In Defense of Decadence
Evan Sung for The New York Times
MR. EVERYWHERE Sirio Maccioni, the owner of Le Cirque, clearly enjoys meeting his customers.
SINGLE PAGE
SAVE
SHARE
By FRANK BRUNI
Published: February 6, 2008
IN the first clipped sentences of his current best seller, Michael Pollan, distinguished author and designated repository for the nation’s food conscience, writes: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Related
Times Topics: Three-Star Restaurants by Frank Bruni (NYC)
I’m glad he wasn’t with me at Le Cirque the other night. I bet he’s glad, too.
The meal started with ravioli swollen with an addictive substance outlawed in an entire swath of the country, by which I mean foie gras and by which I mean Chicago. This filling pretty much guaranteed the dish all the opulence it could want, but Le Cirque wasn’t taking any chances. The ravioli were shaped to mimic top hats.
And while a plant came into play — the recipe called for cabbage — its use wasn’t what Mr. Pollan had in mind. To be turned into a bed for the pasta, it was cooked with cream, black truffle oil and black truffle trimmings, at which point it was less vegetable than opiate.
What sort of entree was apt after an appetizer like that? Chilean sea bass. Le Cirque served it without apparent shame but with considerable ostentation: a sauce of Champagne, butter, cream and hon shimeji mushrooms; a darkly glittering crown of black caviar. It was wanton, craven and totally delicious.
At Le Cirque you will indeed eat too much food, of a kind that neither your physician nor your local Greenpeace representative would endorse, in a setting of deliberate pompousness, at a sometimes ludicrous expense. The ravioli, all three of them, are $35.
But that has long been the way of certain restaurants, which exist to be absurd, to speak not to our better angels but to our inner Trumps, making us feel pampered and reckless and even a little omnipotent, if only for two hours and three courses with a coda of petits fours.
And while I’m not calling for the spread of these establishments (or the massacre of Chilean sea bass), I’m charged with noting when one of them fulfills its chosen mission with classic panache. Le Cirque now does.
It didn’t in 2006, when it opened in the Bloomberg Tower in Midtown, having moved from the New York Palace Hotel. There were too many blips in service and flops on the menu, which didn’t match extravagance with enough finesse. I gave it two stars.
Since then there have been extensive changes, most notably the arrival of a new executive chef, Christophe Bellanca, in place of Pierre Schaedelin.
Mr. Bellanca, who cooked at L’Orangerie in Los Angeles, has provided just the injection of energy and discipline that Le Cirque needed. His menu nimbly straddles the line between predictable decadence — white truffles in late fall, sizable cuts of aged prime beef year-round — and creative flair.
The foie gras ravioli are new, and they’re not merely a triumph of luxury ingredients. The cabbage’s faintly sour notes are a terrific foil for the fatty intensity of so much else in the dish.
New, too, is an entree of sautéed John Dory with a mustard sauce that’s zippier than the stolid ablutions with which proudly archaic restaurants like Le Cirque often content themselves. The onion, fennel and cauliflower with the fish are sprinkled with ground kaffir lime leaves, another of the adventurous touches Mr. Bellanca brings to the food.
He brings a voguish sensibility as well, pairing different cuts of meat prepared different ways, a crispy wedge of flesh sharing the plate with a soft tangle of it, something seared embellished by something braised.
To wit, a lamb dish comprises lamb saddle, belly and shoulder. The saddle, roasted, has a gremolata crust; the shoulder, braised, is shredded and mixed with dried apricots and pistachios. As if that weren’t diversity and diversion enough, the dish is rounded out with artichokes, olives, a tomato confit and minuscule ravioli stuffed with pecorino.
Not everything is as big a hit. I had slightly gummy risotto on one visit, undercooked pumpkin ravioli on another.
The kitchen doesn’t produce meals on a par with those from four-star chapters in the restaurant’s storied past. Le Cirque isn’t quite as reliable as other three-star restaurants.
But the quality of its French-Italian food has improved to the point where it sufficiently complements, and doesn’t undercut, the rest of what makes this restaurant such an haute hoot.
1 2
Comentários