Chef Franco Sampogna

Canvas by French painter Toma-L

After a superb dinner at Frevo, a wonderfully chic speak-easy restaurant tucked away behind an art gallery on Eighth Street, I was elated for three reasons. The first is that Brazilian born chef Franco Sampogna’s contemporary French cooking is so luminous and logical but sensual and succulent. Then there’s the easygoing stylishness of this intimate low-lit counter-style open-kitchen restaurant with eighteen seats at the stone-topped bar and a six-seat chef’s table and the terrific serving team, who hail from France, Portugal, Brazil, and even Connecticut, like me. This charming and talented staff exultantly showcases the fact that even in these tumultuous times, the U.S. remains a magnet for ambitious and talented people, in the best traditions of the country’s history. Finally, this restaurant proved to me that some thirty-three years after I’d folded the wretched sofa bed of my studio at 189 Waverly Place closed for the last time and moved  to Europe, Greenwich Village retains a vital wick of creativity despite the fact that it’s gentrified so much I probably could never live in the fabled neighborhood I’d once so loved ever again.

So Frevo is a votive candle of a restaurant that defends both New York City’s gastronomic credentials and its ability to incubate creativity through its defining DNA of curiosity, tolerance, and ambition. To understand the reasons why such an address is so especially uplifting in New York today, consider that two of the city’s great defining institutions Dean & DeLuca and Barneys are damaged and diminished for a variety of reasons explained in this excellent article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/08/nyregion/dean-deluca-barneys-bankruptcy.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

Foie gras with dried fruit, pistachio and Nori ribbons

Acting on a heads up from a Parisian colleague who now lives in New York City–“This restaurant is really really good, Alec,” she told me, Bruno and I braved our jet-lag and headed downtown for dinner at  Frevo the night we arrived in the U.S. in early August. In the Fifth Avenue bus, I quietly hoped the prix-fixe tasting menu wouldn’t overwhelm us, since we were hungry but decidedly not in the mood for one of those twenty-course tasting menus that have become the bane of modern gastronomy in many European countries.

When I asked my Parisian colleague for more details, she explained that chef Franco Sampogna had had a brilliant career in France and most recently worked as a chef on Long Island and on private yachts. Sampogna moved to France when he was 17, went to hotel school in Nice, and then worked for a constellation of great French chefs, including  Fabrice Vulin at La Chèvre d’or, Guy Savoy at his namesake restaurant, and Alain Ducasse at the Hotel Plaza Athénée.

Arriving, the restaurant was hidden behind a vest-pocket art gallery displaying the works of French painter Toma-L, who takes his inspiration, the nice young woman in the gallery explained, from Joan Miró and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Then she opened a secret door behind one of Toma-L’s paintings and ushered us into the back-room.

Green peas with coconut foam and pistachios

Seated, the French sommelier started us off with a welcome pour of Chartogne-Taillet Saint Anne Champagne. These bubbles paired perfectly with a tangy amuse-bouche of crunchy quinoa salad, a nod at one of the signatures of Sampogna’s cooking, which is healthy eating. Then the meal debuted with a delightful composition of crabmeat, curry, and broccoli topped with Kaluga caviar. Legible, luxurious and bashfully elegant, this dish previewed the themes of the excellent five-course meal that followed.

It wasn’t just the food that made me happy here, though. Even if they came from all over the world, the crowd sitting belly up to the counter was a Greenwich Village crowd par excellence–friendly, unpretentious, nonchalantly stylish, witty, and hungry for life, whether with a five-dollar bill or a Platinum card packed in their pockets.

Chatting with Margot, a single middle-aged lady from Montreal on my right, she told me that she’d been feeling a bit blue after a divorce and had decided she needed “a dose of New York, because New York always works for me–I just love this city so much, always have, always will, ever since I arrived for the first time by bus after a horrendously long journey from the crap town I grew up in Quebec. That said, the Village has changed a lot, because of real-estate, yes, but also since it seems to me that people much younger than me don’t know how to have fun–they’ve lost all of their recklessness.”  I loved this observation, so I told her about the head-resting-on-a-roll-of-toilet-paper naps I’d take at lunchtime in a bathroom stall when I was an editorial assistant at Harper & Row and had come to work after a 45 minute nap and a shower following a night at Studio 54, and also one of my favorite summer nights in the Village. I was stumbling home from a bar around 3am on a night when it was probably 100 degrees F. A large crowd was gathered on the sidewalk in front of a building just before the fire house on Christopher Street and Greenwich Avenue. Curious, I joined them and asked someone what was going on. “Sshhhh!” she said.

So then I heard the wild moans of a woman and grunts of a man making love in an apartment with their windows wide open on a summer night back in the days when a lot of people, like me, could neither afford to buy an air-conditioner or operate one. The sensual panting and screaming rose and rose, and when the woman finally climaxed, the crowd below applauded and laughed. “What a lucky lady,” said the woman who’d hushed me when I arrived. The Montrealer loved this story and replied with one of her own about having sex on the steps of the Salvation Army building on 14th Street with the Pakistani man who’d just sold her a pack of cigarettes in an all-night shop. “My best idea Probably not, but such amazing sex for both of us.” So I love Greenwich Village as one of the world’s greatest urban neighborhoods and always will, just like Margot from Montreal.

Foam hating has become a trope of modern American food writing, but foam can actually be a perfect vector with which to convey flavor without resorting to a sauce. This is what passed through my mind as we tucked into an angelic dish of green peas from the Union Square market topped with tufts of coconut-milk foam–a shy nod by Sampagno at the cooking of his native Brazil, and pistachios. The peas were so fresh and sweet that even butter would have been superfluous, but intriguingly, the taste of coconut teased their herbaceousness and underlined their natural sugar.

Next, an impeccable Hudson River Valley foie gras made with dried figs, apricots and pistachios, and then the dish that put Sampogna’s haute cuisine credentials on full display–halibut with braised fennel in a fennel jus. The fish was perfectly cooked just past opalescent and had a pleasantly crispy skin, and the jus was a silken umami-rich stole that luxuriously flattered the fish without overwhelming its natural flavors. This was one of the most deeply satisfying dishes I’ve eaten in a longtime, because it was such a brilliant example of the camouflaged simplicity that is defining characteristic of the very best French haute cuisine cooking.

Colorado lamb was perfectly cooked and served with a lamb caillette, or patty of ground lamb, cracked wheat, roasted tomato and yogurt foam, and the meal concluded with a refreshing composition of lemon, lime and almond.

It wasn’t until we stepped back through the ‘secret’ door into the art gallery and then out on to Eighth Street that I fully realized just how far away this meal had transported us, since for three very happy hours we’d been inside a cosseting cocoon of chic with a cast of charming people who poured us spectacular wines and cooked us a sublime meal. Frevo is a delightful restaurant, and Samogna’s decision to try his luck in New York is very much France’s loss and America’s gain, since this very talented young chef has a brilliant future in front of him.

Frevo, 48 W 8th St, New York, NY 10011, USA, Tel: (001) 646-455-0804, Email: reservations@frevonyc.com, www.frevonyc.com  Open Tuesday to Saturday, 6-10pm; Tasting menu: $124 per person

The post Frevo, New York City | Sophisticated Contemporary French Cooking in Manhattan, A- appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

The Sofitel, New York City

“So what is French food#8221; she asked me. I very much doubt that she’ll ever read these words, but before all else, I want to thank Betty Russo for both her question and her kindness.

