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" — The food and feel of the restaurant are like a soft but seductive melody, insinuating itself into your memory, calling you back."

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Cheery Cosseting On Beacon Hill

The very terms "town house hotel" and "bistro" are suspect these days. But the Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro in Boston is the genuine article.

Unlike those who appropriate the terms to denote informality only to lay on marble, gilt and a starchy concierge, or instead of French classics serve tacos or lemongrass chicken, Peter and Cecilia Rait, the owners, cleave to strict definitions.

The hotel, which opened in December, occupies two 19th-century town houses on the city's premier antiquing street. Behind louvered shutters each of its 13 snug bandbox rooms has a bright bathroom, air-conditioning, good reading lamps and downy pillows, as well as high-speed Internet access, flat-screen television monitors, and the less expected bonus of an elevator. All the rooms are decorated in the understated but cheery tones typical of the prized houses lining Beacon Hill's brick sidewalks. Service is in the same vein: cosseting.

The ground-floor bistro is open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner. A fireplace warms its lobby, shared with the hotel. The neutral, slightly Deco furnishings are less statement than backdrop for the animated neighborhood clientele.

The menu runs to asparagus soup studded with fava beans and carrot cubes, hearty pâtés, and grilled lamb and beef. The chef, Al Soto, a Californian, makes good use of the local larder, with cod — this is Boston, after all — arrayed with Savoy cabbage and salsify...Breakfasts run to the indulgent, while lunch features tender omelets and good crab.

Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro, 25 Charles Street; (617) 723-7575, fax (617) 723-7525, www.beaconhillhotel.com. Doubles from $225. A three-course dinner averages $33 a person, without wine. Lunch averages $15.

Boston Slumber Party

Like their last venture, La Brasserie de l'Entrecôte in Lisbon, Cecilia and Peter Rait's Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro in Boston is sure to be the toast of the town. On historic Charles Street, Cecilia and Peter have converted two connecting 1830 and 1850 town houses into a 13-room inn with flat-screen TV's, mahogany fireplaces, and cool color schemes (gray, cream, and the occasional splash of Matisse red). Open the plantation shutters for views of Beacon Hill's cobblestones, gas lanterns, and 200-year-old brownstones. Downstairs, chef Al Soto, formerly of La Grenouille in New York, serves classic French bistro food like cotriade, a Breton fish soup, and steak frites. Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro, at the top of Boston's game.

Light, Elegant and Very French

Some restaurants open with a blare of trumpets and a blizzard of publicity. Others saunter onto the scene, settling quietly into a neighborhood.

Beacon Hill Bistro opened late last November in the space that was for years Rebecca's on Charles Street. The bistro, part of a small boutique hotel with 13 rooms, fits seamlessly into this historic section of town with its dark wood, cool tiled floor, and streamlined look.

It's comfortable in the long, narrow dining room - there's nothing contrived or edgy about the looks of the place. The welcome at the entrance is gentle and pleasant. The lighting is subtle, the color scheme muted, the noise level modulated. The wait staff, mostly young women, is efficient. You get a definite feeling of a French bistro but there's nothing too flashy about it, nothing theme-park American.

Executive chef Al Soto's food fits beautifully into the restaurant's ambience. The underpinnings are French but there's no heavy stress on bistro fare. Instead, he takes a light approach to what could, in other hands, be hearty fare. This is food that matches the gentility of the room, the elegance of the neighborhood.

One warm evening, we start with potage St. Germain, a brilliant green shade, thickened slightly with potato and dotted with fresh peas. A crisp pile of shaved artichokes decorates the center. The soup is hot but the color and the delicacy of it are wonderfully refreshing nonetheless. A simple green salad boasts roasted tomatoes that have gained an almost honeyed sweetness.

The sensibility about scale is particularly appealing in Soto's menu. Rabbit loin roasted with tiny chunks of bacon and then dressed with a handful of French lentils and wild mushrooms is a great example. Instead of making this classic dish into a monumental main course, the rabbit is presented as an appetizer. Three little circles of rabbit, some lentils, and a few mushrooms - a trifle that fills one's mouth with flavor and the imagination with those glories of French cuisine. This is large enough to share or to eat as a light meal, but since the proportions are small, the dish doesn't overwhelm the appetite.

The fish dishes are especially good here. Roasted swordfish, a reasonably-sized, thick cut, gets treatment befitting this steak-like fish. The sauce is only a skim of a bacon emulsion, strong but not overdone. Golden raisins and fava beans cut the savoriness of the emulsion, adding sweetness and texture. Gray sole is stuffed with a creamy mixture of crab and artichoke mousse, and again the richness is cut by the astringency of a lemon vinaigrette. Halibut is poached so carefully that the flesh is meltingly tender, and a little tomato salad with it adds some acidity and greenery to the effect.

