For lunch I ordered sardines on toast, pickled herring, a grilled mutton chop, buttered green beans, pommes lyonnaise and lemon sherbert.

I was 12, sitting with my family in the dining room of Lloyd Triestino’s S.S. Victoria as we sailed through the Straits of Malacca, en route from Singapore to Genoa. Once again, because my father was in the British Foreign Office, we had packed up and were moving on to his next post. Those were the days of the great ocean liners, and my first meals out were not in restaurants, but on ships.

A color reproduction of an 18th-century Italian Romantic painting decorated the cover of the menu. It told a story. A young woman with downcast eyes hastened across a balcony in Venice, a black veil artfully draped over her hair and shoulders to reveal her pale, comely face and low décolletage. She was holding a letter behind her as if it contained some news she couldn’t bear to read. The title of the picture was Vendetta, which a translator had rendered, insipidly, Requital.

The long menu was in Italian, with an English translation on the opposite page. The words had a dramatic poetry that made my imagination soar: “jellied goose liver froth … Moscovite canape … glazed veal muscle à la Milanese … savage orange duck … golden supreme of swallow fish in butter …” And darkly, “slice of liver English-style.” Because the ship docked in Bombay, Karachi and Colombo, there was also Indian food, a curry of the day described only by a town or region—Goa, Madras, Delhi—served with things I’d never heard of—papadum, chapatti, paratha, dal and biriani.

For the next three weeks, the menu changed every lunch and dinner, with a different Italian Romantic painting on its cover (always a portrait of a beautiful woman; this was an Italian ship, after all).

I ticked off the dishes I ate and pasted the menus into the blue scrapbook. I am looking at it now. …

Potatoes pont neuf were thick french fries. “Norcia pearls,” served with Strasbourg sausage, were lentils. Rollmops were fillets of marinated herring wrapped around a pickle. Hoppel poppel “in saucepan on toast” was a fry-up of onions, potatoes, pork and eggs. “Crusted pie Lucullus” turned out to be a pâté laced with chunks of foie gras; chicken quenelles were dumplings, flecked with black truffles; “golden reserve” pheasant “in volière” arrived in a sauce made with “fine” Champagne. Chicken cream soup “Agnés Sorel,” was named for the mistress of the French king Charles VII who’d died suddenly at the age of 28, thought to have been poisoned. A strange name for a soup.

I was allowed to order whatever I wanted as long as I had a “properly balanced meal.” The food arrived under a silver dome that was whisked off by the waiter with an operatic flourish (and not without a touch of irony) to reveal my choice du jour with its two requisite vegetables: potatoes always (available in over two dozen ways from “Hungarian cream” to “Castle-style,” roasted with rosemary), and often, curiously, stewed red cabbage. I was even permitted half a glass of wine.

I was tall for my age and rail thin. But I ate for two.

What were those meals really like? Would they impress me now, after years of dining out in restaurants, most often as a critic?

Those three weeks on the Victoria, eating whatever exotic dish struck my fancy, left a lifelong imprint. They were the first step to loving good food. ...

MY FIRST CHANCE at reviewing restaurants came at the The Sunday Times in London where I lived for a year in the late ’70s. My editor, the late Michael Bateman (who was a pioneer in food writing in England, one of the first newspaper journalists to treat it a serious subject), suggested we write a piece together about lunch at the Post Office Tower. You could only go up this London landmark by dining at the revolving Top of the Tower restaurant, which was owned by the Butlins, who were famous for their holiday camps. The public gallery had been closed in 1971 after a bomb planted by the IRA exploded in the men’s room of the visiting gallery. Michael wanted to see if the restaurant was still up to par. It had been good when it first opened.

During lunch the dining room slowly made its disorienting way from drenching sunlight into shade and round again. We had Dover sole. It was leathery and prepared beyond recognition, stuffed with prawns and crabmeat, bread-crumbed, deep-fried and coated with a lobster sauce. Suprême de volaille van Put (named after the chef) was a boned chicken breast stuffed with pâté de foie gras and mushrooms. It came with a Madeira sauce, mushrooms, shallots and artichoke hearts filled with chicken liver mousse and coated with a cheese sauce—all ingredients blending into a brown wet carpet. Lunch cost as much as it would have at the Connaught.

As we ate, I dissected the components of our meal. I told Michael that it was one of the worst I’d ever had. He didn’t seem to take in what I was saying.

“I’m really enjoying this!” he said as we went round and round. He didn’t appear to be paying much attention to the food at all. After a while I began to have doubts about his ability as a critic. He liked everything! What was I going to do the next day when I had to sit down at a desk with him to write the piece?

He ordered another bottle of wine. By the time we got to the dessert, which I don’t remember, I wasn’t sure if it was the tower or my head that was spinning. Befuddled we staggered back to the office.

The next morning we sat down to work on the article.

“We’ll call it ‘A Pity You Can’t Eat the View,’” Michael said.

Then he began to type: “The Post Office Tower is a good place for foreigners to have their prejudices about British cooking soundly reinforced.”

“Why didn’t you say that yesterday?” I asked.

“We were having a lovely time.”

“I know. But I thought you were enjoying the food.”

“The food was awful! Why spoil our lunch by saying so?”

It was a lesson. Ever since then, I’ve tried to keep my opinions to myself when I’m eating in a restaurant.     

IN THE ’80s, when I began to review New York restaurants, American cuisine was just getting into its stride. Alice Waters was becoming a household name; the chefs were often American. The wines would be American, too, and the names—such as Stags’ Leap, Dry Creek, Grgich Hills, Zaca Mesa, BV, ZD—seemed to belong less in the vineyard than on the open range. The ingredients were exotic and served in novel ways. Silver domes would be whisked away to reveal tiny portions marooned in the middle of oversize dinner plates (to be eaten by women with oversize shoulder pads). The sauce was no longer served on top of the food but underneath, sometimes in a yin-yang pattern, forming a pool upon which the fish or meat serenely floated, cut in an unrecognizable shape. Dishes were garnished not with a parsley sprig but with tiny vegetables cut in ovals or julienned and tied together with a chive string like a miniature bundle of firewood.

But there were more changes to come. In 1981, Odeon opened with a wild party that included just about everyone in the art world. Tables were pushed back against the walls and dancing went on through the night. Few people in those days knew where Thomas Street was, and taxis drove frantically around dark streets littered with dumpsters and cardboard boxes, trying to find the restaurant, which was a former working men’s cafeteria on a desolate block. It had large windows hung with Venetian blinds, a long, Art Deco bar, a pink-and-green neon clock, chrome and plastic chairs, paper cloths on the tables, and a small frieze of the New York skyline from a 1930s Woolworths. It was owned by Keith McNally and Lynn Wagenknecht. The chef was the late Patrick Clark, a young African-American who had studied with Michel Guérard. Odeon was more than just a scene: It was a real restaurant, and that’s why it has lasted so long. It was a hangout not only for artists but for the new breed of workers that was moving into the neighborhood: bankers and stockbrokers. Odeon set a trend, and it also helped to open up Tribeca, a role that Keith’s bistro Pastis was to play in the meatpacking district some years later. And Odeon made restaurants so cool that it often seemed to be cooler to work in one than to be a customer.

