Frevo, New York City | Sophisticated Contemporary French Cooking in Manhattan, A-
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
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.
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