The factor about Paris is that it by no means ages — like nice cheese, it’s pre-aged. Innovation burbles the place it finds a foothold, and town is not any extra resistant to fads than wherever else (voilà, the squeeze-bottle avant-gastronomy championed by the sages of Le Fooding or the scruffy little caves alongside the Canal Saint-Martin providing fizzy jugs of pure wine), however the dominant mode stays one in every of august and justly self-confident historical past.
For years, after I lined the style trade, I went to Paris commonly and was by no means not stunned on the method even hundred-year-old establishments nonetheless compelled common visits. I had a few of the nice meals of my pre-critic life at bistros like Benoît (b. 1912) and Le Voltaire (which began life as a café within the 1800s), the place the late princess Lee Radziwill, rising regally from the following desk over, by chance tried to take my raincoat.
New York is almost a new child by comparability, and our attentions are likely to concentrate on the brand new. This may be terrifically thrilling and in addition terrifically exhausting. From time to time, you lengthy for a bit of should and fust.
Le Chêne (the Oak Tree) is a brand new restaurant with an previous soul. Its proprietors, the married couple Alexia Duchêne and Ronan Duchêne Le Could, relocated from Paris, the place Alexia cooked at echt institutions like Allard (b. 1932) and appeared, a bit extra modernly, on the French Prime Chef. (She additionally had her personal well-received restaurant, Datsha Underground, within the Marais, a COVID casualty.) In New York, Duchêne initially ran the kitchen at Margot in Fort Greene however parted methods after a month or two because the restaurant pursued a path with a extra modern slant. Le Chêne clearly revels in anachronism. Its menu groans with historical past. There aren’t, in any case, too many locations within the metropolis that supply up a pithivier, a meat pie first launched in Loire someday within the early trendy period.
A up to date of mine sharply termed Duchêne’s type “nouvelle stodginess,” and whereas I’m hard-pressed to disagree, I’m additionally inclined to see this as a welcome factor. The restaurant is so resolutely uncool that it appears like a reduction within the chaotically faddish restaurant scene. Duchêne gave her personal title to the restaurant, but it surely’s a reputation with a selected thrust. Oaks can reside 100 years or extra, and Le Chêne mounts an bold marketing campaign for permanence. Like a pair of aubergistes, Duchêne and Le Could, who serves because the restaurant’s GM, reside proper upstairs.
Duchêne’s cooking, and Le Could’s wines, are unapologetically French basic in all its statin-requiring glory. The Age of Ozempic has no buy right here. Foie gras abounds — whether or not encrusted as pâté en croûte, served chilly as a slice of terrine, hugging an unblinking eye of artichoke, or making up the bedding beneath a superbly uncommon platter of squab — and a daily côte de boeuf weighs in at round three kilos, for a Louis XIV–ish $350. (Fries are included.) Even dishes extra nation than courtroom are dressed up. A dessert of cherry clafoutis, have to be ordered, like a soufflé, on the outset of the meal. I puzzled aloud whether or not Duchêne left her cherries unpitted; French cooking lore has it that the cherry stones lend a bitter-almond taste to the completed pudding. “My grandmother would have,” mentioned one in every of our servers, who, like every that I encountered, was a Frenchman with accent intact, “however this can be a restaurant.”
And the way. Anybody on the lookout for the extra New York type of bistro, with a bavette steak-frites and some cracked-open oysters, has loads of different locations to look. Duchêne begins as an alternative with a full part of amuses-bouches, little bites richer — in worth and in heft — than many appetizers. A tiny baton of brioche is piped with uni, bone marrow, and a daub of red-pepper purée. A nugget of cod cheek is fried fish-and-chips crisp and topped with a heap of caviar. Of those small indulgences, my favourite was a pair of shrimp tartlets, in crisp shells with crème fraîche and an unexpectedly candy whisper of maple.
Clockwise from high left: The eating room’s spectacular art work, a pithivier, trophy empties at a service station, steak. Hugo Yu.
Clockwise from high left: The eating room’s spectacular art work, a pithivier, trophy empties at a service station, steak. Hugo Yu.
Among the many bigger dishes, it’s not unusual to seek out sauces and accoutrements that recommend days of effort: bouillabaisse beneath halibut and a scallop quenelle, hoisin-textured huckleberry sauce with lamb ribs. Some are fabulous, like a cognac-sticky glaze on uncommon squab or the burnt-grapefruit preserve alongside the foie terrine, whereas others are effortful with out apparent reward. I admire the home made “beetroot condiment” that comes with the pithivier, a softball-size dome of puff pastry layered with potato, smoked eel, and minced pork farce, however I puzzled on the level of reverse-engineering one thing to style so precisely like McDonald’s barbecue sauce.
I didn’t love each dish I had at Le Chêne, however I did admire all of them, in addition to the fervor with which Duchêne has been swapping them out and in, tweaking till she’s glad. (The halibut, for example, not comes with its scallop quenelle and bouillabaisse; as an alternative, it will get a scattering of chanterelles and Romano beans.) There’s one thing admirable about such tenaciousness — possibly even alluring, to evaluate from the variety of {couples} I noticed absolutely making out at their tables. Or that will owe as a lot to the book-length wine checklist compiled by Le Could and his staff of sommeliers, whose efforts appear as a lot the draw of the restaurant as Duchêne’s. I don’t know the way typically a wine checklist of this continental seriousness has been seen on Carmine Road, a lot much less subsequent door to a Wingstop.
Many tables had ordered deep sufficient into the crus to earn their very own decanters, and a central desk within the eating room is devoted to displaying the night time’s ordered bottles, whereas a murderers’ row of big-dick empties circles the eating room as décor. In order for you again vintages of Dujac, Roulot, Rayas, and Haut-Brion, they’re right here, matched in grandeur by the scrotal magnificence of a ten-liter demijohn of 20-year-old Mas Amiel Maury introduced spherical on request with dessert.
That’s to not say it’s a must to drink so unreachably to take pleasure in your self; in all of my visits, Le Could and his staff by no means didn’t level me to one thing scrumptious and (comparatively) inexpensive, whether or not that was a 2017 Chardonnay from Bodega Chacra, Roulot’s facet hustle in Argentina, or a 2019 non-AOC Syrah from the Rhône icon Jean-Paul Jamet.
The lofty spirit, nonetheless, pervades. Allow them to drink pure wine, to borrow a phrase. At Le Chêne, I drank Chenin Blanc grown — I child you not — within the vineyards of Versailles.
Large-Deal Décor
The artwork within the eating room — Basquiat, Warhol, Dubuffet — is courtesy of one of many restaurant’s buyers, a gallerist who prefers to stay nameless.
And a Teeny-Tiny Bar
The entrance room is devoted to a demilune bar, which serves the total menu and sooner or later can have its personal specials. (Le Could talked about Duchêne has been taking part in with the thought of a “fish burger.”)
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