THE MEALS I ATE at Per Se, which I wrote about for this newspaper in 2005, were the most groundbreaking I’d ever experienced as a reviewer. But that was before I’d been to Alinea, a Chicago restaurant opened by a Keller protégé, Grant Achatz. Achatz had been Thomas Keller’s sous chef at the French Laundry, but his food sounded nothing at all like the classically based new American cooking of his former boss and mentor. His inspiration, was the radical new cuisine pioneered by the molecular gastronomist Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Spain. Achatz had spent several days in Adrià’s kitchen and upon his return entered into the spirit by creating a shrimp cocktail that you spritzed into your mouth, a “virtual” pizza made from edible paper, and bubbles of mozzarella that had tomato trapped inside them. (Last year Achatz recovered from a horrendous bout of mouth cancer that, among other things, temporarily affected his taste buds).

My son Alexander was in his first year as a student at the University of Chicago. So I decided to test his mettle with Alinea’s marathon 24-course, five-hour dinner known as the “Grand Tour.” The restaurant is in a small gray townhouse in Lincoln Park, a quiet residential neighborhood in the northern part of the city. On our way in, we caught a glimpse of the kitchen, where we could see a team of young cooks with close-cropped hair and spotless whites hunched over two lines of steel tables. They looked like chemists in a science lab.

A host led us upstairs into a hushed, brightly lit dining room and seated us at a polished mahogany table that was the size of a senior partner’s office desk in a law firm. It was bare but for two beige napkins folded in neat, perfect rectangles. A waiter silently set down a silver bar that looked like a pen holder on the table and stuck a sprig of rosemary into it. That was our place setting.

Alexander darted me a look worthy of Raskolnikov.

Moments later, another waiter appeared with a tray bearing a miniature pedestal made of white porcelain. Instead of a Greek bust, it held a golden ball decked with pearls of smoked steelhead roe. “Our liquid croquette,” he said. “Raise it to your lips, throw it straight back and eat it in one!”

We obeyed and at once an astonishing succession of tastes and textures—among them sour cream, cucumber, radish, lime, candied endive—flew by, like a landscape seen from a racing train.

We were guided through dinner by a staff of reverential waiters dressed in black suits from Ermenegildo Zegna who acted like tutors, explaining each course and instructing us how to eat it.  Everything about the meal was designed to catch the diner off balance, from the hot potato and truffle served on a pin over a bowl of chilled soup, to the skate with brown butter, lemon and capers that were powdered and heaped on the plate like doll-size sand dunes. The food was served on sticks and pins and metal racks, on forks balanced over bowls, and on plates that acted like canvasses, displaying magnificent, brightly colored works of edible art, and even on a white linen pillow that deflated under the plate, filling the air with a scent of lavender so powerful the people at the next table looked up in astonishment.

“This reminds me of Jacques Tati,” whispered Alexander.

At last the waiter took the rosemary out of the silver bar, which became a rest for chopsticks. He brought over a stainless steel stand containing a hot terra cotta brick upon which sat three cubes of lamb, and proceeded to poke the rosemary into a hole in the hot brick, releasing its potent scent. You could feel the heat rising as you picked up the lamb pieces, which were rare and juicy, the best lamb we’d ever eaten.

Our last dessert in the Grand Tour arrived on a gadget that looked like the prongs of a miniature upside-down umbrella. “It’s called ‘the Squid,’” explained the waiter. “It serves a function of keeping fried food from getting soggy.”

Nestled inside the prongs was a caramel-coated Meyer lemon in a tempura batter, speared on a cinnamon stick.

On our way back to the hotel, I asked Alexander what he’d thought. “Would you rather have gone out for a steak?”

“Certainly not,” he replied. “But I felt I was eating on Mars.”

NORMALLY, FOOD BRINGS with it associations and memories, recollections of childhood, a sense of place. But this was something entirely new. After that meal, I wondered what people would be eating in fancy restaurants 30 years from now. Was this the cuisine of the future? Food that feeds not just the body but the mind (and requires a team of instructors telling you how to eat it)? Will the properly equipped kitchen in a top restaurant boast an induction cooker, a laser torch, a dehydrator, an immersion circulator for poaching sous vide and an “anti griddle” to freeze food within seconds? And what kind of utensils will we be using? Will the dishes of today seem as old-fashioned as those I had on the ship when I was 12: the chauds-froids of shrimp, veal marsalas and truffled chicken quenelles?

Now when I read those menus from the S.S. Victoria, I remember the shy, awkward, skinny, too-tall girl I was, traveling from one country to another, determined to hold on to the memory of every experience by pasting it into an album. Half a century later, I’m still on that ship.

mhodgson@observer.com

We began with hot antipasti (baked clams, scampi and stuffed mushrooms) and cold antipasti (prosciutto, several kinds of salami, sardines and salads). Then, a pasta course: tortellini with cream sauce. I was full by the time the turkey arrived, along with dishes that were new to me at the time: sweet potatoes (topped, to my horror, with marshmallows), cornbread and cranberry sauce. Unfortunately, I was sitting next to the patriarch of the family. He kept heaping my plate with more and more food. Since I had been brought up with the notion that leaving food on your plate was a crime, I made quite an impression as the young English woman with a buona forchetta.

After the turkey, there was cheese, because why not? Then pumpkin pies, pecan tarts and chocolate cake, followed by slabs of hot cheesecake. By this point, I was close to tears. No sooner had we started on the cheesecake, however, than the patriarch, who was in his 80s, turned to his wife with a stricken cry.

“Maria! You forgot the stuffed artichokes!” The diners put down their forks and pushed their half-eaten plates aside. They fell upon the artichokes, which were the biggest I’d ever seen, their jumbo-size leaves overflowing with bread crumbs, chopped anchovies and a great deal of garlic. Then we went back to our dessert.

SINCE THAT DAY I’ve eaten many a Thanksgiving feast, but never one of quite such excess. I also learned that Americans find it not only acceptable but in some circles even good manners to leave some food on their dinner plates.

There was food left on the dinner plates, alas, the year I cooked a wild turkey at my house in Connecticut. A flock of wild turkeys used to parade across the garden into the woods, but one afternoon a dog ran out of the bushes and attacked one of the birds, ripping out its throat. Minutes later the owner arrived, full of apologies. Since the turkey was dead, he said, we might as well eat it.

