Salts (798 Main Street, Cambridge, 617.876.8444) has been winning awards and charming patrons with its innovative blend of French and New American cuisine for a decade. Chef Gabriel Bremer produces refined, detailed dishes with subtly intense flavors, bringing classical French technique and artful platings to bear on seasonal New England ingredients.
Bremer’s wife, general manager Analia Verolo, is one of the warmest hosts in town, leading a polished staff of low-key and unobtrusive servers. With its pretty, relaxed dining room, Salts is the sort of understated place that makes for genuinely romantic meals.
And what could be more intimate than sharing your dinner? Salts makes this prospect thrilling with its headturning
signature dish, roasted duck for two ($65). A whole bird, its skin gorgeously gleaming and bronzed with a cider glaze, is festooned with giant sprigs of fresh thyme, filled with a savory bread stuffing, and surrounded by beautiful Seckel pears,
young turnips, and bulbs of braised leeks. The waiter carves tableside, serving large pieces of boneless breast, thigh, and leg with stuffing and vegetables. Bremer’s virtuoso roasting technique produces one of those duck epiphanies rarely experienced outside of Beijing: crisp skin, a thin layer of creamy fat just beneath, tender breast, meatier thigh, and leg so darkly rich as to recall foie-flavored pâtés. It would take a truly famished couple to completely demolish this substantial yet refined rendition of roast duck. Find an occasion, bring someone you love, and share one of the most justifiably famous entrées in Boston.