Soto, who grew up in his father's California bakery, doesn't neglect meat dishes, although here, too, I find that he manages to draw plenty of flavor from his ingredients without overdoing in either portion size or complexity. Roast duck is properly crisp-skinned and very moist, understandable when he explains, in a phone interview, that he brines the duck before roasting. This accounts for the tenderness, and thyme honey gives the sauce a sweetness tinged by a definite herbal flavor. Confited chicken legs that have been braised long and slow are another twist on the classic, drawing an unexpected flavor from the most common ingredients. The sauce here is really just the cooking liquid that the chicken gives off, brightened with long-roasted garlic, but it makes the dish memorable.

The only shamelessly rich dish is vegetarian, squares of ravioli filled with ricotta and sauced with pea puree. It wouldn't be wise to eat too much of this, but then the shallow dish holds only four or so, just the right amount. Tiny lamb chops in a rack go down like savory lollipops. Though the creamed spinach is fine and the black olive puree a good touch, a potato gratin with the lamb has congealed into a mass that's almost gelantinous. It's the one element that seems out of place, too heavy possibly from having sat around too long.

Beacon Hill Bistro has a compact wine list with a good range of prices. One evening we enjoy a Portuguese vinho verde, a quite reasonable under-$25 bottle that went well with light dishes and could fit into the budget even if the occasion wasn't special. Soto, who was chef of the now-closed Uva and earlier worked at La Grenouille and Bouley in New York, says that many of the bistro's customers dine there more than once a week, making the wine prices and the choice of wines by the glass a good aspect.

Desserts are presented in a cart with some extras offered each evening. As much as I like the rest of the menu, the desserts seem cramped in selection and style. The raspberry tart is delicious, just right for the season with plump, well-chosen berries and a light custard. The creme brulee and a fallen chocolate cake are pleasant but unremarkable.

Some chefs and some places put on a show, attempt to win patrons by dazzle, by the culinary equivalent of loud show tunes. Soto and Beacon Hill Bistro are not like that at all. Instead, his food and the feel of the restaurant are like a soft but seductive melody, insinuating itself into your memory, calling you back. This is a quiet restaurant, but one to watch.

Boston's Beacon

Don't just tour those historic brick walks and gaslit streets of Boston's elegant Beacon Hill: Move in! The neighborhood's new Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro restores two connecting 1830 and 1850 townhouses into a cozy 13-room inn touting all the modern amenities (flat-screen TVs, high-speed Internet access, 24-hour room service) of a large hotel. Fresh from a five-year stint running a brasserie in Portugal, owners Peter and Cecilia Rait bring a European flare to the new boutique lodging. Its 86-seat bistro dishes up crowd-pleasers like pumpkin soup with chestnut dumplings, roast duck, and vegetable cassoulet. Most remarkably, guests gain residence on the affluent Hill for as little as $225 per night...Flat-screen TVs, handsome rooms, and a gourmet eatery all deliver at Boston's Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro. Who says business travel has to be tough?

Beacon Hill Bistro Shines

Beacon Hill Bistro is a charmed addition.

We are about to share a meal with Peter Rait, owner of Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro, when he apologetically excuses himself. Just outside the hotel, on Charles Street, a cab driver has locked his keys in the car - with the motor running. Rait is among a handful of people who help find a wire coat hanger to get the cabbie back in service. It is the kind of Good Samaritan hospitality you cannot fake.

We are charmed. Even when conversation is interrupted by his intermittent need to tend to a guest, it is all in a day’s work - or in the case of Rait and his wife, Cecilia, a lifetime’s dream.

Okay, so maybe spending more than $5 million to purchase and renovate the former Rebecca’s enclave at 25 Charles Street is more like a restaurateur’s nightmare. But the couple have done very well to establish such a chic and friendly business in such a short time.

BHHB, as the logo reads, is just what Boston ordered. Nearly seven months up and running, it already sees the same folks return a few times a week for breakfast, lunch, or dinner - and the 13 individually decorated rooms are often booked with weary business travelers, tourists, or locals looking for a city escape.

Though the place was completely gutted (the only remnants of the 1850s and 1830s converted townhouses are their Beacon Hill brick facades), BHHB feels as though it’s been here for years, it is so comfortable in its skin.

The 86-seat bistro is sunlit and cheerful during the day, showing off the gray-green leather banquettes the mosaic tile floor, the dark mahogany walls, and the bright white china on white paper on white linen. White kitchen towels with green stripes (imported from Switzerland), used as napkins add a bit of whimsy.