“Think of the money you’ll save!”

He insisted on plucking the bird for me and spent the afternoon singeing turkey feathers in the backyard. It was all for naught. The bird emerged from the oven with a beautiful burnished skin, but when we tried to carve the meat, it was as tough as a rancher’s saddle.

ALSO IN CONNECTICUT, I encountered the most unusual Thanksgiving turkey I have ever seen. It was served at Arthur Miller’s house, in Litchfield County. His wife, the photographer Inge Morath, was a vegetarian. She’d lived in France, where one year, she told me, she decided to surprise American friends who were celebrating Thanksgiving in Paris. She created a turkey pièce montée, built out of fruits and vegetables. She said she got the idea from looking at composite paintings of animals and birds.

Using a couple of loaves of bread as the base, she put goose feathers in the end of one of the loaves to form the turkey’s tail. She sliced off the end of a corn cob, stuck a toothpick in it and speared it in the other end of the loaf to make the neck. The head was made from a small eggplant nailed by toothpick to the corn; the wattles were large, dried red chili peppers. Quails’ eggs made a spine, and the bird’s chest puffed up nicely as red cabbage and radicchio leaves were pinned to the bread and hung with red grapes. The eyes were made from two slices of radish with raisins in the center.

She added apples, pears, stuffed vine leaves, cherry tomatoes, kumquats, dates, figs, prunes, broccoli, pieces of cheese, black and green grapes, niçoise olives and all manner of vegetables and fruit threaded on skewers or toothpicks like little shish kebabs. With the turkey, she served a selection of dips: bagna cauda, yogurt with fresh horseradish, dill vinaigrette and curry mayonnaise. Eating this, who’d miss the real thing?

THE TROUBLE WITH real turkeys, as anyone who has roasted one knows, is that they get dry. But then a newspaper article claimed that for optimum juiciness, turkeys were best roasted at 500 degrees. The Litchfield County Fire Department had the busiest day in its history that year as smoke alarms sprang into action. Deep-frying is supposed to work—done out of doors, of course—but I’ve yet to try it.

Brining, however, is foolproof. Almost. After soaking his 20-pounder overnight in a tub of salted water, stuffing and trussing it, a friend put the bird in the oven in the morning. “You don’t even have to baste it!”

The guests arrived by late afternoon and we sat around, stomachs rumbling, trying not to fill up on cheese and crackers. After an hour, he went to take the turkey out of the oven. He returned moments later, his face in a ferment. His wife, flustered with all the preparations, had meant to turn the oven up. Instead, she’d turned it off.

 
Moira Hodgson’s memoir, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, will be published by Nan Talese/Doubleday in January.

mhodgson@observer.com.

Montrachet established a cool downtown style that has been widely imitated ever since. But by the summer of 2006, many of its customers felt that the restaurant had lost its edge. Mr. Nieporent, vague about his plans for renovations, quietly closed it down.         

Now it has reopened as Corton—named for another great Burgundy that none of us can afford.

The new look is one of understated elegance—chartreuse banquettes, sloping cream-colored walls delicately embossed with gold leaves and vines—with clean, spare lines. In the front, white wine bottles are stacked behind glass in refrigerated rows, and clusters of lights hang in straight poles from the ceiling, like modernistic icicles. Through a long, narrow window in the back of the dining room, you can catch a glimpse of the kitchen and the chef (and partner), Paul Liebrandt.

Mr. Liebrandt, who is British, worked with many big names—Marco Pierre White at his three-star restaurant in London; Raymond Blanc at Le Manoir Au Quat’Saisons in Oxford; and Pierre Gagnaire at his eponymous three-star Michelin restaurant in Paris—before coming to New York, where he has at times taken his diners on a wild ride.

I last had his food seven years ago, at Atlas, where he served bacon sorbet, rabbit with squid ink sauce and lentils, and shrimp soup with white chocolate. I appreciated the audacity, but I wasn’t convinced. Nor, it appears, was the midtown business crowd at Gilt in the Vuillard House, where he cooked next.

CORTON IS another story. Mr. Liebrandt has moved beyond zany experiments with molecular gastronomy and the avant-garde, forging his own style. His cooking, while still adventurous, is rooted in traditional French cuisine. The meals I had at Corton were extraordinary, putting him in a realm with the city’s greatest chefs.

There are two menus, a $76 three-course prix fixe and a tasting menu for $110. When you sit down, references to the classic and the new are made right away: puff pastry goujons filled with mornay sauce (classic), and soft checker-counter rounds of salty olive oil sponge bread (new). There are two butters—one plain and salted, the other made with seaweed—served with first-rate breads, and an amuse-bouche of a Beau Soleil oyster sprinkled with crunchy buckwheat.

After we had ordered our food, a waitress appeared holding a basket of pastel-colored eggs, looking like Little Red Riding Hood. “From Violet Hill Farm,” she said winsomely. “For the sweetbreads.”

A bit too winsome, perhaps, but wait until you try those amazing sweetbreads, caramelized with argan oil and pieces of smoked bacon, and topped with a melting egg yolk. (In southwestern Morocco, where the oil comes from, you can see the surreal image of goats perched on high branches of argan trees, cracking the nuts to get to the oil-rich seeds inside.)

There wasn’t a single loser among all the dishes I tried at Corton, from the delicate scallops with saffron-colored uni cream and marcona almonds, to the melting cobia, which was slightly too salty one night, but still very good.

Mr. Liebrandt uses beets to add an earthy dimension to foie gras, which is wrapped in a paper-thin layer of hibiscus-beet borscht gelée. A beet sauce instead of the usual red wine reduction comes with the black angus filet, with fondant potatoes redolent of black truffle.

Roast chicken for two is not carved table-side. The breast, a jucy wedge with a burnished skin, arrives on a platter with artichoke barigoule and a sumptuous brown bread-oyster jus.

Mr. Liebrandt may have been tamed since his Atlas days, but his is still food of the “If you can’t remember what you ordered, you’ll never guess what it is when it arrives” school.

The squab is not bird-shaped, but consists of two exquisite dark-pink rounds wrapped in bacon, served with chestnut cream topped with a shaving of truffles, and a foam of spiced milk. There’s foam, too, on the beautifully composed vegetables topped with a translucent cabbage leaf. (How does he manage to bring out so much flavor from a potato or an onion soubise?)

FOR A FANCY restaurant, Corton’s mainly French wine list offers many reasonably priced choices, including around 30 “country wines” under $55 (some good and some not so hot). There are 18 bottles of Corton red and white, priced from $90 to $735. There is also a reserve list available online of wines that must be ordered in advance.

