Bistro Louise still offers a wonderful world tour of flavors

Bistro Louise has been around since 1996, proffering Mediterranean-swayed American flights -- sometimes with Asian fancy, at other times deploying a Southwestern twang -- as expressed through the culinary wit of famed chef Louise Lamensdorf, a Cowtown icon.

She has the pedigree: Louisiana born and bred (including a dozen years in New Orleans), and a student under Charles Finance, first chef to lead the U.S. Culinary Olympic Team, at Simone Beck's cooking school in Grasse, France (Beck collaborated with Julia Child on two volumes of Mastering the Art of French Cooking), and at Cordon Bleu in New York City with Jacques Pepin.

Another dozen years or so later, in 1966, she moved to Fort Worth. Lamensdorf opened the French Apron Cooking School in 1979, teaching the craft of skillfully rendering American cuisine through a portfolio of Mediterranean lenses, always with a keen focus on bold flavors. Chefs Stephan Pyles and Madeleine Kamman made pilgrimages.

Bistro Louise is the ongoing repository of her experiences, which she has historically tuned and recalibrated through European travel. How is it aging? This is an important question, since Cafe Aspen, the restaurant she opened with David Rotman in 1989, shuttered in early February.

On the menu, creative flourishes -- crepe of tea-smoked duck, wok-seared tuna with wasabi ranch -- join a clique of seemingly binding requisites: lobster bisque, grilled tenderloin, the Caesar. The latter is hacked into a wedge with roasted tomato relish and Parmesan. And if the simple Louise's house salad ($7.95) augurs the state of that menu subsection, that wedge should be a marvel. Greens fluffed into a textural swathe nest halved red grapes and olive minces, the whole shimmering in a house avocado lime vinaigrette that supplies so much layered vigor you forget that this is an introduction.

Bistro Louise earns its bistro stripes (and epaulettes) with sauteed foie gras ($13.50) served on a large square plate to corral all of the complex foils and complements. A firm, velvety strip of mottled gray cream is slipped between two impeccably seared Georges Bank scallops resting on planks of fig, wading in a tarry red currant reduction. Blades of fanned Red Delicious apple dot opposite corners, while a fanned strawberry next to a colon of blackberries across from a dab of mango relish with bits of red onion tack down the others. The liver and scallop almost breathe together in their slightly dissonant union -- the delicate, fragile cream and the firm, sweet silk. Yet the kitchen could have escalated this to a passionate culinary pant with a sprinkling of kosher salt.

Black Angus braised short rib ($23.50), as dark as brownies, rests in a reduction hemmed in by a berm of creamy polenta and topped with crispy onions. And this is one sauce where the spoon would be handy, because the meat is so parched that it frays into fuzzy filaments when forked.

Whaler soft-shell crab ($35), a giant, floppy almond-crusted arthropod nested on creamy corn-potato risotto and topped with wisps of deep-fried spinach leaves, is rich and lightly crisped, but cold. And in this chill, the heavy batter armor is more China-shop bull than culinary deftness.

Scottish salmon ($28) in an artichoke and celery-root sauce is firm and competently prepared but ultimately listless. There is no engaging cast of flavors to arouse the palate and send it into a heady fog of transcendence.

On the finish, the five-layer cake ($8) filled with lemon curd and topped with lemon frosting and grated coconut is invigorating in all of its tangy, comforting moistness.

Bistro Louise is a simple space with French doors, muted yellows and faux vine work on walls here and there. It has done well keeping pace over the past half-decade. But its stride seems to have slackened, if just a bit.