Several months later, I still cringe when I remember the way our conversation began. On a warm Spring night, a New Haven bound Metro North train jolted when the transformers were turned on, and then gently rocked its way out of New York City’s Grand Central Station and under Park Avenue to come above ground a few minutes later just before a stop at 125th Street. On my way to speak about my books HUNGRY FOR PARIS and HUNGRY FOR FRANCE at the public library in Westport, Connecticut, my hometown, that night, I was roiled by various emotions. Earlier in the day, it had first dawned on me that this event would be about much more than a just little speech about a pair of books I’d written and my life in Paris to a group of politely interested people. My mother would be in the audience, along with other family members and many other people who’ve known me since I was a little boy. Having chosen to live abroad for most of my adult life, I’d realized that my speech in Westport, a place I’ve always had mixed feelings about–it’s beautiful, smart and morally self-examining on the one hand and way too grossly privileged on the other, would be about splicing myself together, or reconciling the shy little boy who spent hours reading about faraway places and who yearned to know a larger and more vivid world than the one I inhabited with the adult I have become.

So on the train I was sort of fitfully reading a copy of PARIS MATCH I’d lifted from the airport lounge in Paris a few days earlier, and I was so preoccupied on so many different levels that I was startled when someone, the woman I’d sat down next to but hadn’t really seen, spoke to me.

Escargots at Benoit @pierremonetta

“Do you speak French#8221; she asked, which momentarily exasperated me. Why would I be reading a French magazine if I didn’t know the language So I nodded, and then registering that she was an older lady, I relented, and I spoke. “I do,” I said and smiled. “And where did you learn that#8221; she asked. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk, and I’m not generally much of a talker with total strangers in public transport situations under any circumstances, because I like the rare time to myself, but I certainly wasn’t going to be unkind. Maybe I didn’t feel like having a conversation, but maybe someone else really needed one. “Well, I started learning French in school–” I noticed the lady had gentle green eyes “–but I really learned it after I moved to Paris.” “Oh! So do you live in Paris now#8221; I nodded. “Is that where you bought that magazine#8221; Another nod. “How lovely that must be, especially now that you know how to speak French.” I nodded, and was still tempted to return to my reading out of some ill-defined fear that this conversation could be depleting me of the fragile social and psychic energies I’d soon be needing in front of the crowd at the public library. Then I noticed that her soft white hands, which she held together loosely in her lap, were lightly trembling. “So are you on your way home then, or is New York home#8221; I asked. “Oh, New York, I don’t think I could ever do that. It’s very interesting but I love my little garden too much to ever sell my old house in New Haven.” “What do you grow in your garden “Tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplant, corn, all kinds of nice things. Right now, though, all I’ve got is just a little bit of lettuce and some radishes.” Her name was Betty Russo, a retired seamstress who used to work in a Gant shirt factory, and she’d gone into New York City for the first time in five years to visit her son, “Tommy,” who’d just had a serious operation in a Manhattan hospital.

So I told her who was I was, too–from Westport, a food and travel writer, living in Europe for a longtime, now returning home to speak at the library. When I finished, she laughed, and patted me on the knee. “So it’s a big day for you then!” she said and chuckled. She really chuckled. I laughed, too, with her and at her, and also with and at myself. Then she said, “You know what It’s a good thing you’re doing this, and it’s going to be a big success. You just wait!.” I nodded. “Too bad you don’t have time to come to New Haven for a nice pizza, a nice white clam pizza.” I told her I have a permanent yearning for New Haven clam pizza but wouldn’t have the time. We paused, a fleeting but sweet space during which I think we were both trying to think of ways to be kind to each other in the context of a brief encounter. “So Alexander what is French food I know, it’s fancy and expensive and all that, but I’ve never really understood what it is, like I know that Mexican means tacos, or Japanese means sushi, which I wouldn’t eat if you held a gun to my head, mind you, raw fish, no thank you, but French, well–beyond quiche, I just draw a blank.”

So we chatted about French food, and I wasn’t sure if I was making much sense with my talk about produce and terroir and what have you, and then Betty, ever alert–we’d just stopped in Darien, which meant I’d be leaving the train soon, cut to the chase. “Alexander, can you give me the address of French restaurant or two in New York City One would be for my grand-daughter who loves good food, so maybe a real French place, not too fancy, but okay, a little expensive if it’s worth it, so I can take her out for graduation from nursing school, and the other would be for my daughter-in-law….” Betty sighed. “You know, well…they’re times when you do your best. She’s a very bright girl, Tommy’s wife, a lawyer! But she has all sorts of what she calls ‘issues’ with food, can’t eat this, can’t eat that. Won’t eat anything from my garden because she says the soil might have heavy metal, whatever the heck that might be.” Betty brushed some imaginary crumbs from the front of her blouse. “I think we may be spending more time together, because of my son’s illness, so think I’d like to take her out to lunch and try and put things off on a better foot between us.”

I might have wept. Instead, I told Betty to take her daughter-in-law to lunch at Gaby’s at the Sofitel New York City on 44th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, an easy walk from Grand Central, which would mean she could arrive without taking a cab, and her granddaughter to Benoit. If you know more about French restaurants in New York, you may be thinking, but what about Daniel or DB Bistro or Batard or Jean-Georges or dozens of other French places in New York Why these?

I’d recently discovered Gaby, the restaurant at the Sofitel, sort of by accident. This upmarket French owned and run hotel most recently made notorious due to what did or didn’t transpire in one of its rooms between International Monetary Fund chairman Dominique Strauss Khan and a West African chambermaid has always been a stealth address for me in New York City. By this I mean, they’re times when I arrive in New York City from Paris so bone-deep tired I can barely put one foot in front of another, and then all I want is a really comfortable well-run hotel with reasonable prices in a great location. I don’t want a pillow menu, I don’t want a bath butler, I don’t want all of that. I just want a good well-run hotel with a little style that doesn’t make you wonder if you’re casting yourself correctly. I never stay more than a night or two, because I have friends in New York, but this little sojourn is a gift to myself to get things off to the right foot on a U.S. trip. I’d never really given any thought to the restaurant here–I’ve always gone out–but when I was there in May, the weather was almost tropical the day I got in, the heavens opened as I was walking up Sixth Avenue from Penn Station, and I arrived looking and feeling like a drowned rat. A nice hot shower made me hungry.  Still, it was pouring outside, and I was suspended in that strange but not unpleasant place  of being both famished and exhausted, so as rain streaked my windows, it occurred to me that I could look up the menu at the hotel’s restaurant online, and low-and-behold, it looked good, really good.

So I went downstairs to Gaby, where a pair of charming French speaking Cambodians couldn’t have possibly made me feel more welcome, and I had a really good meal. First I succumbed to the gimmicky sounding ‘foie gras spring rolls,’ and was surprised they were delicious–gorgeous little spools of foie gras, figs, prosciutto and just enough greenery to make it all seem healthy, and then a beautifully cooked Vancouver Bay salmon filet on a bed of crushed purple potatoes with an impeccably made beurre blanc. This meal really surprised me–it was such an unexpected exemplar of intelligent contemporary French cooking within the confines of a hotel setting–and probably because I was asking the nice older ‘Yugoslav’ waiter so many questions, chef Sylvain Harribey stopped by my table before I went upstairs. A nice guy from Bordeaux, he said he loved cooking in New York, was motivated by Sofitel’s new commitment to healthy dining in its restaurants, and was intensely aware that he was representing France in the world with his efforts. “French food is still often a little misunderstood in the U.S.,” he said. “A lot of people still think of it as rich, fancy and expensive, so  so I’m pretty point blank my cooking here. What I do is healthy contemporary French cooking, and it’s all about the produce and all about technique. What’s changed since I’ve lived in the U.S. is that I can now get such fantastic raw materials. In terms of my style, I’m a modern but feet-on-the-ground type of guy. I don’t want to eat flowers–I’m not a goat!–I want a good meal.” I wasn’t in the mood for edible flowers that night either, and what I had was a very good meal from a chef who knows to cater to a sophisticated health-conscious clientele without neglecting the wick of pleasure that lights up any good meal.

Benoit, NYC @pierremonetta

So in this instance, I was confident Betty could invite her complicated daughter-in-law to lunch here and call her bluff in more ways than one. For the granddaughter, however, I had to do some quick thinking on my feet. In days of yore, there were a dozen or so plain-vanilla French restaurants in the West 50s that were run by the families of mostly Breton cruise-liner crew members who’d decided to stay on make a life for themselves in America. To my knowledge, they’re mostly all gone now, so the type of beautifully prepared classic Gallic menus they offered have become rare.