Desserts by pastry chef Robert Truitt (El Bulli, Room 4 Dessert) end the meal on an appropriately high note. A light mousselike round of gianduja chocolate is topped with a white swirl of yuzu paste that adds the perfect note of acidity. The salted caramel brioche is outstanding, a daring interplay of flavors: passion fruit curd, banana and, the pièce de résistance, a small square of Stilton cheese (when it comes to cheese, the selection on the artisanal platter is excellent).

Corton manages to be grown-up and hip at the same time. There is no music, and although it can get loud, the room has good acoustics, so your evening isn’t shattered by high-pitched shrieks from the next table.

Of course, a recession is not a great time to open an expensive restaurant. On the plus side, my father used to joke that by going to three-star restaurants in France, he actually saved money, because for the next three days all he could eat was plain yogurt. So stock up on yogurt and head over to Corton. It’s the most important restaurant to open in the city this fall.

 
Moira Hodgson’s memoir, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, will be published in January by Nan Talese/Doubleday.

mhodgson@observer.com.

It was a selection of teas sent by a Chilean friend who lives in Oregon. He had added a note: “Maté is pretty good with bourbon too.”

Maté is a tea made from yerba buena, a mintlike herb believed, among other things, to boost the immune system, soothe digestion and calm nerves. I didn’t try it with bourbon (never having acquired much of a taste for that whiskey), but I discovered that it was pretty good with pisco, a grape brandy. At Yerba Buena in the East Village, it comes in a cocktail, made with Chilean pisco, lime and grapefruit cordials, called a “Boludo Yerba Maté.”

The restaurant, on a grungy stretch of Avenue A just above Houston Street, looks like a dive in Old Havana. The lofty wood-paneled bar, back-lit in turquoise and lime green, is hung with smoked-glass wrought-iron lamps and flanked by palm fronds. A blown-up photograph of a street in Cuba dominated by a 1959 Chevy BelAir hangs on the opposite wall. The sound system pumps out a mix of salsa, Latin jazz and Afro-Cuban music, but the loudest noise is the rattling of the cocktail shaker.

Behind the bar, dressed in a dark shirt and vest, Artemio Vasquez mixes the restaurant’s drinks. No girly cocktails here. He previously worked at Pegu Club and PDT and his Latin concoctions, made with fresh juices, are as much of a draw as the food. The Pisco Sour is served in a goblet, topped with beaten egg whites decorated with a swirl of angostura bitters in a lotus leaf pattern. The Yerba Buena Mojito—not too sweet—is made with mint leaves steeped in yerba buena, squeezed through a strainer into the rum over ice cubes. You can also start the evening off with a caipirinha or something more esoteric, such as a Desert Rose: rose-infused gin, prickly pear purée and lemon juice.

YERBA BUENA'S pan-Latin menu is overseen by Julian Medina, chef, owner and partner; Mr. Medina also owns Toloache, a Mexican restaurant in midtown. Partner and general manager Giovanny Campos devised the wine list, which has a wide selection of Latin, California and Spanish choices at reasonable prices. (Kudos to our charming French waiter, who when asked which of three albariños he recommended steered us to his favorite, which also happened to be the cheapest, a smoky Martin Codax from Spain at $30.)

The small, low-lit dining room, manned by an affable staff dressed in black, seats just 50 on white leather chairs and banquettes. Plain wooden tables are set with votive candles, and through the louvered shutters at the back of the room, you can catch glimpses of the kitchen. Long, narrow mirrors are tilted along the walls, which are covered in white flock paper; the mirrors allow people facing in from the room to see the action.

And there is plenty of it. Every time I came here there were birthdays, duly noted and celebrated by the staff with sparkler-topped desserts, singing and general applause. (One of my friends, carried away by it all, even inquired about renting the place for New Year’s Eve.)

The menu is designed for snacking with cocktails or for a full meal. Calamari crusted with blue cornmeal, served with plantains and a tamarind vinaigrette, was a perfect match for a Pisco Sour, as were the crisp potato mushroom croquettes with truffle jalapeño sauce. The spinach and cheese empanadas turned out to be surprisingly leathery, but were somewhat redeemed by a lovely salad of ripe figs. I was disappointed with the guacamole, which was thin and overmixed. But I loved the chunky salad of jicama, avocado, orange and tomato tossed in a citrus vinaigrette, and the ceviche made with thick pieces of hamachi marinated in chilies and lime juice.               

MATÉ MAKES AN appearance in the kitchen, mixed with pomegranate juice as a glaze for the beef short ribs. The ribs were one of the best dishes on the menu, rich and unctuous, served with a pile of crisp hand-cut shoestring fries and chimichurri sauce.

The pulled suckling pig was also very good, tender pieces in an orange garlic sauce with yucca purée, topped with a piece of chicharrón, the Latin version of crackling.

Twice, we had to wait an inordinately long time for the main courses to arrive. One evening the manager apologized; he said they were a man short and he took the drinks off the bill. Another night we were told the baked rice dishes took 30 minutes. Whatever. But those casseroles cooked in earthenware dishes were worth the wait. The fideua was a mix of prawns, cockles, calamari and chorizo in deep saffron sauce with macaroni and aioli (on another night, there was a version with coconut rice). The arroz con pollo delivered a golden piece of chicken on a pink bed of chaufa, a Latin take on Chinese fried rice, laced with scallions and piquillo peppers.

Desserts included a Latin favorite, churros, with dulce de leche and chocolate dipping sauces, and a rich coconut cake steeped in tres leches, topped with grilled pineapple salsa—very nice with a fizzy glass of moscato.

Which is probably why I began writing this review with a headache. But then I made myself a cup of yerba maté. Is it wishful thinking, or do I feel better already?

Moira Hodgson’s memoir, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time, will be published in January by Nan A. Talese/Doubleday.

mhodgson@observer.com.

I eat my peas with honey

I’ve done it all my life

It makes the peas taste funny

But it keeps them on the knife

There’s plenty of time to recall your own ditties at the ostensibly honey-themed Apiary, in the East Village, while waiting for your drinks. One night we sat empty-handed for nearly half an hour, even though the place was gearing up for dinner and there were plenty of waiters and waitresses milling around—deftly managing not to catch our eye. Once our server established herself, she was helpful and nice. But another night, service was distracted. Apiary could do with a strong presence in the dining room, a host or hostess on patrol.

Noise is an issue, too. Despite the restaurant’s name, the sound level here does not exactly bring to mind Tennyson’s “murmuring of innumerable bees.” It’s more aviary, in fact, the din punctuated by the occasional high-pitched screech of some exotic jungle bird in impossibly high heels. Maybe Ligne Roset—the French company that designed and furnished the restaurant—could come up with a carpet.

GIVE APIARY POINTS  for bravery, though, planted as it is on Third Avenue just below 14th Street—a stretch better known for its profusion of funky sports bars and pubs catering to hipsters and N.Y.U. students. The local diners are more accustomed to getting their steak with a bottle of A1, not romesco aioli and chimichurri.

