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FT editor Roula Khalaf selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
New York chef Andrew Carmellini is feeling nostalgic. At Café Carmellini, the grand brasserie that opened late last fall inside the new Fifth Avenue Hotel, he served venison loin with grand veneur sauce, a monochromatic throwback to the time of Auguste Escoffier, the so-called “king” of the French chefs who began codifying the basic principles of French haute cuisine in the late 19th century.
Carmellini’s brown-on-brown dish features classic game sauce, made with long-cooked broth, fortified with red wine and port, and enhanced here with foie gras and bittersweet chocolate. “It’s like making real sauce,” she says. “There’s history there… I don’t know if it’s good for Instagram, but it’s good for the soul.”
For a time in New York, this kind of old-fashioned, labor-intensive French food seemed on the brink of extinction, overshadowed by all things Italian, a rise of the Korean New Wave, and a style of cooking. most improvised author. In the last decade, the number of iconic French restaurants has declined rapidly. Le Périgord, founded in 1964, closed in 2017. Le Veau d’Or, New York’s oldest French restaurant, opened in 1937 and closed in 2019. La Grenouille, which debuted in 1962, is still around, but it’s A shadow. than it once was. Even Cafe Bouludstar chef Daniel Boulud’s Upper East Side stalwart, relatively new to the venture (it opened on Madison Avenue in 1998), lost its original home at the Surrey Hotel after an ownership change three years ago.
But a renewed appreciation for retro luxuries and familiar comforts, combined with a general decline in chefs with big egos serving up cutting-edge food, with tongs, appears to be ushering in a new golden age for classic French cuisine. Le Veau d’Ora former haunt of Orson Welles, Grace Kelly and, most recently, Anthony Bourdain, returns this summer under new ownership, reinvented by Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, the low-key chef duo behind it. french in Tribeca and The rock at Rockefeller Center.
The two Francophile chefs have spent the last few years subtly upgrading the place, adding a private dining room upstairs and developing a menu (of snails, frog legs, and blanette de veau) that pays homage to the original. “You live in New York and you see a lot of these old establishments crumble and disappear. We wanted to keep this going,” Hanson says. “The lighting is a little better, there are little details here and there, but the feel of the restaurant will be the same.”
Café Boulud reopened in a spacious new location on Park Avenue last winter, with higher ceilings, bigger flowers and the same classic cuisine in a dining room that’s been packed every night. The menu includes seasonal takes on classic dishes, like an extra-springy beef blancheta, along with long-time Boulud signature dishes, like the potato-crusted sea bass with red wine sauce that he first served in New York at 1986. “People love it.” Boulud says of the dish. “I think it will always be there.”
Next door, the chef has also opened the even older Barnes House, in partnership with high-end real estate firm Barnes, a Parisian agency making its first foray into the hotel sector. The cozy dining room evokes belle époque Paris, with conservatory trellises, cast-iron chandeliers, and floral frescoes by Stéphanie de Ricou, best known for her preservation work at the Louvre and Versailles.
The menu leans heavily on luxury, from medallions of sliced scallops and Kaluga caviar to a splendid terrine of beef and morels with Madeira chutney. Large format main courses are served with much fanfare. A roast chicken presented with lobster claws and a head around it, looking like an interspecies Frankenstein’s monster, is a nod to a very classic chicken and crawfish combination. “What’s old is new,” says Boulud.
And Carmellini, who worked at the original Café Boulud when it first opened, has returned to her roots with the opulent Carmellini Coffee, designed by Martín Brudnizki to evoke New York at the beginning of the last century. The food, a mix of haute French and Italian. high kitchenIt’s served in generous portions and is exceptionally rich: from a golf ball of golden oscietra caviar to an extra-sticky, sticky caramel pudding flambéed tableside like a baba au rhum.
Like Boulud and Carmellini, Jean-Georges Vongerichten also found inspiration in the past for his restaurant. four Twentyfive, which opened late last year inside a new Norman Foster-designed tower in Midtown. The elevated dining room floats over the street with sheer curtains. Vongerichten says: “The look was inspired by the SS Normandy, which was stuck in New York during World War II with four or five French chefs on board.” In a nice move, Vongerichten has tapped veteran chef Jonathan Benno (formerly of Per Se and Lincoln) to oversee his return to the exact block of Park Avenue where he began his New York career. Along with some of his usual globe-trotting features, he’ll find dishes like a densely marbled foie gras terrine served with a spiced madeleine and a chocolate moelleux with buckwheat caramel and marzipan ice cream. Too rich? Not a bit of that. “It’s New York,” Benno says. “People will always have an appetite for luxury.”
Vongerichten’s next club in New York, Chez Margaux, scheduled to open this fall in the Meatpacking District, will offer modern French and international cuisine. And this summer will bring, along with the long-awaited reboot of Le Veau d’Or, the inauguration of Chez Fifíby brothers David and Joshua Foulquier, the restaurateurs behind noz sushi. The new restaurant is the most personal: the Foulquiers grew up in the neighborhood and their father is French. Hence, the classic menu and antique decor are inspired by your favorite Paris bistros: Chez L’Ami Louis and Les Gourmets des Ternes, which they visited frequently when they were children. “For a moment we worried that French food was going out of style,” says David Foulquier. “I just think someone needed to do their best and now people are starting to do that.”