At night the bistro converts into a romantic dining room, still casual and comfortable, yet glowing with the warmth of votive candles and wall sconces. Portuguese and Brazilian jazz interweaves with the conversation. In the winter, seats by the fireplace are as coveted as a room reservation.

It is a true bistro. And the menu, with no dinner entrée over $20 (at least at press time), keeps to the notion that simple, delicious food need not be expensive. The wine list exemplifies the same affordability: you can get a glass of wine for under $8 and a nice bottle of Pouilly-Fumé for $25.

Seven months out and chef Al Soto, a California native with a hunger for seasonal ingredients and training that includes stints at the Gotham Bar and Grill and La Grenouille in New York City, is already on his fourth menu change.

Right now he’s celebrating the early tomato season with a chilled tomato soup and cucumber soup with minted sorbet. The menu also offers . . . striped bass with fennel, white beans, and lovage puree and a handful of dishes Soto dare not take off the menu - steak frites (the strip steak so rare and tender, the skinny long French fries so good they can be addicting), confit ot chicken with mushroom fricassee, and roasted-beet salad among them.

This is bistro food, but not “cliché” French. “French food is much more varied and imaginative than those name items people identify right away, “ says Rait, who has worked at the US embassy restaurant in Paris and at restaurants throughout Europe. “This whole notion of what is a bistro has gotten clouded,” he says. “A restaurant will have linen on linen and it’s much more expensive’, It’s “typically much more muted and quiet,” whereas a bistro is “a more casual environment” where “people will sit closer together.” Bistros, he says, “should have a healthy vigor, which says people are enjoying life.”

Just as the bistro has a sense of understated class, so does each room. They are small, comfortable havens painted in earthy, soothing tones like taupe, moss green, or beige and feature designer-fabric duvets, flat digital-TV screens, and serene black-and-white photographs by a Long Island photographer, Daniel Jones.

Plenty of light pours through the shuttered plantation windows that look out over Charles Street’s cobblestones and the Public Garden. An open deck allows guests to sit outside during the day or to see the stars through haze city lights at night.

BHHB buzzes with life. At breakfast, families order from the blackboard specials; single diners linger over their choice of international newspapers. Guests, wearing jeans, dresses, khakis or slacks, wheel their luggage through the small lobby.

During our dinner, Rait chats with a man and woman who liked the hotel so much that, even though there were no vacancies, they returned for dinner.

“One thing’s for sure,” says Rait, “there’s no point in being in the service business if you don’t take pleasure in serving people.”

Finesse and Flair

Beacon Hill Bistro stands out with excellent food, friendly service and charming décor.

The Beacon Hill Hotel is a small, European-style boutique hotel that opened quietly on Charles Street late last year. Its name aptly conveys the casual charm of its décor and reasonable prices, but it could well lead one to underestimate the quality and seriousness of its food. The work “bistro” is said to be derived from a work chanted by Russian soldiers as they occupied Paris in 1870, banging their fists on the tables and demanding that their food be served “bistro” or quickly. There is nothing hurried or casual, however, about the cuisine of Chef Al Soto, whose flair and finesse rivals some of the best kitchens in the city.

The bistro’s long, narrow dining room sports gray-green leather banquettes that run its entire length beneath sparkling, rectangular mirrors along one wall and picture windows with the etched hotel logo along the other. Stainless-steel or brushed aluminum triangular art deco sconces punctuate the dark wooden paneling, while the floor of tiny white tiles adds a touch of lightness to the inviting French ambiance. In classic bistro style, tables are set with white tablecloths covered by butcher paper, and napkins are of heavy, absorbent cloth . . .

. . .The Beacon Hill Bistro’s excellent food was accompanied by splendid, chewy crusted loaves of slightly dark bread well-suited to mopping up the toothsome sauces produced by the kitchen. Even better, in a city plagued by outrageous wine prices, the imaginatively selected and reasonably priced wine list had a number of selections in the low $20s.

Service at the Bistro was friendly and accommodating. . . . From the point of view of value — what the French call rapport prix-qualité — the Beacon Hill Bistro is outstanding. If it stays the course it has charted, it will be around for a good, long time.

Beacon Hill Bistro: You can't have too many restaurants like this

Small hotels are popping up in odd places in downtown Boston, and some of them have very decent restaurants. The Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro houses one of them, with dinner platters rivaling the fare at the top restaurants in town - and that’s not even getting started on lunch and dinner.

The room looks a lot more like a French bistro than most American bistros. It’s white and dark green, with dark wood, and tables in two straight lines, like the girls going to school in Madeleine. It has a floor of fine tiles and a soundtrack of world music that runs mainly to Portuguese, perhaps because the owners managed a hotel in Lisbon. But other than a few fava beans, there’s nothing openly Iberian about the food, which is predominantly French, with strong New England flavors. With 10 appetizers, as many entrées, and a couple of blackboard specials, the menu fits nicely somewhere between the bistro and the full-tilt restaurant.