The restaurant’s front window is decorated with two silvery-blue cobra-shaped poles topped with tiny bright pinpoints. They look like creatures from outer space. They are, in fact, reading lamps, a curious window display for a restaurant—especially one with a name that suggests bees and honey. (Ligne Roset also provided the lamps.)

Lamp shades decorated with cut-outs of ancestral chandeliers hang from the low ceiling, and cut-out Lucite sconces project enormous shadows onto the plain white walls. The long, narrow room has a sleek, bare-bones look: polished ebony wood tables and geometric armchairs upholstered in soothing shades of wine red, aubergine and chocolate brown.

Apiary sets out to combine neighborhood coziness with style and elegance, and the team behind it is impressive. Chef and partner Neil Manacle cooked for 16 years with Bobby Flay at Mesa Grill, Bolo and Bar Americain. Owner Jenny Moon, who left her native Korea to study in the United States when she was just 15, started out on Wall Street before heading uptown to Daniel as Boulud’s assistant. Later she moved to Tabla and, more recently, worked as maitre d’ at Ed Brown’s new Eighty One. Nick Mautone, a managing partner of Gramercy Tavern, put together the well-rounded wine list, which includes a section of 30 New York State vintages. There are also 30 wines by the glass and 24 microbrews. The restaurant serves house-made sangrias and cocktails, such as a lively concoction made of prosecco with dried apricots and mint.

MR..MANACLE'S SELF-DESCRIBED “new American cuisine” heartily embraces the tastes of Spain, Morocco and the Middle East. His cooking isn’t fussy (“no more than four or five seasonal ingredients,” he says), and he goes for bright colors, decorating his gorgeous plates like a painter.

I like the way this chef uses fruits with savory dishes. The brined roast pork loin is a standout, sliced in rosy pieces, its skin burnished a deep mahogany color from a mustard, fig and smoked paprika glaze. It comes with green beans sprinkled with butter-fried bread crumbs and hazelnuts. Beautifully spiced Moroccan chicken is accompanied by light, fluffy couscous laced with dried apricots and mint. Lamb chops crusted with fennel, mustard seed and cumin are matched with a sweet and sour fruit sauce made with currants and apricots, along with a crisp cake of fried hummus.

The first courses are generally excellent. The roast peaches with serrano ham and goat cheese are probably no longer on the menu, alas, but they were so good I hope to see them back next year. A subtly spiced squash soup with curried yogurt replaces summer’s tomato soup, and slivered beets topped with toasted pistachios, goat cheese crème and a sprinkling of microgreens make for a fine fall starter.

The kitchen is less sure-footed when it leaves land. Skip the mediocre halibut crudo, the doughy calamari (although my companion liked them fine, especially with the spicy lemon aioli) and the rubbery, under-seasoned octopus.

And what of those bees? Artisanal honeys are served with the cheese plate, and make their way into several desserts. The goat cheese cake is flavored with honey and comes with a swath of blueberry compote on the plate, but it’s gummy. A pleasant honey ice cream comes with a naked crepe, topped with raw strawberries, and with the peach crisp, which packed more flavor than the pear crisp on the current menu. But the hands-down winner is the creamy chocolate cashew brownie tart in a feathery pastry shell with cashew ice cream. Whenever I get my dessert wine, I’ll tell you what to pair it with.

mhodgson@observer.com

And why not? The small dining room, with its teak blue bar, navy banquettes, low ceiling and white-paneled walls, feels like the inside of a yacht.

Chef and co-owner Alain Allegretti comes from Nice—whose denizens, M. F. K. Fisher once remarked, know how to eat and drink better than any of us. Mr. Allegretti’s menu is, naturally, from Provence, but this restaurant is no casual corner bistro. He takes a classic, well-trodden dish and transforms it.

“Is it too boring of me to order the roast chicken?” asked my companion as we looked at the menu. The chicken, tender enough to eat with a spoon, came with mozzarella wrapped in eggplant, potatoes fondant, roasted tomato and a marvelous lemony chicken jus with white wine, capers and parsley. So much for boring.

In Mr. Allegretti’s hands, a Niçoise salad was no clunky bistro version, either, but looked as though it had been made by a team of elves, with baby vegetables arranged on the plate garnished with a hard-boiled quail egg and rare tuna. (The tuna would have given Julia Child pause; she firmly believed a true Niçoise should be made only with canned.) The ravioli was stuffed with oxtail, and came on a bed of glazed swiss chard in a beef jus. A sprinkling of candied orange peel brought the whole dish together, the way a painter might put a dab of red on a landscape.

IN WHAT SOUNDS like an idyllic childhood, Mr. Allegretti grew up on his family’s farm, where he learned to cook with his grandmother, making fresh pasta, prosciutto and wine and pressing olive oil. He went on to work at Jacques Maximin’s Le Chantecler, at Chez Chapel in Mionnay and at Alain Ducasse’s Le Louis XV in Monte Carlo. In 2001 he came to New York as co-executive chef at Le Cirque 2000, and most recently was the executive chef at Atelier at the Ritz-Carlton. The food at his restaurant reflects the pedigree of the haute cuisine establishments he’s worked in, but it’s also robust and earthy.

You can begin dinner with a Niçoise favorite, Perugina sausage, in a rich stew of sweet pepper and onions topped with crisp, lacy panisses, the town’s famous chickpea fritters. Pillows of gnocchi are coated with a spicy lamb ragout, slivered baby artichokes and pecorino cheese; spinach gnocchi accompanies juicy, rare lamb, along with favas, tomato confit and fennel gratinée, a lovely end-of-summer combo. The milk-fed veal “rumstek,” three thick pink wedges on a Gorgonzola and veal jus scented with rosemary, stands to become a classic.

Since he was raised on the French Riviera, Mr. Allegretti knows his fish, but he garnishes it in unusual ways. Perfectly cooked rouget fillets are placed on a bed of paper-thin rounds of zucchini with pine nuts, red peppers and fried parsley. A waiter pours on a saffron mariniere sauce at the table so the fillets retain their crisp skin. A ceviche of bay scallops in a subtle citrus and gazpacho marinade is laced with small chunks of avocado. Diver scallops, with fennel, potatoes and Niçoise olives, are served on a green tomato and a basil broth and sprinkled with almonds.

THERE WERE SOME disappointments, but they were few: overcooked dorade, a watery Provençal fish soup. The pistou, on the other hand, was superb, with summer vegetables and a poached egg. I also loved the restaurant’s small sourdough olive and pesto rolls that were brought around at frequent intervals.

Allegretti has a first-rate wine list, with selections from new, lesser-known winemakers and from regions such as Provence, Languedoc and Corsica, many at very good prices.

