Results tagged “benoit”

Following a set of mediocre reviews, Pierre Schaedelin was brought on last December as the new executive chef at Alain Ducasse’s Benoit. The 40-year-old, it was announced, would also be a partner in the restaurant, which is modeled after an archetypal bistro that’s been open in Paris since 1912 (Ducasse's restaurant group assumed ownership in 2005). Schaedelin has an old school French chef background, for sure—all terrines, torchons, and rabbit sausage. He’s also developed some serious media chops during the last decade, having first worked for Sirio Maccioni at Le Cirque and then as Martha Stewart’s personal chef. At Benoit the prices have come down—a two-course lunch is now $19; three courses are $24—and Schaedelin is happy about that. Above all, he seems to like talking about cooking more than anything else, and he does so in an unstuffy way—we spoke with him last week about the relaxing parts of Top Chef, tarte flambée, and diner food on Sundays.

Candle 79, the fancy vegan restaurant on the Upper East Side, "takes a limited larder and stages an impressive show, reminding the pork-stuffed, duck-spoiled diner how much else is out there, and how much of it has never relied on animals or fish in the first place," according to Frank Bruni at the Times. He's no vegetarian, so he's thrilled to discover that the place is "largely satisfying, leaving an omnivorous interloper with a sense not of deprivation but of relief. Can an experience this meatless really be this painless?" Could they speak, most animals would say, "Yes!"

      

C'est Bastille Day aujourd hui! Frogs and Francophiles were out in force on Smith Street in Brooklyn yesterday for the Bastille Day celebration, which featured big band music by Baby Blue Orchids, plenty of French food, French cigarettes and heated games of Petanque, played on sand dumped out for the occasion. McBrooklyn reports that "actual French people were everywhere, smoking cigarettes and speaking actual French."

Adam Platt panned star chef Alain Ducasse’s Benoit (pictured), declaring it an “ersatz” brasserie and concluding that “French cuisine, as we used to know it, is deader than we think.” Now the Times’s Frank Bruni takes his turn, and while he disagrees that it’s “a throwaway restaurant,” he does concur that “Benoit is selling a dining experience so familiar it’s almost a cliché… And what of the ‘Parisian salad’? The city it’s referring to must be Paris, Tex. That’s a more likely cradle of this humdrum, deli-caliber mix of chicken, ham, cheese and lettuce.” But the veal appetizer (poached tongue and foie gras) “is worth the trip.”

Today the Times’s Frank Bruni destroys Ago (pictured), the new Italian restaurant in Tribeca’s Greenwich Hotel owned by Robert De Niro. It’s a savage burn, and way more entertaining than any movie De Niro’s been involved with during the last decade. Things go sideways immediately when the bartender unleashes “the Poseidon Adventure of wine spills” on Bruni’s lady friend and his party of four has to wait almost an hour for their table, which is “little bigger than a bike wheel… The table was pressed so close to a column that I couldn’t lower my right arm all the way, and if my wine-drenched friend leaned back in her chair, the column obstructed her view of me and mine of her.” With a couple exceptions, the overpriced food sucks too. Zero stars, fun read.