Good choices: Flammekueche; frisee, pear and Roquefort salad; escargots; grilled tenderloin; choucroute; coq Riesling; red fruit millefeuille; gratine of fruit with a Riesling sabayon.
Credit cards: MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Diners.
Access: Fully accessible.
SANDRINE'S
8 Holyoke St.
Cambridge
(617) 497-5300
Restaurant reviewed 02/24/97 by Alison Arnett
The Boston dining scene definitely needs more regional restaurants - more choices where the food is distinctively of a place or time - as a way to counteract the homogenization sweeping the country. The type of restaurant offering blackened redfish with Caribbean salsa served with a side of risotto - every possible cuisine covered on the menu and eventually all tasting the same - seems to be taking over.
Sandrine's, a bistro in the same Harvard Square location as the former 8 Holyoke, offers just this crucial distinction: cuisine from the Alsace region of France from a chef-owner who clearly knows what he's about. Raymond Ost, who spent years as the executive chef of Le Meridien Hotel here, points out in a phone interview that his native city of Strasbourg is Boston's French sister city.
Ost not only offers firmly rooted Alsatian regional specialties, but talks of instituting French restaurant customs such as enticing customers to come regularly for weekly specials - on Mondays and Thursdays, choucroute is the piece de resistance; on Fridays and Saturdays, the herbed rack of lamb - or to share a flammekueche (like a thin-crusted cheese tart) and conversation. As he tells about it, one realizes he's giving a glimpse into another culture's restaurant habits.
The culinary glories of Alsace, that wine grape-growing region that borders Germany's Black Forest, reflect the agricultural nature of the area.
Sandrine's best dishes do the same - hearty, warming, strong-flavored and vibrantly connected to the earth. The wine list, too, reflects a sense of place with several good Alsatian wines offered as well as others.
I haven't had Alsatian choucroute this good outside of Alsace. A fantastic mound of sauerkraut, perfectly crisp, wonderfully seasoned, is made by Ost himself. The sauerkraut is topped with a smoked, salted pork loin chop and three kinds of sausages: a white Weiswurst veal and herb sausage, one smoked pork called Bauernwurst and a fat weiner. Plain steamed potatoes, a few greens and a pot of mustard complete the plate.
This impressive choucroute is obviously a labor of love, relying on a knowledge of good ingredients, including the sausages made specially for Ost. One immediately knows how the farmers of Alsace sustain hard work in the vineyards because this groaning board of food could nurture a whole crew. This is not a dish for the faint-hearted, but it's a delicious tour de force.
Another signature dish, the flammekueche, displays the same virtues. The big rectangles of thin-crusted tart, baked in a pretty, tiled wall oven over the bar, come on a wooden pallet. The first time I had one the toppings of bits of bacon, cheese and onions were great but the crust not crisp enough. However, on subsequent visits, the flammekueche was wonderful, crackly on the bottom, smoky-rich on top. I especially like the smoked chicken version with onions and cheese. The taste of the bacon version is excellent, but the thick-cut bacon throws off a lot of fat, tending to make the tart too oily for my taste.
Sandrine's food does fall into the heavy category - with big portions and rich sauces - although Ost says the changing of seasons will lighten the menu. A Coho salmon, its tail neatly tucked into its head, comes in a creamy sauce, very good but also very buttery and thick. A spoon could stand straight up in the clam chowder. Garlicky escargots served on toast was as traditional a dish as could be as was a frisee salad with a mouth-puckering vinaigrette. I liked rabbit marinated in red wine and served with buttery egg noodles and the Alsatian coq Riesling, chicken in a white wine sauce, also served with egg noodles. Both dishes were sprinkled with tiny croutons, something Ost says his mother used to do when she served noodles. Grilled beef tenderloin served with a gratin of sweet potatoes and wilted spinach was beautifully handled.
However, too much sweetness marred the curry coconut sauce over shrimp, and the enormous veal chop served with wild mushroom risotto could have used a closer trimming of the fatty edges. All in all, Sandrine's menu would benefit from a little lightening up, perhaps more fish in less sauce, especially considering its location. On my first visit, I overheard a patron at the next table engaged in a long conversation with the server as he sought a nonexistent vegetarian choice. That's changed on subsequent menus, with a selection marked plat de jour of vegetables, but it still sounds like an afterthought. The desserts are appealingly homey and more modest in conception and size than entrees. The gratine of apples and pears with a marinated genoise cake and a glaze film of saboyan custard on top was especially delicious. A more structural concoction of thin crisp pastry, millefeuille, was layered with fat berries, a little pastry cream and surrounded by raspberry coulis. The contrast in textures and tastes was delightful.
Sandrine's look has been revamped into a much more colorful interior with lots of blues and reds and colorful upholstery. It makes for a cozier ambience, but the Harvard-owned building still has an institutionalized look. That probably explains the popularity of the tables in the front window where white curtains soften the walls and the bar gives light to that corner of the room.
Although the restaurant has been open for several months, service still seems to be disorganized, possibly hampered by the pillars that dot the floor and slow the traffic patterns. One night, the fault definitely was one too few servers on the floor, leading to long waits for even the beginnings of a meal. But each time, the flow of the meal was slow, and courses came in fits and starts.
There's much to like about Sandrine's, named for Ost's teenage daughter. Its charms tell us about a special place in France, and the drawbacks are more universal and certainly fixable. Anyway, it's great to know that one can tell a friend: ``Hey, today's Thursday; let's go for choucroute.'' So French.
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