Salts delivers duck to die for in Cambridge

The next visit, my friend and I order the duck, which comes stuffed with a savory bread mixture, Vidalia onions, slender carrots, and delicate glazed turnips. The waiter carves, expertly but slowly, as heads turn at other tables. Each of us gets a long rectangular plate with a piece of breast meat under its perfectly crackly skin, and a leg and part of a thigh, plus all those vegetables. It's exquisite, and immediately I know I've been dying for whole duck all along.

Chef Gabreil Bremer and his wife, Analia Verolo, reopened Salts in early March after buying the restaurant from Lisa and Steve Rosen, who had had success with it under the same name. The little place, with 42 seats, has been a beacon of personalized and imaginative cooking since Bruce Frankel opened it as Panache in the late '70s; Robert Calderone and his wife, Susan Finegold, also owned the restaurant for several years before moving their name for it, Anago, to the Lenox Hotel.

Bremer is certainly upholding the place's culinary reputation, and not just with the duck. After stints at Fore Street in Portland, at Rialto in Cambridge, and at Le Soir in Newton, this is his first restaurant. His cuisine is French with a clean and contemporary American finish.

It's a happy marriage, as an appetizer special one evening of a warm salad of asparagus over a poached egg in a gougere shell demonstrates. All the components in this dish are appealing: the egg shimmies a little on the shell as the plate is set down, and the yolk breaks into liquid as soon as the fork touches it. The egg white is fluffy; the cheesy gougere shell flaky and the asparagus just right to catch the rivulets of yolk. Over the green spears are a few delicate stalks of wild asparagus, adding drama and extra crunch (especially since the waiter tells us they were smuggled in from France).