Duck Leg Confit at Brasserie Athénée

I’m not going to make a case for Brasserie Athénée, a Theater District restaurant on the edge of the infamous Restaurant Row. It gets largely mediocre reviews. Like most restaurants in that neighborhood, you can get a good meal or a terrible one, depending on what you order, how busy they are (the pre-theater rush tends to be awful), and who’s on duty in the kitchen that day.

I’ll only tell you that the Duck Leg Confit ($21) that my son and I had yesterday was one of the city’s better examples of the genre, especially at the price.

Brasserie Athénée (300 W. 46th Street at Eighth Avenue, West Midtown)

The Mark by Jean-Georges

The current crop of new restaurants is dismal these days, so I have been re-visiting places that I thought deserved a second look. The Mark by Jean-Georges is packed every time I drop in, and reservations at prime times need to be booked several weeks in advance. So, I wondered: has it improved?

When we last visited The Mark, I wrote:

. . . we were left with the impression of decent hotel food served in a gorgeous room where the people-watching trumps the cuisine. Perhaps Vongerichten is skipping the inevitable decline, and launching with mediocrity in mind from the beginning.

I was referring, of course, to the “inevitable decline” that afflicts most Vongerichten restaurants after the first few months in business. Unlike other successful chef–restaurateurs, like Daniel Boulud or Tom Colicchio, he never seems to find the talent that can run a restaurant in his absence.

I’ve been back to The Mark many times, perhaps a dozen or more, but always at the bar. It attracts a lively crowd of affluent, educated, attractive Upper East Side-types, along with assorted mafiosi and working girls. It’s not a bad place to have a drink, if you’re in the area.

But when my friend arrived first, the vibe looked so unsavory to her that she chose to wait in the hotel lobby, rather than go in alone. That sense of discomfort did not abate when we went into the dining room, where the staff seated us at a smallish round table in the corner, right next to the patio door.

Sam Sifton awarded two New York Times stars in April of last year, while finding the cuisine “so unambitious that it is difficult to fumble.” We had a similar reaction, but the crowds have not dissipated, so Mr. Vongerichten’s money men decided they could hike prices. A lot. Whereas most of the entrées were below $30 when The Mark opened, now almost none of them are. A burger, formerly $22, is now $26. The black truffle pizza with fontina cheese, $16 when I had it last year, is now $26. Linguine with clams has risen from $30 to $32, parmesan crusted chicken from $23 to $30.

But I liked the food better this time, and that counts for something.

The amuse bouche was a honeydew gazpacho (above left). We shared the Watermelon and Goat Cheese Salad ($14; above right), which the kitchen plated as two half portions. It’s served with cracked white pepper and a dash of olive oil, a perfectly balanced summer dish.

Both entrées were faultless. Scottish Salmon ($29; above left) is lightly poached, served with sprink leeks, roasted peppers, and artichokes. Casco Bay Cod ($32; above right) rested on a bed of spinach, with sweet garlic lemon broth and a coating of crunchy lemon crumbs.

All of these plates shared that wonderful combination of sweet and sour that Vongerichten is known for, so satisfying when it works, but so difficult to duplicate. There is much more to the menu, but in these selection his vision is evident, and the deputies he left behind seem to know how to execute it.

I still like The Mark, but it isn’t for everyone. Some will find the “scene” there a distinct turn-off. If you can tune it out, or don’t mind it in the first place, the food is actually very good.

The Mark by Jean-Georges (25 E. 77th St. near Madison Ave., Upper East Side)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: *½
Overall: **

La Silhouette

 

Note: La Silhouette closed in November 2013, after cycling through three chefs in three years. This is a review under chef David Malbequi, who left the restaurant in July 2011.

*

It seems like an absurd quest these days, to open a French restaurant without a well known chef at the helm. This is in contrast to Italian restaurants, which proliferate in such excess that it is impossible to try them all.

It wasn’t always this way: French cuisine was central to the Western canon, as obviously essential as Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven’s symphonies. It’s not so much that new French restaurants are rare these days, but they aren’t common either, and the few we have are drowned out by baser fare.

Todd English hasn’t opened an important restaurant in years, and two weeks ago the Times featured a glossy photo of him pumping iron. The accompanying article didn’t even attempt to assert any culinary importance, even though it appeared in, you know, the DINING SECTION. Heaven forbid they should actually focus on, you know, FOOD.