I haven’t lived in New York City in twenty-five years, but I so wanted to suggest a perfect second address to Betty for her special dinner with her granddaughter, and happily I could, because I’d recently gone to dinner with my old boss, a certain Madame Ruth Reichl, at Benoit, Alain Ducasse’s spin on the Paris original in New York City. I’d been to Benoit once before a very longtime ago, and hadn’t particularly liked it, first of all because the food was so wiltingly removed from the mother ship and also because I just plain didn’t cotton to the idea of trying to merchandise such a profoundly Parisian bistro in a city that had such a different culinary history and produce culture. On this particular evening, the only one Ruth and I could find that cross-hatched, she was just getting out of a book promo event late and wanted somewhere easy and midtown, and since NYC pals had insisted that Benoit has evolved into a really good restaurant , I booked it and hoped for the best.

Roast chicken at Benoit @pierremonetta

As it turned out, the best was actually much better than that, too. We had an excellent meal. The almost poignantly talented French chef Philippe Bertineau–I say poignantly, because how many of his foreign and out-of-town clients can really understand just how good he is in the context of being a Frenchman charged with flying the flag of traditional Gallic gastronomic glory in New York City and cooking almost exclusively with North American produce–immediately won us over with some of the best soft-shell crabs I’ve ever eaten.

Calf’s liver with potatoes @pierre monetta

I don’t mind admitting that I made a real pig of myself during this meal either, since I evinced an urgent need for tart flambé, the thin-crusted Alsatian tart topped with creme fraiche, bacon and onions, the moment I saw it on the menu, and we also wolfed down one of the best lobster salads I’ve eaten in a longtime. Then Ruth went for the roast chicken, as I rather knew she would, and I decided to see what calf’s liver might be like in the U.S. (When I moved overseas many years ago, I was not yet a calf’s liver eating type of guy, an error that has since been lavishly rectified). Bertineau’s liver–crusted but custard-like inside, with chive-flecked sautéed potatoes, brought on a blanket of homely pleasure and also the exuberance of an expat off-handedly rediscovering the spectacular evolution of the daily  quality of American food, even in the context of a classic French dish cooked by a French chef.

MIllefeuille @pierre monetta

And finally, even though it was late and we were tired, we were having too much fun to shut down our dinner too quickly, and so we shared a gorgeous millefeuille that was sort of a communion-wafer-stand-in for how we became friends and colleagues–we both love great French food. Some other time I’ll blow on the embers of the absolutely catastrophic lunch over which Ruth and I first met each other, but for now, suffice it to say that this meal made it easy for me to tell the lovely Betty that this was where she should take her food-loving granddaughter.

Gaby, Hotel Sofitel New York City, 44 West 45th Street, New York, NY 10036 Tel. (1) 212-782-3040, www.gabynyrestaurant.com Open daily. Average three-course dinner for two without wine $130

Benoit, 60 W 55th St, New York, NY 10019, Tel. (1) 212-646-943-7373, www.benoitny.com Open daily. Average three-course dinner for two without wine $150

The post “So What is French Food#8221; Benoit and Gaby Offer a Delicious Answer to That Question in New York City appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

photo @ paul brissman

I’m not sure exactly why it happened, but somehow or another, the whole business of making a simple restaurant reservation has turned into an irritating, multi-step time-consuming chore in most of the world’s major cities. And the way in which restaurants cavalierly treat those of us who are willing to put up with this steeplechase completely ignores the two obvious realities–no restaurant would stay open without customers, and a restaurant reservation is a sincere and serious expression of desire and curiosity on the part of a customer with regard to a chef’s cooking and hospitality style and a commitment to experience it.

Recently, though, this introductory transaction between restaurant and customer seems to have gone very wrong. In Paris, some of the most popular tables are so over-solicited that they just don’t even bother to answer the phone anymore, with the result that people in New York, LA, Sydney and Hong Kong dial away for hours without even the courtesy of an answering machine. London and New York are better in terms of being able to book online (Open Table, etc.), but if the chefs have long complained that customers are rude and careless in not calling to cancel a reservation they no longer need, I’d say that the sort of airline style full-load factor double booking that’s become common place in London and New York restaurants is a disgrace. What this is all about is making you show up for a table at a time that’s rarely of your chosing–“You can come at 7pm or 10pm,” and then making you cool your heels in the bar for a really longtime until your table finally comes up. Mind you, you have to check in with the hostess on the dot of 8.30pm for an 8.30pm reservation, or else there’s no guarantee you’ll get your table, which I frankly find outrageous.

During a brief recent stopover in New York, I was meeting a good friend, a major food writer from London, for dinner, which I was looking forward to, since we don’t see each other enough in Europe and I love Mexican food, and I thought it’d be interesting to hear his take on the foodscape of New York City after a week of eating there. When we realized we’d both be in New York for a single cross-hatched night, he was in Cape Town and I was in Saigon, but he told me he really wanted to try Alex Stupak’s new East Village restaurant Empellon Cocina, so I got on Open Table and found out that I couldn’t book for March in February, and so had a Post-It note on my computer for a few days. Then I duly made the reservation, which asked for a cellphone–I have a crummy little pay-as-you-go phone that I use in the US, and didn’t give it another thought until we showed up on a rainy Friday night for dinner about ten minutes late. “Oh, yeah, well, like, we just gave away your table cuz you were like late, so whatever.” Well, how long would we have to wait for another table. “Oh, like forever, so sorry, but it’s just not going to happen.” I thought my English friend would have a coronary on the spot, so I ushered him outside as soon as possible. “That was the rudest experience I’ve ever had in a restaurant on any continent, and I’ll tell you something, Alec, with that attitude, I don’t care if the food’s wonderful. I wouldn’t set foot in that place at gun point. I honestly think the world’s gone mad–have chefs completely forgotten that a restaurant is an optional experience and that customer service is vital part of the experience they’re peddling#8221; Er, well, um, apparently, at least at Empellon Cocina. But not only at Empellon Cocina, since it’s become such an ordeal to book a popular new restaurant in almost any major city anywhere that the pleasure of the experience often becomes a wound badly salted even before you show up.

Chef Marcus Samuelsson; photo @ paul brissman   On the flip side of the coin, however, they’re buzzy new places in New York City that actually more than warrant the major nuisance of scoring a table, a perfect example being brilliant Swedish-Ethiopian-American chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Red Rooster in Harlem. Good grief is it hard to get a table at a place that made it on to esteemed colleague Nicholas Lander’s Favorite Tables of 2011 in the Financial Times but when I settled in at the bar for a ‘Brownstoner,” a sublime bourbon cocktail on a Sunday night with my Moldavian friend Nanettina, all was immediately well with the world, even though I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to some anxiety about having dinner in Harlem.

Why I grew up in greater New York during a pair of decades when the city was collapsing into ever great social and criminal turmoil. Though I had a truly ancient memory of climbing down from the train platform on the Harlem River branch of what’s now called Metro North at 125th Steet with my thrifty grandmother from Chappaqua–the cab from this station to my aunt’s apartment at 91st Street and Park Avenue was cheaper than it would have been from Grand Central Station, this gesture stopped cold sometime in the early seventies, and for decades afterwards, I’d look out the scratched train windows at the burnt-out and abandoned brownstones of Harlem with sorrow and incomprehension.

So after living in Europe for over twenty-five years, I can’t pretend that I was exactly sure-footed when I took the subway uptown to Harlem. But the old danger-alert antennae that I developed in New York when the city was still a bit of a shooting gallery in the early 1980s and will forever possess, didn’t even flicker as I came upstairs on Lenox Avenue. And from the moment I stepped in the door at this uptown bird, I loved the place.