Desserts include grappa chocolate fondant, which is a dome of dark chocolate mousse under a layer of chocolate, served with ricotta ice cream studded with slivered almonds, and a wonderful lemon brioche with lemon chibouste. The panna cotta is flavored with licorice and served with sautéed pineapple; the crème brûlée is made with lavender honey. Meringues and anise-scented biscotti arrive with the bill.

I like the understated elegance of the restaurant: Its van Gogh palette of yellow and blue, the thin-stemmed wineglasses and the polished new mirrors along one wall that make the room feel larger. In the corner there is a limestone-clad wood-burning brick oven, which will be fired up later in the fall.

The staff (and numerous busboys) are welcoming and anxious to please. The only caveat is noise. The dining room has hardwood floors, and the tables for two are long. When the room is crowded, it is hard to hear across them.

The prices here are high and they add up. But this could become a neighborhood restaurant for some. A large apartment building by Rem Koolhaas is going up on the next block. Meltdown? What meltdown?

mhodgson@observer.com

Still, the restaurant is hardly empty, even at the end of summer. On a warm evening, the east side of Sixth Avenue between Bleecker and Houston feels like an Italian piazza. Da Silvano’s linen-topped tables and chrome chairs spread out over the wide sidewalk; further up are the tables of its neighbor, Bar Pitti. People loiter in the street, lounge on the benches, or stop to chat with friends having dinner. A yellow Ferrari draws up to the curb and is immediately surrounded by an enthusiastic crowd of young Italians, including the waiters, who wear light blue shirts and neckties.

Meanwhile, Mr. Marchetto is on patrol, wending his way among the tables. Silver-haired, bespectacled, and rotund, he is dressed in a white sweatshirt, beige pants, and white leather thong sandals decorated with Chinese dragons. His toenails are painted black. The silver two-seater Smart car he owns is parked in front of the restaurant, wedged in behind a black SUV the size of a hearse.

Tonight there is a gallery owner, a film director, and a Hollywood screenwriter, none of them household names. At a table for eight, an Italian patriarch with a face from a Roman coin presides over his family of three generations. He has a napkin tied around his neck and watches, bemused, as his small granddaughter plays a computer game. Next to me, a suburban couple has an argument. “Stop saying ‘me and you!’” the woman scolds her husband, who is eating a boiled artichoke. “It’s you and I!”

MR. MARCHETTO, who is from Florence, opened Da Silvano in 1975, when Italian restaurants in the city had Mount Vesuvius posters on the walls, candles in Chianti bottles, and the tautology “shrimp scampi” on the menu. But Mr. Marchetto painted his walls yellow and served New Yorkers such novelties as radicchio, risotto, and chicken liver crostini. Da Silvano spawned a slew of Tuscan restaurants (the first of which, Il Cantinori, was opened by his former busboy, Pino Luongo, who absconded with his staff). While many Northern Italian places have come and gone, Da Silvano has endured. Mr. Marchetto’s face graces the house line of oils and vinegars and even the bottles of water. But there is better Tuscan food to be found elsewhere these days, and for less money. So what is the secret of Da Silvano’s mystique?

The restaurant has high energy combined with gruff charm. The welcome is unequivocal, and as far as getting a coveted table, such as one outside, there seems to be no pecking order. As people table-hop, it feels like a party. You always run into someone you know.

But the price ratcheting is annoying. When I asked our friendly Italian waiter for a glass of white wine, he didn’t mention that the Gavi di Gavi he’d suggested (black label, it turned out) cost $26. Other white wines by the glass are around $16—hardly a steal. As for bottles, the list is Italian, predictable, and ludicrously expensive, with few choices under $65. But if you’ve made a killing in the art market, who cares?

WHEN I FIRST used to come to Da Silvano, the waiters would recite a long list of specials as customers glazed over. Now the specials number more than 30 and are pinned to the menu. I asked the waiter what he recommended as a first course. “Taglierini with black truffles,” he replied without missing a beat. (It’s $45.50.) “Lobster gnocchi.” (A relative bargain at $32.50.) 

Instead, we began with a salad made with tender pieces of octopus sprinkled with herbs, and a platter of merguez with gorgonzola sauce, a combination that oddly worked, the tang of the cheese providing a foil for the spiciness of the sausage. Squash blossoms arrived in a batter that was too thick, but they were hot and crisp.

As for the grilled seppie (cuttlefish) rolled in bread crumbs, it seemed to have made a brief passage under little more than a heat lamp before being brought to the table. The crumbs were soggy, the fish raw and gummy inside.

In contrast, the pasta dishes were very good, although the ravioli with fried sage leaves swam in butter. I loved the taglierini contadina, fresh thin noodles tossed with crumbled hot and sweet sausage and peas in a subtle tomato sauce; and the tagliatelle, which came in a rich, creamy sauce laced with pieces of crab.

Whole branzini, perfectly cooked, was accompanied by slices of squeaky fresh fried zucchini and roast potatoes. But the salmon tasted like a leftover: The fish was flaky, mixed in with cannelli beans, greens, and tomatoes, the sort of thing you’d put together yourself for a perfectly respectable meal after rooting around in the refrigerator—not for a price tag of $35.

The steak fiorentine for two is an immense piece of meat big enough for four. The “vertically roasted” duck, falling off the bone but still juicy, was terrific, redolent of rosemary and with a taut, crisp skin.

The desserts are ordinary; they include a pleasant tiramisu, a serviceable panna cotta, and sorbets—among them a lovely deep blackberry flavor, but the scoop of strawberry was iced from too long in the refrigerator.

So at least some things in the Village never change: Da Silvano remains overpriced and the food is hit or miss, and yet it’s still fun. Now Mr. Marchetto, with his daughter, will be opening Scuderia, a restaurant across the street. Too bad the neighbors wouldn’t allow another sidewalk café. Everything tastes better outdoors. Doesn’t it?

mhodgson@observer.com

When my son was a boy, he loved to watch the noodle man at Honmura An, the only authentic soba restaurant in the city. The noodle man worked in a glass booth in the dining room, where he’d pummel the dough, toss it in the air and roll it out, never once making a hole. Then, using an enormous carving knife, he’d slice the dough into perfect, foot-long strands that he hung up to dry.

Honmura An closed last year, leaving its fans bereft. But now soba cuisine has returned with Matsugen, Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s new Japanese restaurant in Tribeca. Alas, there is no noodle man on display here. He is hidden backstage, where a special mill has been installed to grind the buckwheat kernels into flour for the dough made daily. If it’s not fresh, it’s not soba.