So of course, when two former Le Bernardin managers and a former Boulud chef open La Silhouette, does the critic-in-chief even bother to review it? No, he sends an underling, who pooh-poohs it, while he reviews his eighteenth hotel restaurant cum lounge, with which he is, of course, unimpressed. For once it was Adam Platt and Gael Greene who got it right, awarding two stars (or “hats” in Greene’s case).

The chef at La Silhouette is Frenchman David Malbequi, who arrives via Daniel, BLT Steak, BLT Market, and the Standard Hotel. Entrées are mostly in the $30s, which the Times describes as “quite expensive,” but these days you’ve got to hit $40 (which La Silhouette doesn’t) before I would say that. For anything beyond a bistro or its non-French counterpart, this is the going rate.

There’s a luscious Porcini Cappuccino Soup ($16; above left) with smoked foie gras and a dreamy Wild Burgundy Snail Risotto ($16; above right) with Hen of the Woods mushrooms and a garlic parsley sauce.

I heard nothing but praise for Mustard Crusted Lamb Loin ($34; above left) with stuffed artichoke and tomato confit, and Pan Seared Striped Bass ($30; below left) with spring peas, asparagus, mint, and vinegar jus.

It was, perhaps, lazy of me to order the New York Strip ($39; above right). If it wasn’t steakhouse quality, it was nevertheless better than most non-steakhouses serve—rare, rich, and beefy, with a satisfying marrow and porcini crust.

The kitchen offers neither an amuse bouche nor petits fours (although one review, curiously, mentioned the latter). But there is a solid bread service: toasted bagel chips with a sour cream and chive spread, and an assortment of baked breads afterward. The staff are on top of their game, although an uncrowded Sunday evening might not be the acid test. Laminated menus sound the only off-key note.

The one cocktail I tried was very good: A Little Hell ($13), with Rittenhouse rye, sweet vermouth, and whisky marinated morello cherries, on the rocks. The seven-page wine list is slightly more than half French. There aren’t quite enough bottles under $60, but there’s a reasonable selection under $75, along with pricer bottles. Right at $60 is a 2002 Château La Vieille Cure (above right), which the sommelier decants at the table. After a few minutes, it opens up nicely.

Almost every reviewer has harped on the remoteness of the location. Is it really that unusual, today, to venture west of Eighth Avenue? It is less than ten minutes’ walk from Columbus Circle, not even all the way to Ninth Avenue. You could easily miss the entrance, though: a small, barely-marked door on a side street. The owners got a sleek, modern design from Richard Bloch, the starchitect whose work includes Masa, 15 East, Dovetail, and Le Bernardin.

This is an enjoyable place to eat.

La Silhouette (362 W. 53rd Street, east of Ninth Avenue, Hell’s Kitchen)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

DBGB

On a recent visit to Daniel Boulud’s newest restaurant, Boulud Sud, I was struck by the consistent solidity of the chef’s restaurants.

Have there been wobbly moments? Yes, of course. Have the food and service always been precisely as they should be? No, of course not. But still, I find Boulud’s establishments more reliable than those of any other chef or restaurateur who has as many places as he does—except, perhaps, Danny Meyer.

Unlike Meyer’s empire, there is no one in Boulud’s large empire who is the obvious public frontman for the service end of the business, although he or she must exist: restaurants don’t keep executing at this level by magic, and Boulud himself could hardly be keeping track of them all.

Two years ago, my first visit to DBGB, the most casual restaurant in Boulud’s brood, had some hits and misses, but the restaurant then was nearly brand new, and so packed you could barely move. Sam Sifton came along and gave it two stars, which we thought was on the high side.

On a recent Saturday evening, we found DBGB very enjoyable indeed. It was less than half full, but as it was quite early—and a holiday weekend to boot—I wouldn’t draw any conclusions.

I certainly don’t remember a Matzo Ball Soup ($8; above left) on the opening menu. My son was perfectly happy with it.

One could argue that Spring Lamb ($27; above left) was over-priced for a rather small portion, but you can’t fault its preparation, which was first-rate. I wasn’t sure which of many sausages to try, but I finally chose the Korean, or Coréanne ($13; above right), a wickedly spicy pork sausage with a kimchi sauce and a stingy allotment of two shrimp chips.

DBGB has an attractive, casual dining room. It’s a pleasant place to be—at least when it is not crowded (and I don’t know when the crowds come, if they do at all these days). Service was much better than it had to be: I think the server checked back about 17 times, to ensure we had everything we needed.

