Gitanes

Gitanes is a top-of-range French dining room on Elgin Street that refuses to behave like one. The menu runs to snow crab, sea bream crudo, and a cold bar built for slow indulgence, then turns around and sends out a hundred-day dry-aged burger and a foie sundae without a hint of apology. That appetite — French technique, Canadian ingredients, and a willingness to chase luxury into places a stricter kitchen would not go — is what separates Gitanes from the bistro it could have settled for being. It has cooked this way on the Elgin Street corridor since 2019, dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday, which makes it a restaurant built for the one polished night out rather than the casual drop-in.

Start at the cold bar, where the kitchen shows its hand. Oysters by the half-dozen and a tiered seafood platter anchor it; snow crab comes with nothing more than drawn butter; sea bream crudo is dressed with almond, verjus, and sunchoke. The warm starters keep the same nerve — escargot baked under Gruyère and puff pastry, white asparagus with ramps and a shrimp Béarnaise, roast cabbage with goddess dressing and pangritata. The two plates that most clearly catch the kitchen's instinct sit at the edges of the list: clams in buttermilk and cassis kosho, a sharp and faintly Japanese counterpoint to all the richness, and a lamb tartare cut with green harissa and olives instead of the usual capers and yolk.