Not only was the service friendly, prompt and charming, but I haven’t seen such an interesting crowd in New York since the days that I was too naive to realize what a dork I was to be wearing penny loafers to Studio 54 and the restaurant Ruskay’s on Columbus Avenue was luring daring types north of Lincoln Center for sultry after (and often pre-) performance suppers–the Upper West Side was then very down at the heels. Like any happy American restaurant, Red Rooster was loud, but it stopped short of being deafening, and Nanettina and I read the menu with the fascination that this 21st century culinary Rosetta stone deserves.

photo @ paul brissman

If the Red Rooster takes its name from a famous Harlem speak-easy, and Samuelsson has lived in Harlem for the last six years, I’d never seen anything like this line up in my life. There were dishes that nodded at Spanish Harlem–the Latino neighborhood now rapidly wilting from gentrification, the Ethiopia of Samuelsson’s ancestors and the Sweden of his adoptive parents, and, perhaps most importantly, the great soul food eats of Harlem, or Afro-American comfort food I hadn’t eaten since I was a little boy and shared a house keeper’s supper (I was always happier with the warm interesting cooks in the various kitchens I haunted as a child then I was with the cool and collected ladies on the other side of the dining room door).

So boy did we eat, beginning with excellent cornbread that was served with a smokey, spicy tomato jam, and then a night owl’s breakfast of a starter for me–navy beans with grilled pork belly and a coddled egg, and crab cakes with spicy mayonnaise and pomegranate coulis for the more decorous Nanettina. We traded plates half way in, and both dishes were generously served, cooked from good produce, nicely seasoned and just plain delicious, as was the very good Austrian red that I spotted on the surprisingly good wine list (it would have been nice to have a few bottles from the North Fork of Long Island, though, since this restaurant attempts to fly a locavore flag, and those sturdy reds would go really well with the food here).

photo @ paul brissman

Next up fried yardbird (if you don’t know, yardbird is old American slang for a convict, so this is sort of a coy little joke), or dark-meat chicken (thighs and drum sticks) marinated in spicy buttermilk, fried, and served with heavenly white mace gravy, bread-and-butter pickles and mashed potatoes. To my surprise–chicken in France is vastly better than it is in the U.S., I hadn’t enjoyed a poultry feed as much in a really longtime. My Moldavian was very happy with “Helga’s” meatballs, a throwback to Samuelsson’s childhood and surely some ancestral rissoles of Nanettina’s forebearers as well. We also loved the sweet potato beignets and Red Rooster cheese cake–nicely made with a graham cracker crust, it came with citrus yogurt sorbet, lingonberries and passion-fruit sauce, a final study in the deeply appetizing multi-culturalism that informs the kitchen here.

If the food was very good, what I really loved about this place was that it’s become a lively, inclusive, progressive new institution in a rapidly evolving neighborhood (urban planners please note: a great restaurant or a lively market often provides the major momentum to a happy urban renewal story, with the wonderful green market in Union Square offering another great example) To wit, we talked to the beautifully dressed and very good looking young black couple next to us out on a first date–I hope our prattle was a relief from the taut tension of new desire rather than a hinderance, and then the two Swedish boys who took their place and quickly announced that they love New York, and a hip jazz musician, and a local real-estate agent, and a whole bunch of other friendly folks, and then headed downstairs to Ginny’s Supper Club for a night cap. Chatting with the jazz band between sets and listening to a really terrific singer, I remembered how much fun real night life used to be back before everybody got duped into working from 7am-9pm seven days a week and checking their email every five minutes. Here, on a rainy Sunday night in New York City, we just let go and had a great head-emptying good time.

310 Lenox Avenue, New York, NY 10027, Tel. 1-212-792-9001. Open daily. Average $50.

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For that matter, almost all of the formerly dodgy bits of Manhattan have been spruced up and sociologically scoured by the great flood of Wall Street money that washed over the island during the last twenty years, and if I certainly don’t miss the constant vigilance that was once part of walking New York’s streets or the city’s once filthy, graffiti covered, non-air-conditioned subways, there are times when I feel a twinge of nostalgia for the bohemian funkiness and artistic edginess that’s been dulled by a pervasive corporate prosperity. Walking through Chelsea to meet a friend for dinner the other night, I came across the shuttered premises of the old Empire Diner and it set off a mental slide show of fuzzy images from madcap middle-of-the-night meals surrounded by a wonderfully oddball quorum of transvestite prostitutes, drug-muddled club goers, sozzled artists, and the miscellaneous eccentrics who were once numerous in Manhattan, including an old woman with a heavy Slavic accent who’d come by around 3am in a tattered ball gown with troweled on makeup and a parrot on her shoulder.

So it was fun to arrive at Boutique Eat Shop (B.E.S.) and discover a place that still serves up a slightly boffo only-in-New York slice of bohemia. This new place in the heart of the Chelsea gallery district is the brainchild of NYC night-life impresario Irishman Patrick Duffy, and it’s a great looking space with brick walls, low lighting, a big bar, and interesting art by a posse of working NYC based artists.

It was interesting to see what New York party people are eating these days, too. Suffice it to say that the days when cheeseburgers, omelettes, and salads kept New York night owls happy are long gone, since Korean-American chef Charles Cho cooks an ambitious and generally successful menu of sophisticated dishes that reference his Asian background and experience cooking in Europe and in various American cities, most recently Los Angeles.

After starting off our meal with a “Patrick III,” a pleasant and potent concoction of cava, gin, grapefruit juice and elderflower liqueur, we enjoyed Chao’s delicate lobster ravioli in a sauce of creamed corn, wild mushroom risotto, delicious glazed pork belly with water melon salad, ginger-crusted snapper and grilled lamb chops. Though the seasoning could be a bit more authoritative–there was no trace of the ‘Tabsco foam’ mentioned on the menu with the ravioli and it would have brightened this dish a bit, the quality of the produce was impeccable, and it was obvious that Chao is a very experienced chef. B.E.S. also has an excellent wine list and a really good bar tender, which is probably why it was so appealingly animated on a sleepy Sunday night, too.

Grilled pork belly with water melon salad  The best part of our meal here, however, was the interesting looking crowd, great decor, reassuringly louche atmosphere and the lively chatter of proprietor Patrick Duffy, a bona fide ‘bete de nuit.” And in an increasingly gentrified Manhattan, it was nice to think that the frisky quartet having dinner next to us weren’t all bond traders, but might instead have included a Moldavian tattoo artist without a green card, a professional clown, a dominatrix, and the founder of a popular sex-toy website.

Boutique Eat Shop, 559 W. 22nd Street (at 11th Avenue), Tel. 1-212-414-8700. Open daily. Average dinner $60.

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This lovely man really cared about what he ate, too, since he was also the editor of what was then one of the most sophisticated guides to eating in New York City, “The Restaurants of New York,” by Seymour Britchky, and once or twice during the time that I worked for him, he invited me to lunch in one of these fancy spots, which made a change from the slices of pizza and hot dogs that were then the noontime fare of publishing juniors. The meal at Le Veau d’Or on the occasion of my birthday was a pig fest, too, since we started with slices of delicious pate de campagne and then shared a roast suckling pig with a stunning bottle of Cote Rotie.

Today in New York, the most important pig is spotted rather than minced, herbed and baked into a succulent, savory loaf, and so for dinner with an old friend on my first night in the city, I was keen to try the Manhattan ‘gastro-pub’ that won a star from the New York Michelin guide. And all I can say is what a long, strange trip it’s been. When I lived in New York in the 1980s, the amazing culinary revolution that had so recently blossomed in San Francisco was just reaching the city, and if New Yorkers have always loved to eat, they were suddenly interested in eating a lot better. Sure, you could still go to dinner at hokey places like Luchow’s, the nominally German restaurant on 14th Street or the very good Cafe Geiger in Yorkville, and dozens of Italian restaurants, but France definitely still lorded it over every other country at the table in Manhattan. Still, there was a sudden quickening in the city’s culinary hierachy, based on a peculiar mixture of immigration and social prejudices, with the opening of seriously good and adventurous new restaurants like Karen and David Waltuck’s Chanterelle which were not only upending the local gastronomic totem pole but delicously mocking it. A flock of ‘real’ Italian restaurants was also coming on strong, and a Chinese and Mexican food was suddenly becoming much more authentic, too.