The restaurant is a bit expensive, for what it is. My son didn’t drink alcohol, and all I had was a $10 beer. Nevertheless, the bill was $73 before the tip: not a splurge, but you can see from the photos how much food we got for that price, and it isn’t much. Obviously, there’s a “Boulud premium,” but at least the chef delivers.

DBGB (299 Bowery at E. 1st Street, East Village)

Food: *½
Service: **
Ambiance: *½
Overall: *½

Boulud Sud

The word chef derives from a Latin word meaning chief, or head. It is, in other words, a managerial job, even though most of us think of chefs as “people who cook.” That, of course, is Daniel Boulud’s public persona. But running an empire of thirteen restaurants in six cities on three continents is more a test of management than of cooking, and in New York no one has a better success rate then Boulud.

With the opening of Boulud Sud (a Mediterranean-themed fine dining restaurant) and Épicerie Boulud (a sandwich and take-out place) across the street from Lincoln Center, Boulud is now up to eight Manhattan establishments. I believe he is the only restaurateur in town with six or more, who has never closed one. (His record out of town is more mixed: two Vancouver restaurants closed this year; a Las Vegas restaurant closed in 2010.)

Boulud’s Manhattan restaurants are all hits. If he ever has a slow night anywhere, I’ve never seen it. What is more remarkable, all of his restaurants remain recognizably French—a cuisine that is hardly fashionable in this town, to say the least.

Boulud’s closest analogue in New York, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, opens a steakhouse here, a Thai restaurant there, a Japanese one somewhere else, and so forth. Indeed, Vongerichten’s website promises, “A cuisine to suit every taste.” That’s not Boulud. Although his places span a wide range of formality, or the lack thereof, he doesn’t try to be something he’s not. That may be the key to his enduring success.

Boulud’s restaurants are critical hits, as well. Of the five that received “starred” reviews in The New York Times, all have the rating that I believe Boulud intends them to have (four at Daniel, three at Café Boulud, two at DB Bistro Moderne, Bar Boulud, and DBGB).

Boulud Sud and Épicerie Boulud build on the chef’s already successful Lincoln Center beachhead, where Bar Boulud has remained perpetually packed since it opened in 2008. As I noted at the time, there are at least 10,000 seats at the performing arts center, they are in use most nights of the year, and most of those people want to eat. It seemed remarkable that so few good restaurants were in the immediate vicinity.

Since Bar Boulud came along, prospects for dining at Lincoln Center have improved considerably, with Lincoln opening in a new space, and Ed’s Chowder House, and Atlantic Grill replacing formerly dreary alternatives. But Boulud is clearly betting that the neighborhood is not yet saturated, and judging by the crowds at these restaurants, he is probably right.

Boulud Sud is the most outwardly formal dining room that Boulud has opened in quite some time. Predictably, an Eater.com commenter called it “dated and stuffy”: the younger diners that restaurateurs covet are conditioned to break out into hives when they see a white tablecloth. Good for Boulud for bucking that trend. This is a comfortable, adult restaurant, lying at about the midpoint of between the bustling Bar Boulud around the corner and the quiet Café Boulud on the Upper East Side.

Servers and runners wear crisp white shirts and black vests. Boulud, leaving nothing to chance, brought in a brigade (many of them from his other restaurants) that practically outnumbers the guests. My immediate reaction, after falling in love with the room (nicer than the photo suggests), was to think: we are going to get taken care of here.

The Mediterranean theme gives Boulud license to wander from the south of France, to Italy and Morocco. You can easily dine here for under $40 per head, before alcohol. That probably won’t last, but for now Boulud Sud might be the best fine dining deal in town.

The menu, with its multiple categories, reminds me a bit of Café Boulud: “De La Mer” (fish and seafood), “Du Jardin” (vegetables), “De La Ferme” (meat and poultry). Within these categories, there’s a further subdivision into “small plates,” appetizers and entrées. Mains average around $25, and very few are over $30. The small plates and apps (the distinction being somewhat arbitrary) average around $12.

From the “small plates” section, a Tartine ($13; above left) offered four delicate canapés of crabmeat, sea urchin, and olives. Treviso Salad ($12; above right) was a simple, but effective combination of castelmagno cheese, speck ham, and aged balsamic.

