Liberté! Egalité! Familiarity!

It would be hard to devise a restaurant more formulaic than Gaslight, the noisy South End brasserie on the hopping stretch of Harrison Avenue that’s well on its way to becoming the new Tremont Street.

If it feels as though you’ve seen this kind of French prefab before, you have: Think Brasserie Jo, Eastern Standard, and, if you have a good memory, Metro (in the former Sears Building in Porter Square). That’s because restaurateurs—and investors— consider the brasserie to be an infallible money-spinner. Buy enough bentwood chairs, put in red leatherette banquettes, lay hexagonal black and white tile, decorate the menu with belle époque curlicues, make a decent steak frites, and you’re home free. The creators of Boston’s brasseries, having apparently studied the playbook of New York’s Keith McNally (the man responsible for Balthazar and Pastis), seem keen on emulating his genius for classic design.

Seth Woods and his Aquitaine Group, the team behind Gaslight, have previously
succeeded with this formula at the popular and cozy Aquitaine and Aquitaine Bis, which are a bit more in the mold of a bistro than a brasserie. The difference? Although both have basic, reasonably priced menus, brasseries (literally, “breweries”) are usually bigger, with less-ambitious food that can be turned out quickly. Bistros, meanwhile, tend to be more individualistic, like the idiosyncratic Craigie Street Bistrot in Cambridge or Petit Robert Bistro, the nearest Boston analogue to a simple, affordable Parisian restaurant.

Now Woods and his partners apparently want to take their success to the next level: a big, high-volume restaurant like Papa Razzi. In a passing coincidence, Papa Razzi is owned by the same group that brought us Bouchée, another recent Boston retread of the Frenchy formula. But Bouchée hired an experienced former chef-owner, Tim Partridge, whose restaurant Perdix was a darling of the Hub’s fine-dining crowd and who pushes the boundaries just enough to keep the food a half step above the ordinary. Gaslight’s, by contrast, is a half step below.

There’s plenty to like, though. The waitstaff is friendly (despite the kitchen’s bumpy timing), the restaurant’s overall look is right, and during my visits the South End power brokers were everywhere. How they heard each other, if they wanted to, was another matter: The chic tile and wood create a merciless racket. (The first time I walked into Gaslight, sometime within the first two weeks of its opening, I walked right back out again with the beginnings of a headache. On later visits, though, the noise level had improved to nearly tolerable. Plus, in response to customer complaints, the management recently installed noise-reduction panels and drapery.) The reason to brave the din and the crowds is the prices—they’re low enough to let you go through the menu till you find the sort of no-think standbys that this formula depends on.

Go on to the next page for more...