comprehended the way salmon can literally melt in one's mouth.

Greens show up all over Erickson's repertoire, in keeping with her thinking that food ought to be more satisfying and hearty than decorative and spare. Caramelized onion and goat cheese ravioli ($12.50) came arrayed over a profusion of liberally oiled exotic greens with roasted red onions, peppers, and feta cheese; the effect is robustly savory and tremendous fun to eat. But the real test of Erickson's skill was the portobello mushroom stuffed with roasted red peppers, fresh spinach, herby bread crumbs, and goat cheese ($11.95), the sort of dish that frequently arrives as a mound of cheesy mush. Erickson's, by contrast, was a triumph of finesse, with the powerful earthy mushroom flavor a nice foundation for the vegetables, and the cheese lending richness.

If our waitress was horrified that we finished with three desserts, she had the grace not to show it. We had blackberry cobbler ($5.25) with heavy cream; bread pudding ($5.25) shot through with caramely veins of amaretto and served with rum butter cream sauce; and a brightly refreshing lemon curd tart ($5.50) in a fine crust ringed with a moat of heavy cream.

Have I used the word magnificent yet?

WE CAME BACK FOR brunch to find the Boat House Cafe even more charming suffused in that splendid light, with good background jazz and great coffee providing morning pleasures both aural and oral. This time we found the menu strangely limited: Four of the five brunch entr饳 are egg dishes, nary a cr갥 or a pain perdu to vary the experience. One, French scalloped eggs ($6.50), was an intriguing bake of hard-boiled eggs, onions, spinach, bread crumbs, and cheese. The crumbly dish was initially pronounced arid and unsatisfying by its orderer, but before long he had cleaned his plate and revised his opinion, swayed by the herbal subtlety of the dish and an unusual texture that grew on him. With it came perfectly moist red potatoes ($1.25), simply roasted in their skins.