Lamb Cleopatra ($23; above left) is lamb shoulder, slowly braised, and served with almonds and apricots: a hearty, satisfying dish. Daurade ($27; above right) is crisped on the plancha, served with vegetables on a Romesco sauce.

All of these dishes are slightly on the conservative side, as you would expect in a Boulud restaurant, but they were beautifully done, especially at the price. The Daurade, for instance, would easily be a $30+ entrée in many restaurants, without being any better.

It’s difficult to predict the trajectory of a restaurant on its third night of service, when the chef/owner has his A team on the floor, everyone is on best behavior, and the reservation book is being held down to 70 or 80 percent full. Boulud Sud will, if nothing else, be more expensive later on. If it becomes as busy as Bar Boulud, it might be a shade less charming.

But for now, Daniel Boulud has another hit on his hands.

Boulud Sud (20 W. 64th St. btwn Broadway & Central Park West, Upper West Side)

Food: **
Service: **
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

Rouge et Blanc

Last year’s fall previews mentioned a French–Vietnamese restaurant called Cinq à Sept. Shortly after opening, it was renamed Rouge et Blanc, without any intervening event (like a chef shuffle or a revamp) that would have prompted it.

Despite being launched twice, the restaurant has not attracted much critical notice, a Gael Greene rave being the only professional review I can find. It deserves a much closer look.

The folks behind it are Thomas Cregan, a former sommelier at Chanterelle and Beacon; and chef Matt Rojas, who has worked at Eleven Madison Park, Degustation, and Shang. No source I can find says how long he worked at those places, or what he did there; it’s not a bad resume, nevertheless.

The Vietnamese theme is interpreted awfully loosely, with Asian spices clearly evident in some dishes, and only barely there in others. But everything we tried was executed impeccably, albeit on a scale of modest ambition. It’s always a good sign when the menu is reprinted daily, and doesn’t overdo the number of choices: here, just eight appetizers ($10–18) and seven entrées ($19–34; all but one $27 or less).

Bone Marrow ($13; above left) is a wonderful start, roasted with grilled baby octopus, pickled plum sauce, and fennel, and served with a soft, warm roll. (There is otherwise no bread service.) Green Papaya ($12; above right) is a bright spring dish, with whole fried prawns and a curry vinaigrette.

The Vietnamese influence was less apparent in the entrées, but both were beautifully prepared. Quail ($26; above left) had the musky aroma of a charcoal grill, served with blue foot mushrooms and two quail eggs. Duck Confit ($26; above right) lay atop a sweetbread cassoulet.

The all-French wine list isn’t long, but markups aren’t ridiculous. A bottle of Château Moulin de Clotte was $48. You’d expect an ex-Chanterelle sommelier to know the correct temperature to serve a French red (61 degrees), and this one did, but casual restaurants seldom get it right. The owner overheard me comment on it, and came over to chat with us.

The décor is not easily categorized, but it’s charming. The Vietnamese accents are mostly in the background. French chansons waft over the speakers. A wide, glass window faces a cute, lightly-traveled block of MacDougal Street.

The attentive server provided reliable ordering guidance, but hadn’t yet learned to pour a full bottle of wine. That, and the lack of a proper bread service, were the only flaws at this otherwise adorable little restaurant.

Rouge et Blanc (48 MacDougal Street, south of Houston Street, SoHo)

Food: **
Service: *½
Ambiance: **
Overall: **

La Boite en Bois

La Boite en Bois, a Lincoln Center standby since 1985, fell off my radar in recent years. I’ve been there a few times, but until Saturday, probably not in the seven years I’ve been keeping this blog.

It’s rare that the coat-check girl is a restaurant’s smartest hire, but that just might be the case here. Walk in, and down a half-flight of stairs, and there she is, entoning “Bon soir, monsieur! Bon soir, madame!” When the website says that “you will feel as though you are in the countryside of France,” it is almost true. The cramped, rustic dining room really does transport you. I’d forgotten just how tight it is: this isn’t the place for a business deal or a seduction.

Appetizers are $8.50–13.50, entrées $19.50–30.50, but from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m., a $44 prix fixe is the only option. However, they offer almost their entire menu at that price. In contrast, Bar Boulud, a better restuarant, offers a $42 prix fixe, but your choices are limited to just three appetizers and three entrées.