   So how, I wondered, did we reach the point that deviled eggs are on the menu at the Spotted Pig, one of the city’s most talked about, widely lauded, and most popular restaurants in New York City Mind you, I loved deviled eggs, but in giving a Michelin star to this place, I think Michelin was trying to strike sort of a hip, irreverent pose, and I’m not entirely persuaded it comes off.

Granted, I like the look of this restaurant, with it’s stamped tin ceiling, bric-a-brac, and bare wood floors, a lot, but it doesn’t look much different from the dozens of pub-like places that once quietly catered to the large number of single men and women who live in the West Village who don’t cook, like to start their evening meal off with a potent cocktail or too, and then go for comfort food like fried chicken or meat loaf, before having another potent cocktail for dessert, and of this genus, Fedora’s, also recently rebooted, was a perfect example. These unassuming neighborhood places are more or less extinct now, washed away by the flood of Wall Street money that sluiced through the city’s economy during the now discredited ‘boom’ that ended with a catastrophic financial meltdown (For anyone who hasn’t yet seen the brilliant film “Inside Job,” an extremely intelligent and lucid documentary that explains that this catastrophe was thirty years in the making beginning with the election of Ronald Reagan, it’s required viewing).

So I met my friend Ted here and we were ushered upstairs, which is very dark. There was a nice table for two by the window, though, so I asked if we could sit there and was told we couldn’t, because it had been reserved for one of the restaurant’s managers, an honest if indiscreet explanation. So we sat on low little stools at a bare wood table and looked at the menu. For fun, we both ordered deviled eggs, decided to split a puntarelle, radicchio, speck and blood orange salad, because I’d never seen puntarelle in the United States before, and then both go with the legendary cheeseburger with its grilled roll, blue cheese garnish and succulent mixture of excellent Pat LaFrieda beef with a bottle of delicious Ridge Zinfandel. This burger has been the object of ecstatic praise in New York, as has the Spotted Pig’s chef, Englishwoman April Bloomfield, who was profiled in the last food issue of The New Yorker.

The deviled eggs were okay, but over-salted and lacking the paprika that made my Mom’s, or mine–I use pimenton, better. Next the salad, which was a puzzle. In Rome a few weeks ago, I ate puntarelle salad constantly. It’s a spring green that requires a lot of handwork to prepare, and comes to the table in thin, crunchy celery-like strings in an anchovy dressing. Here, curiously, there were just a few of the small, tight green puntarelle heads the Roman would throw away, a few slices of delicious smokey speck, some radicchio and a couple of tiny medallions of blood-orange, but the dressing had no taste, so the ingredients with which it was made weren’t melded together. Overall, disappointing.

We arrived at 6pm–New Yorkers seem to eat out earlier and earlier, and by the time our burgers, arrived the place was packed with a crowd that was curious mixture of West Village types, including the two NYU film students to our left, one of them with elaborate tatoos, and a couple from New Jersey who were very audibly alarmed by these same tatoos. Or to wit, the crowd was a mix of the few arty types who still survive in the heavily gentrified West Village, plus a lot of braying Wall Street types and Bridge-and-Tunnel couples. The nasty New York snobbery of calling anyone who comes from over the Hudson or the East River ‘Bridge and Tunnel’ has lost a lot of it’s sting now that Brooklyn is so hip, and trendy types are pushing into Queen’s neighborhoods like Jackson Heights, but the political and aesthetic short-hand the phrase denotes still applies.

The burgers arrived with an avalanche of shoe-string fries, which look dramatic on the plate but are a non-starter for me, because they’re always cold. These were also very heavily salted and lukewarm. Odes have been written to Bloomfield’s burger, and because I loved her short-lived John Dory restaurant, and she sounds like a really nice woman on the basis of the New Yorker profile, I couldn’t wait to tuck into mine. It was good, too, but not as good as the burger served at chef Michael White at Ai Fiori (he also uses Pat LaFrieda meat, but dresses his up with bacon, cheese, lettuce, onion and tomato, whereas Bloomfield admantly insists on cooking hers with the unique garnish of blue cheese).

The New York press has described The Spotted Pig as a gastro-pub, but for anyone who knows real British ones, it’s not. It’s a rebooted West Village bar restaurant, with better than average food and the eye-watering prices that only bond traders might find digestible. With tip but no coffee or dessert, this meal cost us both $65, and walking home through the beautiful tree-lined streets of one of the world’s most civilized urban neighorhoods, I couldn’t help but thinking that this same wad of cash would have bought me a knockout meal at Les Bistronomes in Paris, which I reviewed here two weeks ago. “It’s been a longtime since a really exciting restaurant opened in New York,” Ted said during dinner. I can’t comment on that, but I do find New York menus all read the same these days, with an admirable onslaught of offal and a more puzzling preponderance of brussels sprouts, or to wit, they’re admirably earthy and locavore, but not many exhibit the electric creativity you find at such recent Paris openings as Frenchie or Daniel Rose.

The Spotted Pig, 314 West 11th Street, New York, NY 10014 Tel. 1-212-620-0393. A,C,E trains at 14th Street and 8th Avenue or No. 1 at Christopher Street. Average $60.

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Though the stretch of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan between 14th and 8th Street was once a gastronomically distinguished miniature main street for those golden blocks bounded by these streets and Fifth Avenue, it’s more recently lost a lot of its once brilliant gourmet cred. The Jefferson Market, once one of the best grocers in New York City, never recovered when it moved across street, and has since become a shadow of the terrific store that it was in the days that I lived around the corner on Waverly Place and would occasionally spot (easy to do) James Beard in the line at the then excellent butcher’s counter. Even though I was living in a miniscule studio on the pauper’s salary of an editorial assistant at a major midtown publisher, I insisted on eating good meat, and so was in and out of here all of time to buy a single chop, a small steak or a half pound of ground beef from the charming Italian butchers wearing white paper caps behind the counter. On one especially memorable April Friday, I stopped in on my way home from work to buy a single piece of chicken, and Mr. Beard himself happened to be in the midst of having a large order filled when my turn came. Observing the butcher wrap my single piece of fowl, he horned in before I could pay my bill and add two fat lamb chops to my order with his compliments. I was embarrassed by this sudden generosity, toyed with the idea of turning it down, then knew it would be too silly. When I thanked him for the sudden feast, he eyed my leather shopping bag filled with manuscripts and said, “You’re very welcome. Now go buy a good bottle of wine to go with the chops, drink it all, put those manuscripts in the closet, and go out and have a good time on this pretty spring night. You’re only young once, young man.” I did as I was told, especially since it was pretty easy to abandon the huge tome on insurrection movements in Philippine history I was supposed to read by Monday.

I never walk this stretch of pavement without having the memory of this exceptionally kind gesture put me in a good mood, and so it was on an arctic night in Manhattan that Bruno and I showed up to meet friends at the superb new Kin Shop at 11th and Sixth for dinner. Stepping into this busy storefront place, I was immediately impressed not only by the simple attractive decor but by the friendly service and palpable atmosphere of people having a great night out over really good food and drinks.

The bar at Kin Shop

Chef Harold Dieterle’s alluring menu is a shrewd personal ode to Thai cooking, and over very generously poured cocktails, something that always throws me for a loop since I am a dedicated son of Bacchus, the four of us rather feverishly studied the offer in a frantic attempt to make up our minds. “C’est fabuleux,” exclaimed Bruno, who loves Thai food as much as I do, and it was fabulous indeed, which made it tough to nail down final choices even though we knew we could fork into each others plates.