Mr. Vongerichten opened Matsugen in partnership with the Matsushita brothers, Taka, Masa and Yoshi, who have branches of the restaurant in Tokyo and Honolulu. For once, he is not doing any cooking (his sole contribution to the menu is his molten chocolate cake, the most imitated dessert in town—if not the world—which gets a Japanese accent from a dollop of green-tea ice cream). Yoshi runs the kitchen, while his brother Taka and, on all of my visits, Mr. Vongerichten himself greet customers in the front of the house, which is run by the latter’s staff.

LIKW HONMURA AN, Matsugen has a pared-down Japanese aesthetic, both in the food and the design. It’s not a blockbuster show with a dripping ice Buddha, like Megu down the block. The stark white Richard Meier décor of the premises that used to be 66 is now gray, and the smaller rooms, which have bare wood tables, frosted paneling and stainless steel wire mesh walls, are minimal bordering on grim. Up front there is a sleek lounge area with a sunken sushi bar and an appetizer bar. The jolly communal table from 66 has been retained, along with the four tanks of tropical fish that provide theater in the rear dining room and separate it from the kitchen.

Although this is a downtown restaurant, Matsugen’s clientele—among them many Japanese—is a cross-section of hipsters, older couples, businessmen and families with kids (including a small boy equipped for an evening of social intercourse with both a computer game and earphones). Across the way one night, a corpulent figure out of a drawing by George Grosz sat back in anticipation as a waiter set down an array of metal equipment for the most expensive dish on the menu: shabu shabu with wagyu rib eye (at $160, beyond my budget). I hope he didn’t overcook it.

Matsugen’s enormous menu covers all the bases, from sushi and tempura to more than a dozen appetizers, soups, grilled meat and salads. There are rice dishes cooked in an earthenware pot, one of which, made with sweet, delicate crabmeat and Japanese mushrooms, provoked sighs of rapture at my table. There’s even a version of the ubiquitous black cod with miso, a thick, buttery wedge cut in three browned chunks, and deliciously fatty grilled pork belly, served on a black lava rock from Mount Fuji.

Skip the boring prawn tempura, which is not worth $22. (I know, the prawns are huge, flown in from Japan and all that, but they were overcooked and no better than I’ve had in dozens of other restaurants.) Instead, order the shrimp cake: four juicy wedges variously topped with a piece of green pepper or a mushroom under a jellied glaze, displayed like jewels in a box. The lobster salad, a dish I ordinarily would not order in a Japanese restaurant, was outstanding, not just because of the pristine ingredients, but for the light, citrusy carrot dressing that comes on the side. It’s nothing like the cloying versions you find in other places.

But there is one dish you must not miss at Matsugen: uni with yuzu jelly. I’ve never tasted anything like it. The sea urchin roe is spread out in a glistening line in what looks like a miniature wooden boat. Because it comes from Japan—not California, as in most Japanese restaurants here—the uni has a pronounced funky taste redolent of the sea, the yuzu adding a subtle note of citrus. Uni also comes on scallops topped with caviar, and even on soba noodles.

SOBA, our waiter explained, traditionally winds up the meal (before dessert, of course). There are three kinds of noodle, the lightest of which is like angel hair. Seiro noodles, smooth and of medium husk, are served cold in a house special with a mind-boggling array of stuff—scallions, bonito, yam, sesame, okra, wasabi, cucumber, shiso and nori—topped with a raw egg yolk you swirl in with your chopsticks. It was a thrillingly complex bombardment of tastes, but so rich we couldn’t finish it (perhaps because we’d kicked off dinner with that jellied uni). Hot seiro soba with duck and scallions was also terrific, with a rich earthy broth. Afterward you are brought a teapot of the liquid the noodles were cooked in—very nourishing, I’m told, but an acquired taste.

Desserts include a popular Japanese specialty new to me, warabi mochi. It’s made of bracken (a type of fern) and arrives in a wedge that looks as though it has been dug up from an Irish bog. It was strange, but I quite liked its nutty taste. My favorite, though, is made of red beads of grapefruit combined with yuzu jelly and served in wedges of grapefruit skin, the way you get pieces of orange after dinner in Chinese restaurants.

Depending on what you order, you can have a stellar meal at Matsugen or an ordinary one, an expensive or a reasonable one. (But the prices do tend to add up.) On each visit, however, I discovered not only a new dish, but one I’d go back for.

That’s the excitement of this restaurant. It’s uncompromising, delivering an authentic experience of Japanese cuisine. And if you want to take it out for a test drive before committing, try the goma dare, a coarse-grained inaka soba served cold with sesame sauce. At $14 it’s one of the cheapest dishes on the menu, and it’s Mr. Vongerichten’s favorite.

mhodgson@observer.com

When the tourists and suburban shoppers aren’t in Prada or Louis Vuitton, they’re on the street buying T-shirts, jewelry, film scripts, designer handbag knockoffs and, since they’re in Soho, “art.” Leaning against the black Hummer that’s parked outside my front door each day is a display of huge spattered canvases in monolithic colors (the Kate Moss series, the Brooklyn Bridge series) manned by guys in baggy jeans.

How’s business? I ask.

“Great!”

So, when Provence reopened last May as an American restaurant, it seemed that another vestige of the old Soho had been lost. In more than two decades of existence, Provence had provided a romantic setting for many a date and marriage proposal. I even had my wedding dinner there. But two years ago it was taken over by Marc Meyer and Vicki Freeman, the owners of Cookshop and Five Points (the latter named for the notorious mid-19th-century slum that is now Foley Square). They revamped the décor (without sacrificing the old restaurant’s romantic charm) and they reinvigorated the French menu. I liked the new incarnation at first, but the food was inconsistent.

Now they’ve turned Provence into a genuinely American restaurant where the theme is—what else?—the farm.

Instead of escargots and bouillabaisse, there are fried green tomatoes with paprika aioli, and buttery steamed littleneck clams seasoned with chili and oregano. Instead of hanger steak, there’s a hamburger made from grass-fed beef topped with a sharp Amish cheddar and accompanied by french fries and a Vidalia onion aioli. It’s first rate. And at lunch one day, two of us dined on crunchy fried soft-shell crabs with succotash laced with fresh corn and fava beans from the greenmarket.

Simple food. And much of the time, the kitchen gets it right (the prices are right, too, with nothing over $24).

Hundred Acres is on a mercifully quiet block between Prince and Houston. The entrance has been moved to a better spot, and communal tables have been installed, so the place is more casual and accessible to walk-ins (a.k.a. those shopping-bag-toting tourists).

Provence’s signature blue and yellow colors have been abandoned in favor of perfectly nice cream walls and dark wood. Gone are the mirrors and the Pierre Deux striped silk banquettes. The middle room is hung with gorgeous blown-up photographs of an old Pennsylvania farmhouse taken by Christopher Hirsheimer, who co-designed the restaurant with Melissa Hamilton. The covered garden in the back now feels like a greenhouse, with potted plants instead of elaborate flower arrangements. You half expect to see tomatoes on the vine.