Sausage with lentils is a perfect illustration: perfectly respectable, but nothing you’ll remember. It comes out in minutes and is obviously pre-made. The sausages were thicker and richer when I had the nearly identical dish at Bar Boulud in 2008. It was $16 there, but $9.50 here when ordered off the à la carte menu.

Roast salmon in a honey mustard crust, bathed in a rich cream sauce, was the best salmon I have had in a very long time, one of those sublime dishes that you wish would last forever. A similar preparation was the highlight of Bryan Miller’s one-star review for the Times, shortly after the restaurant opened.

For a pre-concert meal, reservations are mandatory. At 6:00 p.m. on a Saturday evening, the restaurant was already full, mostly with people headed to Lincoln Center. The staff is conditioned to get diners to their concerts on time, and this leads to some confusion. Wine was ordered, but never brought. A coffee was ordered; cappuccino came instead. Water glasses were not promptly refilled, and a spoon (rather than a fork) was the only utensil offered with a slice of cheesecake (housemade, and excellent).

La Boite en Bois (The Wooden Box) is one of many dozens of old-school French bistros that used to dot the city’s landscape, and if they’re a bit scarcer than they used to be, there are still plenty of them. They may be tough to tell apart, but this one delivers just enough charm to deserve a place on your pre-concert rotation.

La Boite en Bois (75 W. 68th St. near Columbus Ave., Upper West Side)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *

La Petite Maison

Note: La Petite Maison closed in July 2012 after a brief, undistinguished run.

Did you ever get the sense that Sam Sifton, the New York Times critic, doesn’t like food? Perhaps that would explain why his columns waste anywhere from a third to half the space reviewing the guests, rather than the restaurant.

This was the case last week, when he awarded one star to La Petite Maison, the import from Nice that opened recently in the old townhouse (formerly owned by the Rockefellers) that was once home to Aquavit and Grayz.

The photo on the left headlined the review, suggesting that La Petite Maison is a big party that just happens to serve food. Perhaps that’s the case some evenings, but not last Thursday. Instead, we found a normal adult restaurant, doing brisk business, not unlike many successful places that get the benefit of a fair review without such a misleading photo.

Admittedly, the name’s a bit of a dodge. The bi-level house isn’t petite at all. It’s loud when full, and the tables are so tightly packed that you’ll need the agility of a belly dancer to make your way across the room. We had probably the best table in the house, a four-top in the corner, set for a couple: at least the sound came at us from two directions, rather than four.

The old Grayz décor, which will be missed by no one, was jettisoned in favor of a bright, modern-looking room with handsome, Warholesque artwork on the walls, and crisp, white tablecloths. It’s not for twentysomethings. Downtowners will despise the obvious midtown vibe, but it’s nice to see a new place that’s not a clone of ten others you’ve been to.

It is a clone of one particular place, La Petite Maison in Nice. Alain Allegretti, of the eponymous (and sadly closed) Allegretti, was brought in as consulting chef. The nature or duration of his duties is unclear, but the menu has very little of his influence. It’s mostly a carbon copy of what they serve at the mother ship. (A Provençal soup seems to be his main contribution.)

Sticker shock may be the initial reaction, with appetizers $9–22 and entrées $24–45. If you’re getting tired of the recent trend of “entrées for two,” you may be irritated that five out of fifteen entrées are in that format. There is also a separate section dedicated to truffles, wherein you can indulge your taste for truffled eggs ($45), truffled macaroni ($55), or a truffle sandwich ($85). Roasted shrimp at $42 may seem inexplicable, but you can also dine quite economically on Cesar [sic] salad for $13, or black tagliolini with shrimp and sea urchin for $24.

Indeed, more of the items are sensibly priced than not, when adjusted for midtown rents. Salade Niçoise ($15) and Zucchini Blossom Beignets ($15) were good recreations of familiar classics. Chateaubriand for two ($70) was arguably a bargain: it’s slightly better, but much more expensive at Keens ($106), and these days there aren’t many places that serve this old favorite at all. And Keens doesn’t include the wonderful side dish of mashed potatoes, which was as soft and creamy as any you’ll find.

We experienced none of the obnoxious upselling that Sam Sifton complained about. Nevertheless, there were some odd service lapses. Baguettes (very good) came in a paper bag, without butter or bread plates. The chateaubriand came with two sauces (unnanounced), which I took to be the traditional au poivre and Bearnaise. But they came in water glasses, without serving spoons: most odd. And for $70, you’d think they could actually serve the steak, rather than just dropping a skillet into the center of the table. Our server disappeared for long intervals. Apparently, they didn’t mind that we occupied our table for almost three hours.