Once the gastronomic dice were rolled, we were able to get down to some serious food talk as three food writers and editors, with the ever patient and ethusiastic pleasure of Bruno’s company (he may be a wizard of a financial consultant, but he does love good food), and the good news is that after several shockingly awful years, it seems as though there’s a healthy pulse in publishing again.

Spicy duck salad

Surely to Bruno’s relief, the arrival of our starters tabled this shop talk for good, since we were all swooning over a quartet of dishes that included my brilliantly fiery Spicy Duck Laab salad served on romaine and garnished with toasted rice, the beautiful blonde’s duck tongue salad, and her charming husband’s sublime Kaffir lime marinated Montauk fluke with pomelo, radish & galangal-tumeric sauce. Bruno’s pumpkin and Bibb lettuce salad with pumpkin seeds and an Asian pear and peppercorn vinaigrette was good, too, but not in the same league as the other three dishes.

Pumpkin and Asian pear salad  In a sated lull before our main courses arrived, I found myself wondering again why Paris doesn’t have neighborhood Asian restaurants as good as Kin Shop. To be sure, I have my Asian favorites in Paris, including Au Coin des Gourmets, Bambou and others, but the local Asian offer out my door in the affluent and food-mad 9th arrondissement is pretty uninspiring, and the same can be said for many other well-heeled neighborhoods all over town. One can only guess how the under-the-radar fashion designers and fur-drapped ladies with cashmere clad gents who pack Lao Tseu, a decidedly middling Chinese place in Saint Germain des Pres, would react to this food, and that, perhaps, is the problem–it’s just too vivid, full-bodied, and authentic.

My main course–a poached duck egg on red-onion congee with spicy Thai sausages like you find in Chiang Mai and a fried Thai basil and garlic sauce immediately found a place in my comfort-food hall of fame, or that rotunda of dishes I could eat every other day for the rest of my life. What I loved about this dish was its stealthy blast of perfect umami pleasure, since it offered a brilliant constellation of intriguingly subtle tastes and textures. Madame’s Massaman, or braised goat with fried shallots, purple yams, mustard greens & toasted coconut and her husband’s casserole of bamboo shoots with pickled green peppercorns, romanesco cauliflower, bitter melon and wood ear mushrooms were brilliant, too, and though rather more timid than the rest of this line up, Bruno’s steam red snapper in coconut milk with cashews, bok choy and kabocha squash was a very nice dish, too.

We finished up with homemade Kaffir lime and Galangal ice cream, and on the way home, I found myself desperately yearning for a restaurant as good as Kin Shop in Paris. Not only is the food terrific, but it’s a lot of fun, has good service, and a surprisingly excellent wine list, including a couple of stand out bottles, notably Heidi Schrock’s 2009 Gelber Muskateller from the Neusiedlersee district in Austria’s Burgenland at $42 (on the other hand, I’d advise you to avoid the sparkling Shiraz on the menu like the plague; why this wine has become so popular in Australia is an absolute mystery to me).

Kin Shop, 469 Sixth Avenue (11th Street), New York, NY 10011, Tel. 212-675-4295. Average $50.

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The last meal before heading for the airport and the long flight home is always an important one for me, since even if upgraded on Air France, I know the food airborne will be a tad better than mediocre at best. So on our last day in New York, I booked for lunch at ABC Kitchen, New York based and Alsatian born chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s latest table in a very pretty loft-like space at the ABC Carpet home furnishings store on Broadway just before Union Square.

It had gotten rave reviews locally, so we were looking forward to a good feed when we showed up after a round of last-minute errands (Why are Gillette razor blades so much cheaper at Duane-Reade than in France, to say nothing of other necessaries like adobo peppers, organic aloe syrup, dried blueberries, etc.?). Things got off to a shaky start with the glacial reception of an almost comically disdainful and haughty hostess, a woman who really should jump the pond and apply for a job with the Costes brothers in Paris, but once we’d settled in, this place started to be fun. First of all, the crowd of hot looking young media types–women with It bags and buffed guys with the NYC uniform of a dark V neck sweater over a white T shirt, was entertaining, and the waitress was very sweet. The menu was quite appealing, too, since it more than delivered on the restaurant’s slogan: “local, organic, home,” a smart confluence of gastronomy and good health.

I loved my salad of roasted red and yellow baby beets dressed with Greek yogurt, and Bruno’s raw Maine diver scalllops with chilies, mint and dill were very good, too. Since he’s currently on a major waistline alert, I suggested he try a real New York classic, a Waldorf salad, which came as match-sticked Granny Smith apples, raisins, and a light dressing on a bed of grilled chicken and lettuce and was very good. Unfortunately, I allowed myself to be tempted by a daily special, a lobster roll–a flavorless and rather stingy lobster salad on a cake-like, stale and tasteless roll with a side of soggy fries. Compared to the epic lobster roll at Mary’s Fish Camp, this one was a real letdown, but things picked up with some very good dessert–a really excellent carrot cake with cream-cheese buttercream icing and an oustanding brown butter, chocolate ganache and hazelnut crunch tart.

Overall, this was a pleasant meal, and I loved the assiduous use of first-rate organic produce and commitment to running a sustainable business, but I wouldn’t describe it as a destination restaurant, but rather as a very good option for lunch or brunch if you happen to be shopping in the Flatiron district. On the other hand, how thrilled we’d be to have a retail-setting restaurant this good in Paris!

ABC Kitchen, 35 East 18th Street, New York, NY 10003, Tel. 212-475-5829. Average $45.

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I’ve been eating at the Oyster Bar, the seafood restaurant in the bowels of Grand Central Station in New York City, ever since I have any clear memory of what was on my plate. For those who don’t know it, Grand Central Station, one of New York City’s main train stations, is one of the most magnificent buildings in the United States, a dignified, elegant American Beaux Arts building with a soaring main concourse with an azure ceiling with faux constellations, solid brass fittings, and acres of polished stone.

I’ve come and gone from this station, which serves New York City’s northern and eastern suburbs, thousands of times, and the beauty of this station has been a benediction to the homeliness of something as ordinary as an hour train ride to my sister in Noroton Heights, Mom in Talmadge Hill, or my brother in Old Greenwich, all Connecticut suburbs.

On every visit to New York, I offer myself lunch at the horse-shoe-shaped counter in the Oyster Bar, and if the food is never outstanding, it’s always been reliably better-than-average. Until last Saturday anyway. After a busy morning of errands and meetings, I looked forward to sitting down at the counter for the same odd but deeply satisfying meal I always eat here—a shrimp cocktail and a fried-clam sandwich with a glass of white wine. So I found a corner seat offering extra room to read the paper while I ate, and ordered. I was promptly served a glass of ice water, and just as promptly I called the waiter back to show him that the glass he’d just filled was filthy. “Oh yeah,” he muttered and changed it.

Then twenty-five minutes went by before the shrimp cocktail arrived, with the plump prawns nestled on a bed of browning iceberg lettuce and accompanied by a quarter of nearly rotten lemon. Another intervention. Next, the fried clam sandwich—a skimpy portion of gritty clams and cole slaw on a Kaiser roll, which I made the best of but was really mediocre, especially in view of the fact that this lunch, including a glass of white wine, cost $38. Before leaving I asked to speak to the duty manager, and when he finally showed up, I politely explained that the quality in this restaurant really seemed to be on the skids. “Well, you can always go elsewhere,” he replied.

I couldn’t help but contrast this rude and aggressively indifferent response to the way my waitress at the Union Square Café reacted to my over-cooked cheeseburger a few days later. She offered to serve me a new one, but I hate waste and didn’t want to wait, so I finished the burger and asked for the bill. “There isn’t one,” she replied. “We’re very sorry, and would you like some dessert?rdquo; I didn’t want dessert, but during a long walk in Greenwich Village on a beautiful Indian Summer afternoon, one of my recurring thoughts was a huge respect for the professionalism of restauranteur Danny Meyer, who so graciously understands that the customer is always right.