The bread is crusty, glutinous sourdough stuff with butter, not olive oil. The dish that set the tone of our dinner was gnocchi with cèpes and braised vegetables ($7.50). The gnocchi were good, the braised baby vegetables (turnips, carrots, and such) were outstanding, and the cèpes - porcini in Italy, my favorite wild mushrooms - were amazingly delicious. A dark sauce has never been lapped up with such alacrity. Same was true of the garnishing pools of asparagus purée. Roast-beet salad ($7) is becoming a cliché (albeit a welcome cliché), but this restaurant breaks the mold by molding slices of beet into a layered cake like pommes Anna, cutting a pie wedge, and serving it as a deconstructed salad with an olive of goat cheese (not farmer’s cheese as the menu says) and field greens (not mint as the menu says).

Asparagus soup ($7.50) is a beautiful green bisque that doesn’t overstate the asparagus, but does overuse salt and pepper like many seafood bisques. The garnishes of asparagus tips, fresh green fava beans, and "confit carrots" (sweetened chunks of carrot) were appetizing morsels, but when they ran out, the green stuff wasn’t so much fun.

"Confit" has another culinary meaning for confit of chicken ($17) - that is, cured with spices under oil. Beacon Hill Bistro’s chef does a light cure, but presents a handsome leg of chicken and three slices of sautéed breast, rolled and stuffed, on a bed of butter beans and a little spinach, with a sweet-and-sour sauce. Food here is somewhat vertical, and rather more elegant than the Parisian idea of bistro food, but just as tasty.

Roast cod on savoy cabbage and fava beans ($16.50) was a superbly sweet chunk of fillet, served with favas alchemized into a potato-like cake, along with wisps of cabbage. This dish might be a little Portuguese or a little Basque, but in the Boston context, let’s call it a very elegant update of schrod.

Native lamb ($18.50) is some baby chops and a hunk of flavorful, lean, braised meat (perhaps from the leg) complemented by a real potato cake, and more of those marvelous cèpes.

The wine list comprises about 30 bottles, mostly from $19 to $48, with 13 wines by the glass ($5.50 to $7.50). The wines by the glass aren’t the same as the wines on the list, even when they are the same kind of wine. Thus a glass of 1998 Cave de Ribeauville riesling from Alsace ($7) was bone-dry and spicy, but only the appetizer for a bottle of Trimbach riesling ($33), also from Alsace. Among the current reds, don’t miss the ’96 Valdepeñas ($6.50), a softer and spicier idea of Spanish red wine; it’s ideal with today’s spicier food. Tea ($3.50) is served properly, in a china pot with loose tea in a mesh insert. Cappuccino ($3.50) is excellent.

The dessert tray had only three items, although a few more desserts are concocted"downstairs" (a true Parisian touch, the kitchen downstairs, although it reminds us of the subterranean kitchens in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London and Nicholas Freeling’s The Kitchen). We had three items from the tray, and one from downstairs. The blackberry tart ($6.50) was an immortal, a classic thin-crust tart with just enough pastry cream to hold the numerous berries - smaller but riper than we usually get in May. The flourless chocolate cake ($5.50) was very good - perhaps a little dry, although it had the Viennese-style real whipped cream to help it along. Crème caramel "roll" ($5.50) was a long slab of stiff custard, from which our waiter cut a respectable square and spooned on more caramel. From downstairs, the cheesecake ($6.50) is a little round cake of almost unbearably rich cheese confection, with a sprightly wine-fruit topping.

Service at Beacon Hill Bistro is in the French-bistro style, which is effective but less forthcoming than full restaurant service. Atmosphere very much reflects the affluent neighborhood the hotel restaurant sits in. If hotel guests were dining our night, they blended into Beacon Hill pretty well. Even the Portuguese music blends in, especially when a fado singer or Cesaria Evora slows down and gets, uh, torchy. (There is a fine bistro called Torch across the street.) It’s not that Beacon Hill didn’t have a bistro before, but two places where you can walk in early and eat a terrific meal are not too many. Twelve would not be too many, either.

Boston's Best Bistro
Even if you can't get one of the dozen rooms overlooking Charles Street and Olde Towne at the intimate Beacon Hill Hotel and Bistro, you can still enjoy Left Bank fare like salmon with roasted fennel.

Hot 100 Issue

HOT SCENE. Brunch is bountiful. Lunch is luscious. Dinner is delectable. The libations are lovely. The rooms are remarkable. The Beacon Hill Hotel & Bistro has it all. The classic bistro food also happens to be one of the best foodie deals in town, so catch it while you can.