The menu is a bit cheap-looking, and is written in slightly awkward English, but the receipt is in French. I have to assume that they intended to use French all along, and chickened out at the last minute. This strikes me as a misjudgment: those who patronize French restaurants usually want the real thing. Some diners might not know that courgette means zucchini (that’s what translations are for), but is Salade Niçoise so intimidating that it needs to be replaced with “Traditional salad of Nice”?

These may seem like small points, but this is, after all, a French restaurant, where dinner for two will exceed $100 a head, assuming you don’t drink water. The wine list isn’t long, but if it’s short on bargains, it’s well worth exploring. How many restaurants offer a 1998 Château Vannières, much less at $85?

La Petite Maison could do a better job of embracing and celebrating its Niçoise heritage. In a month or two, the party revelers that Sifton complained about will have moved on to the Next Big Thing, and we’ll be left with a comfortable, upscale French restaurant for midtown adults.

La Petite Maison (13–15 W. 54th Street between Fifth & Sixth Avenues, West Midtown)

Food: *
Service: *
Ambiance: **
Overall: *

Lyon

Note: Owner–partner François Lapatie left Lyon in June 2012, and the restaurant closed later that year. The space is now Cole’s Greenwich Village.

*

Can French cuisine regain the dominant position it once held in New Yorkers’ hearts and dreams? Perhaps the route is from the bottom up.

Lyon Bouchon Moderne is a step in the right direction, a casual bistro from the restaurateur François Lapatie, formerly of the Michelin-starred, and now closed, La Goulue.

Perched on a heavily trafficked West Village intersection, Lyon is beautifully decorated in the authentic fashion. But hard tabletops and mirrored walls turn the long, narrow space into an echo chamber: for much of the evening, I couldn’t hear my companion without cupping my hand over my ear.

Termed a bouchon, the Lyonnais term for a meat-centric bistro, Lyon’s menu is studded with carnivore bait, like boudin noir, bacon-wrapped loup de mer, a green salad with bacon, and so forth. Prices are modest, with appetizers $10–14, entrées mostly in the $20s (a Niman Ranch strip steak au poivre at $45 is an outlier), side dishes $6–8, desserts mostly $9–10.

The wine list fits on a single page, and as you’d expect, is dominated by reds. There are more bottles at $75 and above than I think a restaurant in Lyon’s price range can justify, but there are enough choices below $50 to satisfy the casual diners that a place like this presumably attracts.

There’s an emphasis on Beaujolais, with eight bottles in a separately captioned section of the list, but I found a 2006 Domaine Les Côtes de la Roche Saint-Amour ($49) too shallow and bitter for its age.

With the food, I can’t find any fault at all. Pieds de Porc ($22; below left) was impeccable: two plump cakes with pig trotters and foie gras, a light coating of mustard, and a stew of green lentils and sherry vinegar. This is a dish I dream about.

My companion had the Pintade ($27; above right), a breast of guinea fowl, root vegetables, and thyme. I sampled a bit of the fowl, which was plump and tender.

Among the pro critics, Sam Sifton of the Times (who awarded one star) and Steve Cuozzo of the Post (who awarded two) are in broad agreement, finding Lyon very good at its best, but also uneven. [Due to their differences in interpretation of the star system, Sifton’s one and Cuozzo’s two are essentially the same thing.] We may have fortuitously avoided the clunkers, or maybe Lyon is getting better, as Cuozzo suggests.

Because Sifton is an incompetent buffoon, he insisted that Lyon needs “An entree that every third person in the restaurant orders,” a new index to success that I’ve not encountered in any other review. I realize that a dish made from pig parts will never be the people’s choice, but the trotters fit the bill for me.

Lyon was nearly full on a Thursday evening; service was as attentive as it needed to be. The loudness of the room would make me hesitant to return with anyone whom I wanted to converse with. Dinner at the bar, some night after work, is the more prudent course.

Lyon (118 Greenwich Avenue at W. 13th Street, West Village)

Food: **
Service: *
Ambiance: *
Overall: *½

Millesime

There’s plenty of great cooking in New York, but I am not often floored. I was floored on Friday by the quality of our meal at Millesime, the new French seafood restaurant in the Carlton Hotel, where Country used to be.