The casual sensibility extends to the kitchen, which is run by Meyer with Joel Hough, chef de cuisine of Cookshop. Their rustic American menu, which has around 15 dishes, changes daily, based on what’s available in the market. The food is unpretentious and straightforward, and it’s served by a friendly, affable staff.

One dish I’d go back for is a tone-perfect salad of cucumber and delfino cilantro (a herb with fernlike leaves) tossed in a cumin-lime dressing and laced with crispy nuggets of bacon. You can also begin with beguiling open-face “tea” sandwiches made with buttered multigrain bread covered with thin slices of tongue and pickled ramps. A trio of toasts served on a wooden board are variously topped with smoked fish, chicken livers with pickled beets, and a delicate mousselike purée of favas.

The food may be simple, but the dishes are well conceived. Pollock (a white fish that in England is known as poor man’s cod) is served with a fines herbes butter and a generous helping of English peas. It was beautifully cooked. The grilled bluefish, which I only like when it’s really fresh, was also terrific, garnished with a salad of raw carrots and cucumber with lime.

Plates get interesting little touches, such as a lamb duet—roast leg and a chop—served with grilled turnips, sugar snap peas and pickled cherries. Rabbit, accompanied by German fingerling potato salad, is wrapped in bacon, which keeps it from drying out.

The desserts are mixed. A crostade of peaches turned out to be a soggy strudel filled with tasteless white peaches. The cherry shortcake was pleasant, although cold from the refrigerator. But I loved the big wedge of chocolate cake made with a feather-light sponge.

The restaurant’s major shortcoming—a distressingly common one these days—is the noise level. Forget the romance of Provence. The front room was always loud, but now it’s deafening thanks to the subway tiles on the walls.

One night two of us were seated at a table by the french doors, which were open onto the tree-lined street. The rain was coming down in buckets. No, don’t close the doors! Our legs were getting spattered but we didn’t care. At least we could hear each other.

mhodgson@observer.com

So there was much anticipation when Alain Ducasse announced he was going to open a New York branch of Benoit, one of the last authentic bistros in Paris, dating from 1912, and which he took over two years ago. What’s more, he was going to establish it in the premises that were once La Côte Basque, one of the city’s most beautiful restaurants.

The first tremor of displacement begins as you wait for your table at the bar, where the thumping beat of techno music helps to obliterate the last traces of that venerable institution (and even of the brasserie its owner and chef, Jean-Jacques Rachou, replaced it with when he sadly decided haute cuisine had had its day and he wanted to attract a younger audience). The room is hideous, done up with thick black and white stripes on the walls and islands of waist-high round black tables and black bar stools. It feels like a T.G.I. Fridays: the perfect setting for green-apple martinis and loaded potato skins. Look up, however, and you will see a beautiful antique blue and yellow glass ceiling from an old Paris bakery.

And look up at the ceiling in the dining room: a trompe l’oeil sky. It’s one of the few design elements that doesn’t feel as though it had been assembled from a bistro kit. The walls are covered with bright blond wood paneling and hung with shiny new mirrors and scenes of Paris. There are the de rigueur red banquettes, but the chairs look as though they’ve come out of a 1950s cafeteria. Mr. Rachou’s majolica statue of a heron, dating back to La Côte Basque, still presides over the room, and the medallions of 1890s cartoons, brass lamps and sconces from his brasserie have been retained. But the lighting is flat, and the frosted-glass separators installed as an attempt to break up the space make it feel claustrophobic. This world of Benoit is Disney World’s.

MR. DUCASSE MUST be riding high on the success of Adour, which he opened last winter in the St. Regis, one block away. At Benoit, he’s offering the Ducasse experience off the peg, so to speak. That’s fine, but because of his name, you come with high hopes, even to a bistro. And you don’t expect the sort of wine service I received one evening when I asked for a second glass of rosé. Our waitress brought over a bottle containing little more than an inch of wine and cheerfully emptied the dregs, along with the sediment, into my glass.

The menu offers traditional bistro fare such as steak tartare and canard à l’orange, and some dishes you won’t want to miss on a hot summer night, such as onion soup and Mr. Rachou’s famous cassoulet. (To be fair, those were on his brasserie menu, too.) Benoit’s chef, Sebastién Rondier, has no lack of credentials, and he’s worked with Ducasse since 2000. But most of the food I tasted was mediocre.

A charcuterie platter for two ($42) includes prosciutto, pâté en croûte and dry sausage, but it had none of the sparkle of the dish that’s served at Bar Boulud. It was lifted from total doldrums by a sort of mille-feuille arrangement of veal and tongue layered with foie gras mousse. This was wonderful. So was another dish, the buttery duck foie gras confit with brioche. But a tartare of coarsely chopped daurade with olive oil was lackluster.

I had read that Mr. Rachou—who is not affiliated with Benoit, but is a friend of Ducasse—had contributed his recipe for quenelles de brochet to Benoit’s menu. I have glorious memories of these silken zeppelins, floating in a delicate pink sauce Nantua. I wonder what he would have made of the dish that was served to me one night. A casserole of melted sludge arrived, two unevenly shaped browned lumps on a watery brown sauce rimmed with a white froth. The quenelles themselves were quite nice under their tough skin, their texture a bit chunkier than the ones I remember, but they looked as though they had been washed up on the shores of Love Canal.

“Are you still working on that?” asked a busboy.

Work was needed for the halibut, which tasted like hospital food. The underseasoned fish had the texture of wet Kleenex and lay on a pool of brown sauce garnished with three asparagus spears. It came with a silver sauceboat filled with a frothy Champagne sabayon that had a strange metallic taste.

I HAVEN'T BEEN to the original Benoit, but I have been to L’Ami Louis, another venerated Paris bistro, after which the roast chicken here is named. I can still almost taste their chicken, one of the best I’ve ever eaten, with a miraculously crisp golden skin. Here, the chicken for two with thin french fries ($48) was tender and juicy, but the skin was limp.

Desserts included a slab of lemon meringue pie that could have come from a diner, and a dry chocolate soufflé sprinkled with sugar, served with vanilla ice cream. One of the desserts was described on the menu as a “mystère.” “Enjoy!” said the server as he set it down. The mystery in this pleasant hazelnut ice cream was melted chocolate in the middle.

Given that it’s Ducasse, the prices are not exorbitant. But you can’t help feeling that Benoit, which also has a branch in Tokyo, is little more than a cynical moneymaker, packing in the tourists and suburbanites eager for the Ducasse experience without paying through the roof.

If you go downstairs to the bathrooms, you will see black-and-white photographs of glamorous women taken in the ’60s, the sort of people who flocked to La Côte Basque in the era when Jackie Kennedy was barred for wearing a pantsuit. Those were the days!

mhodgson@observer.com