Tues-Thurs 5-10 pm, Fri-Sat 5-10:30 pm, Sun 5-10 pm.

Last week, an old lady took out the front end of Voilà!, a new French bistro in Madison Valley. Apparently she mistook the gas pedal for the brakes and, voilà!, ended up with half of her car inside the dining room. No one was hurt and the restaurant gamely stayed open for the weekend, boarding up the hole with some plywood emblazoned with the restaurant's goofy name in day-glo orange cursive script.

I generally ignore restaurant names, even if recent years have provided some bluntly unmodified nouns, like Persimmon, Union, and Lark. But Voilà! is hard to brush off. First of all, there is the exclamation point. Years ago I worked at a firm that boasted not just an exclamation point in its official name, but also an ampersand (&). To date, my resumé is made ridiculous with over-punctuation. In the case of Voilà!, I have taken to pronouncing the ! as an audible click like the !Kung Bushmen of the Kalahari desert. Secondly, the word itself has a sort of chain restaurant least-common-denominator quality to it, as if Seattle dwellers would only respond to a really easy French word, never mind the fact that, for years, we've been perfectly able to cope with the likes of Campagne, Le Pichet, Le Gourmand, Cassis, and Place Pigalle. This take-it-easy-on-the-Yankees attitude seemed to be reflected in other details too, like a too-simple wine list, with wines by the glass listed by varietal only, not by region of origin and maker, and a dining room decorated with the universal bland signifier of Frenchness, large-format fin-de-siécle-style posters.

It was a nice surprise, then, to find that Voilà!'s menu wasn't entirely predictable, although to be sure, one could order coq au vin, pâté, and even a frog leg special. Things really perked up when my friend and I received two lovely spring salads, both composed of feathery shaved vegetables. Someone in the kitchen must really adore the mandoline, the little guillotine-like tool that makes such slivers possible for those of us who don't possess the knife-handling precision of Iron Chef Sakai. One salad was a pile of fennel ($7), very lightly dressed and adorned with smooth, near-buttery chunks of hearts of palm. A little basil played in the background; a confetti of pinky tomato didn't add much flavor, but kept the salad from looking washed out. The other plate had long, raw zucchini shavings ($6) that looked like an elegant nest of fettuccini. Chunks of toasted walnut and shavings of parmesan complemented the salad (although a sharper parm would have made it even better).

For the main course, I was tempted by a dish of broiled endive with ham and béchamel: It sounded like the perfect French comfort food, but it was a hot night, and the oozy sauce would have been too much. Instead I went for the homemade merguez ($10), the spicy North African lamb sausage that has become a staple in French food on both sides of the Atlantic, and it was really succulent and decidedly lamb-y (I often find that merguez in this country tastes like it's been adulterated with pork). The skinny links were served on a pile of medium-cut French fries, tossed, as I believe all fried potatoes should be, with persillade, a mince of raw garlic and parsley that blooms aromatically once it comes in touch with the steaming fries.

My friend ordered mussels with blue cheese ($12). The waitress brought them to the table covered with a second bowl so that when she pulled away the lid, voilà!--mussel vapor burst up from the slick black shells. My friend loved the juicy mussels, and their light cream sauce, and even I, with my almost inviolable no-seafood-with-cheese rule, found the dish flavorsome, if a little hard to compute.

Well-crafted desserts of the tried-and-true bistro variety finished the meal nicely: A créme brólée ($6) was appropriately crackly-creamy, and a lemon tart ($6) was smooth and tangy, if a little restrained.

So, despite its goofy name, Voilà! seems to have its act together, plus it's a decidedly modest-priced meal in the company of its steeper neighbors. Let's hope it can shake off the curse of the space (which has hosted four restaurants in as many years) with the same luck and pluck that it shook off the old lady's automotive attack.