These very high and very low experiences of customer service in New York restaurants also offer a keyhole view of what I like to eat when I’m in the United States, a question people often ask me as though I must be Zeus descending from Mount Olympus when I leave Paris for the U.S. The truth of the matter is that the food in the U.S. these days is often excellent and that the quality gap between France and America has significantly narrowed during the almost 25 years I’ve lived in Paris.

But it’s not trendy New York restaurants like Torrisi that I crave on home turf, but really good pizza, sushi, American Chinese food, a red-sauce style Italian meal, a burger or five, Mexican food, deli food, and even the Betty Crocker vintage American comfort food that I was served at a dinner party the other night—glazed Virginia ham, string bean casserole made with Campbell’s cream-of-mushroom soup and Durkee’s onion rings, potato casserole made with cream-of-Potato soup and lots of cheddar cheese, and pumpkin pie courtesy of Comstock canned pie fillings.

My host and the other guests at this meal were visibly surprised by the pleasure I took in this food. “But you live in Paris!” said one. Indeed, but as someone who passionately knows good food, I know that it can be found at all altitudes on the food chain, and this is why I served a favorite James Beach three-meat meat loaf to friends the other night (they ate the entire monster, too, which made me happy, although I’d kind of been hoping for a left-over slice or two to slip into a meatloaf sandwich the next day).

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Run by Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, two talented young New York chefs, the very popular Torrisi on Mulberry Street, formerly the main drag in New York’s Little Italy, offers a generally good but occasionally coy

hipster culinary riff on what this neighborhood has become. To wit, Little Italy is being slowly engulfed by an ever growing Chinatown on the one hand, and on the other, second or third generation Italian Americans are returning to the turf of their original immigrant forebearers.

So if the menu at this old Italian grocer is pretty cut and dry East Coast Italian at noon, at night they serve a $50 prix-fixe that’s a melange of Italian dishes and Asian-Italian dishes, like the Vietnamese style sweetbreads that were one of the five appetizers that began our Sunday supper at this friendly place. If the homemade mozzarella, salami bread, and lamb with white beans and escarole that were the other starters, were delicious, the sweetbreads added a jarring note to the meal, because there was no logical liaison between this dish and the others. Similarly, the twee-ly named “Pommes aux Pommes,” a tart of rosti potatoes topped with apple slices was one of those ideas that work better in a chef’s head than on the dinner plate.

Our seafood pasta–spaghetti cooked in a deeply flavored seafood bouillon, finished off with more of same, and garnished with cuttlefish, mussels, clams and shrimp, was superb, as was barbecued lamb with Chinese greens and garlic.

Service is friendly here, the people-watching’s good, and when there’s an awful lot of talent in the kitchen. N.B. No reservations for dinner, so get here early, and check the website, www.piginahat.com, for the menu, which changes daily.

250 Mulberry St., New York, NY 10012, Tel. 212-965-0955. Subway Stops: Prince Street or Broadway-Lafayette. Prix-fixe dinner $50. Lunch: 11am-4pm daily; Dinner: Sunday-Wednesday 6-10pm, Thursday-Saturday 6-11pm.

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“THE LEFT BANK,” 15 Street & 6th Avenue, NYC….Er, um, well not quite.

If the food at Manero’s was good, no one could ever have accused it of being interesting, but then in those days no one wanted food that was interesting. To be sure, Westport had an excellent Chinese restaurant, West Lake, and the Italian food at the Apizza Center in nearby Fairfield was wonderful, too, but aside from a couple of New England-y seafood places—The Clam Box, etc., and a “French” restaurant downtown where they flambéed everything, but most of all the bill, the town offered slim pickings for anyone who really loved good food with the exception of the rather mysterious Café Varna, which served, rather amazingly in retrospect, Bulgarian food.

The local restaurant pulse quickened in the seventies with the opening of places like Viva Zapata, a Mexican place that Grandmother Drake heartily disapproved of—“Barbara,” she’d say to my mother, “You shouldn’t feed food like that to growing children”—and a fun little café called Bon Appetite.

During a recent trawl through southwestern Connecticut, I thought of this long ago gastronomic landscape and couldn’t help but be amazed by the variety of ethnic eating now on offer in the area, a reflection, I think of how Americans have become so much more adventurous at the table than they were forty years ago. I mean, who’d have ever thought that there’d be a half-decent Thai restaurant, the Little Thai Kitchen, in a white-bread suburb like Darien (Their pineapple fried rice is killer good) Or Ola, a really good pan-Latino place owned by Guatemalans in Orange, Connecticut just outside of New Haven.

To be honest, I didn’t expect much from the later on a rainy Sunday night, but my friend David was enthusiastic, and while traveling in the U.S., I enjoy being “off-duty,” and so rather less exigent than I am in Paris. The colorful “fiesta loca” décor and location in a strip mall encouraged me to seriously temper my expectations, so it was a surprise when lobster and avocado quezadillas with chipotle creme fraiche came to the table and were delicious. My churrasco beef—marinated skirt steak served with rice and beans. lime-horseradish-and-parsley chimichurri and long wands of deep-fried plantain, was excellent, too, although I’d have liked a bit more fire in the sauce, and David’s shrimp “Bahia” was wonderful—plump shrimp in a gentle but nicely seasoned sauce of coconut milk. With a good bottle of Rueda rose, this was an unexpectedly pleasant meal, and a perfect example of how terrifically cosmopolitan dining options have become all over the United States.

Back in New York City, I had one of the best Italian meals I’ve ever eaten at Danny Meyer’s new Maialino restaurant at the Gramercy Park hotel. This place is his homage to Roman trattoria, and he nails it perfectly with absolutely stunning food. The four of us swooned over a daily special of insalata Catalana—perfectly poached squid, prawns, and fish with diced tomatoes and tiny croutons in a brilliant lemon vinaigrette, a superb plate of Italian charcuterie, and tripe cooked with mint as first courses, and then tucked into malfatti with sublime shreds of roasted sucking pig in a lemony sauce, spaghetti alle vongole, roast suckling pig, and swordfish, all of which were outstandingly good.

In fact the only things I’d didn’t like about this place were the prices—staggering, and the décor, which was too high-concept with a fussy marquetry style floor. But the service was charming per all Meyer restaurants, the wine list had some terrific off-beat bottles, and the crowd was fun, too, including the just-in-from-LA couple nearby. She, a perfect cooing Barbie in sequins, and he sort of a junior Phil Spector type. Former boss and fellow diner Ruth Reichl advised me that Maialino also does one of the best breakfasts in New York, and I can’t wait to try it on a future visit. In the meantime, I’ll be remembering that roast suckling pig with rosemary potatoes with gunning salivia glands until my next trip to New York, where my other stand out meal was a superb dinner tasting menu at Kajitsu, a very beautiful Japanese restaurant in the East Village where the tempura sweet corn on steamed rice with corn soy sauce and Italian parsley was one of the best things I’ve eaten all year. In fact, the only place I really wanted to get to and missed was Kyochon, the Korean chicken restaurant on 5th Avenue that David Lebovitz made sound so appealing. What Grandmother Drake would have made of Korean fried chicken or udon with yuzu is beyond me, but I have a hunch she’d have preferred Manero’s. Myself, I return to Paris more impressed by the food in the U.S. than ever before.

Kajitsu, 414 East 9th Street, New York, NY, Tel. 212-228-4873, Tasting menu $70

Little Thai Kitchen, 4 West Avenue, Darien, CT, 203-662-0038, Avg lunch for two $60

Maialino, Gramercy Park Hotel, 2 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY, Tel. 212-777-2410. Avg dinner for two $150

Ola, 350 Boston Post Rd, Orange, CT, Tel. 203-891-0522, Avg dinner for two $100.

