Call it a happy reunion. The last time I had seen chef Aaron Chambers and Shanna Chambers, the owners of Salem’s brand-new Bernadette, was in January of 2023. That call had been to discuss a dinner at Settler, the pair’s intimate restaurant that opened in February 2020. Chef Chambers, who worked under Daniel Boulud before relocating to the North Shore with Shanna, is now tackling a second Salem concept.
Warm woods—natural oak and light-stained walnut—define the 55-person dining room, as do arched architectural details. (The space was designed by renowned Boston firm RODE Architects.) An open kitchen offers a stunning view into dinner’s machinations. From my perch in a curved corner booth, I could see both the entire dining room and the food traveling from kitchen to table.
To call Bernadette a bistro is to flatten the word, I think. If I lived in Salem, I’d certainly cozy up to a seat at the 12-seat bar on a chilly winter evening for a taste of this or that (more on that later). But Bernadette’s brilliance lies in its combination of neighborhood approachability and understated elegance.
An expeditious drinker will find many gems on Bernadette’s list. The French compilation spans Alsace to Cahors, covering most of the country’s major wine regions: Beaujolais, Burgundy, Bordeaux, the Loire, Champagne, the Jura, the Rhône. A thoughtful cocktail list and a small and curated by-the-glass list is both wide-reaching and financially modest; no single listed drink will tip into $20+ territory, a rarity these days.
The menu, divided into three principal sections—small apéro, appetizer-sized hors d’oeuvres, and entrée-level plats—provides ample flexibility. Start, if you wish, with a petite plate of Comté-filled gougères before launching into something larger, or do, instead, as I did: begin with the prehistoric-looking marrow bones, which are topped with a shallot compote and thin-sliced cornichons—and served with grilled house-made sourdough bread.
A traditional Alsatian tarte flambée—the French answer to pizza—is delicate and crisp, topped with house-made pancetta, Vidalia onions, and crème fraîche. It felt criminal to turn down the offer of fresh-shaved black truffles (available at a small upcharge), so I didn’t. Despite a full dining room, chef Chambers arrived to do the honors himself.
An appetizer of Maine peekytoe crab was a refreshing intermezzo between courses. Did we want the Royal White Sturgeon caviar supplement, a quenelle of saline and perfect black orbs? One could hardly pass up the opportunity. The crab sat in a vibrant green broth of celery and radish: piquant, bright, perfect.
On the night that I dined at Bernadette, the restaurant offered six main courses: two fish, one pork, one chicken, one beef, and one vegetarian. Dishes reflected the cold weather and locally available produce (roasted winter squash as a meat-free option, for instance, sourced from Iron Ox Farm and served with blue oyster mushrooms, kale, and quinoa). Our server touted the virtues of chef’s Brandt beef cheek Bourguignon, slow-roasted and tender beef served in a pool of pommes purée and demi-glace—and spinach, too, for those craving a green.
But I measure all bistros—quiet and ambitious alike—by the quality of their roast chicken. The poulet rouge, a burnished bone-in breast and boneless thigh, sat atop a sauce Chasseur, the so-called French hunter’s sauce. It comes from a base of Espagnole (any student trained in brunoise, macedoine, and the five mother sauces will already know this tomato-inflected brown sauce by heart), enlivened by mushroom and shallot. The kind of chicken one might order every week, for eternity? I don’t doubt it.
Pommes frites, of course—a roiling, heaving bowl of them, served with aioli—are de rigueur. For my own sanity, I ordered a leafy salad, kept lively with a sherry vinaigrette and tiny specks of shallot. All this to usher me toward dinner’s coda. The dessert menu is slim but well conceived. A Paris-Brest, the traditional French dessert made from choux dough and filled with flavored cream, was not in the cards for me and my nut allergy, regrettably, but I found compromise in the suitably Francophilic tarte tatin. In this miniature version, a puck of pastry is set beneath sliced and caramelized apples. A swoop of caramel. A globe of vanilla ice cream. It is all just enough.
Guests of Bernadette can also opt for chef Chambers’s famed madeleines, lemony and sugar-dusted (Settler ex-pats know these treats already). Dinner closed, in our case, with a glass of raisinated Pedro Ximenez from Lustau and two cherry-cranberry pâtes de fruits: sugared fruit cubes thickened with pectin. It was a faintly sweet au revoir, the kind you tend to remember.