Where would Julia Child eat? We think here.

At Les Sablons in Harvard Square, hospitality makes meal memorable

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Rye spaghetti at Les Sablons in Cambridge. (Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

From top: spring vegetable crudite, sweetbread vol-au-vent, striped bass (left), and lemon posset at Les Sablons in Harvard Square. (Photos by Jonathan Wiggs/Globe Staff)

By Devra First

Globe Staff

LES SABLONS

★★★

2 Bennett St., Harvard Square, Cambridge, 617-268-6800, www.lscambridge.com. All major credit cards accepted. Wheelchair accessible.

Prices Appetizers $14-$24. Entrees $26-$44. Sides $10-$17. Desserts $8-$16.

Hours Mon-Thu 5-10 p.m.; Fri-Sat 5-11 p.m.; Sun brunch 10:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m., midday menu 2:30-5 p.m., dinner 5-10 p.m.

Noise level Lets you converse like the adult you are if you’re eating here.

What to order Spring vegetable crudite, white asparagus a la plancha, sweetbread vol-au-vent, beets and radishes, striped bass with tomatoes, olives, and saffron, lemon posset.

It’s sort of irresistible, when a new restaurant opens in Cambridge, to play the “Is this where Julia Child would eat now?’’ game.

Les Sablons is where Julia Child would eat now.

She’d scooch her frame onto one of the stools at the downstairs bar; order a glass of something festive; and dispatch the burger (made with beef, lamb, and foie gras) in a series of tidy, satisfied bites. “Oh, thank you, that was wonderful,’’ she’d say in that voice, wiping her fingers and folding her napkin, and then she’d toddle off into the night. The staff would keep goldfish crackers, her favorite snack, behind the bar for her.

They might keep goldfish crackers for you too, if you want them. Les Sablons is Reminder No. 4,782 that hospitality is what really makes a meal memorable. Good food is good, too, and at Les Sablons it is often wonderful. But there are off nights, and less successful offerings, and these things feel forgivable: The people who work here have encyclopedic knowledge of what goes into each dish and how it tastes and what to drink with it and why. But they are also interesting and companionable and act like themselves rather than some outdated notion of what a server should be. I’m also pretty sure they all have PhDs in ethnomusicology or something like that.

Les Sablons is in Harvard Square, the latest project from the team of Garrett Harker, Jeremy Sewall, Shore Gregory, and Skip Bennett. You know them from places like Eastern Standard and Island Creek Oyster Bar, and if you were to cross the two, you’d start to get a sense of what the new place is like. To find it, look for the big clock by the bus lane; it’s located in the old Conductor’s Building, a romantic name for what was once a stuffy, narrow transportation office. Now it’s a two-level restaurant — sort of French, sort of not — with a first floor that evokes a train station (Les Sablons is a stop on the Paris Metro). There’s an arched ceiling, white subway tiles, lights that dangle down like old, off-the-hook payphones. It’s more low-key down here, where you come for a drink and something to go with it. (No knock on the cocktails and wine, but the beer game is particularly strong.) Upstairs is where you head to course it out, in an equally narrow dining room: several four-tops at the head of the stairs, leading to a few glamorous curved booths that are indisputably the best place in the house to sit, leading to more tables beneath some artwork involving Play-Doh containers and photos of Grace Jones and David Bowie. Don’t ask me.

Sewall is the chef, along with Brian Rae (who long worked at Rialto across the way), and eating his food here is a reminder that we all really should have gone more often to Lineage, his now-closed restaurant in Brookline. He has longstanding connections with the fishing community, and at Les Sablons this plays out in selections like live scallops with hazelnut vinaigrette; slices of raw coral salmon with mint, baby snap peas, and cucumber water, exuberance from opposite sides of the color wheel; and striped bass with tomatoes, olives, and a saffron-tinged, rouille-esque sauce, the flavors of bouillabaisse streamlined. The misstep here is Spanish turbot with English peas, blue crab, and beurre blanc, expensive at $42 and not nearly as fresh-tasting as the striped bass.

This is one of those restaurants where the smaller plates outshine the large. Are all restaurants now one of those restaurants? There’s not really a dud among the starters, even if servers seem to like the retro cocktail fare (mushroom strudel, crispy potato with caviar and creme fraiche) more than I do. If one is feeling like a cynical crank, the spring vegetable crudite is open for mockery: a big plate upon which a few baby radishes and carrots, asparagus spears, and greenery cavort over a smear of artichoke hummus, beside a line of lemony sauce. “We call it Tiny Town,’’ one server confides, and it’s easy to see why. The dolls will gather for their tea party now. But hey, why go out to eat if you’re going to be that way? It’s so pretty and delicate and well composed, and such a pleasure to crunch and swipe your way through.

Spears of white asparagus are charred into tender sweetness, plated with a swoop of mild green garlic sauce and a handful of lettuce, drizzled with anchovy vinaigrette. Toothsome rye spaghetti is tangled up with mousseron mushrooms and pesto. Spring busts out everywhere on this menu with the Technicolor passion of “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’’; it makes you look forward to the changing of the seasons, just to see what the kitchen will do.

There’s some momentum from these opening numbers — for instance, a stunning vegetarian main course of paper-thin slices of striped beets, radishes, and summer truffles arrayed over red quinoa. But the ragout de poulet with fennel ravioli and lemon broth, which sounds so alluringly clean, turns out to be more chicken roulade than stew, more bland than bright; veal boudin blanc (with pommes Anna, morels, and haricots verts) features links that are flabby rather than delicate.

One of my favorite main courses was monkfish, roasted on the bone, with littlenecks, bok choy, and (just a hint of) green curry. The fish was juicy and succulent, the flavors balanced, and I was happy to be eating it. But as much as chefs want us to want to eat fish on the bone, American diners are not yet there: It’s too much work, too much potential danger. We want tenderness, bonelessness, butteriness when we go out to eat. And the monkfish is off the menu.

Now on: sweetbread vol-au-vent with porcini cream. It’s an ask on the part of the chef — order offal! — but couched in the comfort of what’s basically the best pot pie you’ll ever have. (Do you like chicken nuggets? Are you a grown-up? Then eat sweetbreads already.)

Dessert ties it all up in a bow — an otherwise simple slice of gateau Basque, edges pleasingly scorched, gussied up with strawberry and rhubarb in an exactingly perfect dice; lemon posset, a bowl of creamy pudding, crowned with pistachios, candied citrus rind, and olive oil gelato.

This isn’t comfort food. But it is nurturing. That’s what it feels like people are looking for right now. At any given moment, we might be eating 12 courses of Chef’s Vision off of white tablecloths, or Japanese-Peruvian-French small-plate mashups, or a solid diet of earnest wintertime roots. And then it’s on to the next. Being treated well fails to go out of style. Harker and Co. understand that. I’d generally wish to see our dining scene be more diverse, less dominated by restaurant groups. But a restaurant group is a community, too, and when its culture prioritizes hospitality, supports the local fishing industry, and pours good beer, it’s really hard to argue with that.