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Ralph’s Restaurant in Saint Germain des Pres @ Nicolas Buisson

To be sure, Ralph’s is destined to be a big hit this summer, because the interior courtyard is an ideal urban bower for warm-weather dining, it has one of the best locations in Paris bang in the heart of Saint Germain des Pres and the food’s much better than I expected it would be (I’m not only not a big fan of in-shop dining, but perhaps unfairly doubted the designer would be able to pull off an “American” restaurant in Paris). All of this being said, it’s still too bad that such a highly visible showcase of red-white-and-blue gastronomy should be so static in creative terms.

Ralph’s Lauren’s style is often about a very subtlely off-center classicism, but this does not translate to the menu of Ralph’s, which is as traditional as anything you might have found in a country-club dining room on the Eastern seaboard in the 1950s. I started with a “Maryland style lump crab cake,” which was a nicely made and seasoned mound of crabmeat rolled in angel’s hair vermicelli, fried golden, and garnished with a pleasant yellow-pepper-and-citrus sauce, and my friend Alice ordered the lobster salad, which was well presented and generously served, and well it should have been for 35 Euros.

In fact all of the the prices at Ralph’s are similarly eye-popping, from 27 Euros for the very good cheeseburger I had as my main course, to 36 euros for the nicely grilled salmon on a bed of spring vegetables that Alice had for hers. Yes, 10 Euros for a side dish of wilted spinach may strike you as outrageous, but it also forces one to remember that Saint-Germain-des-Pres has now been thoroughly rebooted from blowsy bohemian hangout into a world-class luxury-shopping district. After all, why would Ralph Laurent have chosen to set up shop here?

So would I go again Definitely if you were picking up the tab and I had a hankering for a really good cheese burger, but even though the food’s pretty good, it’s not very likely otherwise–the prices are just too vertiginous for my thin wallet.

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A week later, I went to meet a dear old friend for dinner at Cookshop, a terrific looking bistro on Tenth Avenue in New York City, and sipping a surprisingly good glass of Finger Lakes Riesling (dim-witted of me perhaps, but I still associate Upstate New York wines with the scary jugged stuff I drank in college) at the bar before Tom showed up, I couldn’t help but thinking of Ralph’s and all the fun one might have had creating a market-driven menu that channels the best of contemporary American bistro cooking working with first-rate French produce in Paris.

Chef Marc Meyer has created a swell little neighborhood restaurant that was one of the NYC pioneers of the locavore eating trend, and on a warm May night, the dining room was filled with a wonderful mix of stylish and arty locals, including dating couples of all stripes, boys out on the town, girls out on the town, and a pleasant scattering of tourists who were probably staying at one of the glamorous new hotels–the Standard, the Soho House, the Hotel Gansevoort–that have opened nearby.

Good looking waiters in tight plaid shirts animated the room, and as soon as we were seated and I eye-balled the menu, I suspected were going to have a very good meal. And so we did. Tom loved his seared bluefish pate, and my Montauk squid with chick peas and a pleasantly spicy Moroccan sauce was perfectly cooked so that it was creamy and tender and absolutely delicious. Next, an epic New York strip steak for me and slow-braised porchetta for Tom. Both dishes were impeccably cooked and imaginatively garnished–my steak was brightened by a fine aioli and came with baby artichokes, fingerling potatoes and cured olives, while Tom’s stone-oven bake pork was beautifully accented by dried fruit and salsa verde and beans with applewood smoked bacon.

Desserts looked dauntingly sweet, so we finished up our excellent Burgenland red, a Kollwentz Zweigelt, with a portion of Crater Lake Blue, a raw cow’s milk cheese from Oregon. All told, an excellent modern American meal, and a cooking style I would dearly love to have available to me in Paris for those occasions when I want to show French or other foreign friends that the United States is quite far from being the gastronomic wasteland of their received ideas.

Ralph’s, 173 boulevard Saint Germain, 6th arrondissement, Tel. 01-44-77-76-00. Metro: Saint-Germain-des-Pres. Open daily. Average 65 Euros.

Cookshop, 156 10th Avenue, New York, NY 10011, Tel. 212-924-4440. Average dinner $70.

The post RALPH’S, Paris: An American in Paris; COOKSHOP, New York City: What Ralph’s Could Have Been appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.

At the risk of a little sacrilege, I’d say that a really well-made pizza can offer a punch of pleasure that’s every bit as potent as a slab of foie gras or any other Gallic delicacy, and anyone who doubts me, should make a beeline to Keste on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. On an absolutely arctic afternoon before Bruno and I found the courage to try and jam everything we’d bought or been given during our visits to New York and the Bahamas into two suitcase that seemed to shrink by the hour, we dashed out the door for a last-minute pizza fix before the numbing misery of JFK.

With a pleasant young Italian waiter tediously playing the folklore card by calling us “Signore” (Gentlemen)–and this inspite of the fact that he perfectly understood me explaining in French what Buratta was to Bruno, things did not get off to an auspicious start. The shockingly high prices on the menu had me ready to pick a fight, too.

And then the pizzas arrived, and were truly fabulous. In fact, the creamy sweetness of fresh just melted mozarella meeting with the bright acidic tang of San Marzano tomatoes with a punchy floral note of basil has to be one of the most brilliant taste trinities ever invented. A sausage version of the same pizza came with a superb garnish of crumbled pork sausage meat from Faicco’s butcher across the street, and though $8 for a glass of wine still feels like highway robbery to me, the house red went down without any problems. The only tiny flaw with Keste’s pizzas was that a perhaps insufficiently heated oven made them a mite soggy–in Naples, the crust of any good pizza is always dry on the bottom, but this is just a quibble, and I was well and truly yearning for another pizza few hours later when I pried open the aluminum lid on one of the worst meals I’ve ever eaten on AIR FRANCE.

Keste’s also provides an inadvertent but absolutely fascinating lesson in the essential differences between American and European dining, since our waiter spent at least half of his time telling customers that they couldn’t order a half-and-half pizza (half mushroom and half sausage, say) like you can in most American pizzerias. “Why not I’m the one whose going to be eating it and paying for it#8221; said a man at the table next to ours. “Er, well, because the chef thinks that only certain flavors work well together. This is why there is no compose-it-yourself pizza here.” Or to wit, raised to believe the customer is king, many Americans resent it when gastronomic discipline is imposed by a restaurant kitchen.

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Before leaving Paris, I’d booked dinner at Le Concert de Cuisine for our first night home. Why I’d heard it was wonderful just before I went away for the holidays, and the lightness and subtlety of Franco-Japanese cooking seemed ideal as the gastronomic balm to jet lag and the inevitable masochistical melancholia that follows the end of any good vacation. Suffice it to say that I made an excellent choice, too, since chef Naoto Masumoto served us one of the best meals I’ve eaten in Paris since, well, my last dinner at the Cafe des Musees (early December).

To be sure, the location in the 15th arrondissement wasn’t particularly alluring, and the pleasant but anodyne decor of the dining room isn’t memorable, but I’ve rarely eaten food as delicate but politely provocative in the genre of the culinary minuette created by Japan and France’s reciprocal gastronomic fascination than Masumoto’s pumpkin risotto, linguine with sardines and Nori seaweed (sublime), lacquered suckling pig, and baba au umeshu (plum liqueur).  Shrimp flambeed in soy sauce and Cognac were superb, too, and overall Masumoto, who previously cooked at the Benkay at the Hotel Nikko for ten years, has revealed himself as a major talent for so brilliantly understanding the best ways for French and Japanese cooking to inflect upon each other.

Keste Pizza & Vino, 271 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10014, Tel. 1-212-243-1500. Avg $25.

Le Concert de Cuisine, 14 rue Nelaton, 15th, Tel. 01-40-58-10-15. Metro: Bir-Hakeim. Lunch menus 24 et 29€, Dinner menus 40 et 57€.

The post Keste–Brilliant Pizza in New York City, and Le Concert de Cuisine–Superbly Subtle Franco-Japanese Cooking in the 15th: A-/B+ appeared first on Alexander Lobrano.