I don’t know if Millesime is the new restaurant of the year, but it certainly is the best restaurant that no one is talking about.

It is hard to over-state the obstacles that Millesime must overcome. I mentioned some of them in my review of the downstairs lounge, Salon Millesime, but they bear repeating:

1. A name most people can’t pronounce (roughly: MEEL-eh ZEEM-eh)
2. A location dead to foot traffic, and poorly served by transit
3. A cuisine that is not currently fashionable
4. A genre not favored by the city’s major critics
5. A chef without name recognition in New York

That Laurent Manrique isn’t better known is a product of poor memories and east coast bias. He was named chef at Peacock Alley in 1992, at the age of 26. After five years, he moved onto Gertrude’s, where he was named Bon Appetit Rising Star Chef of 1998. A year later, he left New York for San Francisco, eventually winning two Michelin stars at Aqua for three consecutive years, 2007–2009. (He later left the restaurant in a dispute with management.)

If he’d done all that in New York, he’d be a household name in this town—at least among those who follow the restaurant business. But as he hasn’t worked here since the end of the last century, most of the city’s diners have no knowledge of him.

At Millesime (French for vintage), he’s clearly aiming for a vibe more casual than Aqua, and far more casual than the previous occupant, Country. The space has been brightened up, in the brasserie style. It remains one of the city’s most theatrically grand spaces, thanks to the overhead Tiffany skylight.

Most of the entrées are in the $20s, most of the appetizers in the low teens. Still, it pains me to suggest that the menu might intimidate diners not familiar with “Pike Quenelles Jean Louis Dumonet Style,” or the three preparations of potato on offer (all $5): Mousseline, Salardaises, or Paillasson.

Most of the menu choices are translated, but I fear that diners will associate French with old-school formality, even if that’s neither valid nor fair. Somehow, I don’t think an all-Italian menu would have that effect.

There are no amuses bouches or petits fours here, but everything we tasted was executed flawlessly. If the rest of the menu is as good, this is three-star food, though slightly undermined by service that is eager but not yet quite polished. Warm bread straight from the oven was so captivating that even the chefs couldn’t help snacking on it. It’s too bad they didn’t notice that the butter on our table had come out of the fridge, and was hard as a rock.

I haven’t encountered this dish in any French restaurant: Harengs Pommes A L’Huile ($15; above left & center). That’s a spray of warm fingerling potatoes, with a salad of smoked herring, which you combine at the table. It’s a lovely dish, but one I associate with Scandinavia, not France.

Those Pike Quenelles Jean Louis Dumonet Style ($14; above right) were perfect, putting to shame the chalky ones I was served at La Grenouille a few years ago. The Dumonet style, I am assuming, refers to the rich lobster broth in which they’re served.

The market fish for two changes daily—here Monkfish ($41; above), presented to the table and returned to the kitchen for plating. If you’re going to offer just one market special, it takes some courage to choose monkfish, which is better known as the poor man’s alternative to lobster. But as presented here, monkfish needed no apologies: it had a rich flavor of its own.

The side dishes, too, were faultless: the Potatoes Salardaises ($5; above left) and the Creamy Spinach ($6; above center). An Apple Crumble ($9; above right) was just fine, but perhaps the least memorable dish of the evening.

The food bill was $90 for two. By a wide margin, this is the best food I’ve had at under $50 per head, bearing favorable comparisons to restaurants that charge twice that.

The bargain is undermined by the wine list, which had no bottles (even of white wine) below $55. A restaurant in Millesime’s price range needs drinkable whites in the $40–45 range. Moreover, when I ordered the 2006 Stag’s Leap Karia Chardonnay, it was the 2007 vintage that came out (at the same price, $80), which they realized only when I pointed it out.

Wine lists have a way of sorting themselves out: when the management sees what is not being ordered, they adjust. Still, it is a blunder at a restaurant that can ill afford that kind of mistake.

As now configured, the space has more tables than Country did, and on a Friday evening it was no better than 20 percent full. The restaurant had the usual media splash in the major blogs, but as we noted above, diners don’t fight for reservations to a French seafood restaurant on Madison Avenue, from a chef who won Michelin stars in California.

They should.

Millesime (90 Madison Avenue at 29th Street, Gramercy/Flatiron)

Food: ★★½
Service: ★★
Ambiance: ★★
Overall: ★★½