The bar at Lafayette.

For restaurants in New York, there are spaces blessed and spaces cursed. The accursed kind is inevitably occupied by a telltale loser parade of strangely named tenants, like FR.OG, and ill-begotten concepts, like a “barstro.”

During their short lives, these places are as barren as Sarah, as lonely as Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and as shifty as a carnival barker. Nevertheless, observers can’t help but be touched and a little awed at the enduring capacity of man to think he can succeed where surely he can’t. Sound the sad trombone.

Those spaces in the tabernacle of the anointed don’t see as much turnover, but they have similar tells. They bustle at night and hum during the day. In springtime, their patios are full of people. Black town cars idle in bike lanes before their doors, presenting a threat to the atmosphere—and to bicyclists—but that matters little to those within. At these tables, beyond these gates, it’s already paradise. Lafayette, Chef Andrew Carmellini’s long awaited grand cafe, which opened in March, is located in such a blessed space.

Twelve years ago, when I first moved to New York, the space was Time Cafe, a mediocre restaurant with a mural of the Mojave, a burger under $10 and an absolutely terrific downstairs club called Fez Under Time Cafe, which gave underage kids the chance to drink, unknown acts the chance to sing, and headliners like Johnny Cash and Jeff Buckley the chance to slum it. It closed in 2005 after a long and happy life and was replaced by Chinatown Brasserie, which didn’t dry up for six years and was most notable for a real tough bartender named Rainlove Lampariello (who told me his “parents were hippies”). After that rainbow dissipated, Lafayette appeared.

On a recent Tuesday evening, the sprawling restaurant felt like the set of one of those Garry Marshall ensemble romantic comedies. It’s the place where Ashton and Julia would eat on their magical first date. Like The Dutch, one of Mr. Carmellini’s other restaurants, Lafayette was designed by Roman & Williams, the husband-and-wife firm behind the Ace Hotel as well as the sets of movies like Zoolander and Addicted to Love. They are masters of golden-glow maximalism.

Even in real life, the crowd—and there is always a crowd—was from central casting. Windswept women with perky breasts, perfect highlights and ballerina flats sat with men whose stubble was so well groomed it looked more formal than the depilated cheek.

As I was led to my table by one of three siren hostesses in black dresses and white pearl necklaces who had greeted me with a beauty so strong it felt like a wall, not a welcome, the seated women followed me with their Westchester blue eyes, flicking their tongues over the teaspoons of crème fraîche that accompany any good tarte, as if to say, “The man I am with is wealthier, more handsome and more successful than you. Nevertheless, I’d be down for a quickie, if you want to meet me in the restroom.” I too was in paradise.

Much as I imagine heaven to be, Lafayette is more theme park food court than restaurant. There’s a patisserie, kitted out with perfectly formed baguettes and pain de campagne in a spread straight out of Amélie. There’s a zinc bar, lit softly by a large glowing custom clock designed by Roman & Williams. There’s a rotisserie station, where skewered Amish chickens, never Jewish or Cathlolic ones, rotate on a spit. But most of the space is meant for sitting.

Downstairs, in what used to be Fez Under Time Cafe, there’s a vaulted private dining room. Upstairs, there are 12 tables abutting plush leather booths along Great Jones Street, where the tables are large and the ballers are seated; a purgatorial space where Jeffrey Chodorow was eating on the night I visited; and a tucked-away alcove where those beautiful hostesses seat the ugly and people with babies. But as I said, the ugly are few.

For all of Lafayette’s pageantry, the menu is remarkably sober and, if anything, a bit cautious. Mr. Carmellini, assisted by Damon Wise, the longtime chef of Craft and short-lived chef of The Monkey Bar, sticks to the classics. He has drawn from nearly every region of France. The Mediterranean is amply represented by a salade Niçoise at lunch and a spaghetti Niçoise at dinner, and by the general preponderance of capers. But there’s also tripe Bourguignonne, Lyonnaise charcuterie and something called oysters “Sargent,” inspired by John Singer Sargent’s Oyster Gatherers of Cancale. Since Sargent was a man admired for his technical facility, if not his originality, one can see why Mr. Carmellini likes him.  

For the sheer scale and ambition of the project, one would be hard-pressed to find fault with anything on the menu. Mr. Carmellini’s years running Boulud Sud (1998-2005), his long successful run at The Dutch and Locanda Verde, and his general Midwestern openness have equipped him with unimpeachable technique, just as Mr. Wise’s years under Tom Colicchio have.

The appetizers, under the heading French Market, include dishes of great subtlety—like thinly sliced raw Maine scallops served lightly dressed with a sauce aigrelette, so sublime as to be a saltwater sacrament—and dishes of simple pleasures. Les olive vertes, picholine and nocerella, were warm. More restaurants should warm olives, because they are awesome.

Those oysters “Sargent,” actually Blue Points, are jazzy riffs on a classic, fantastic and thalassic. Softened by seaweed butter, topped with toasted nori and wakame, which is like the kudzu of the ocean, and baked, their brininess has been softened in the process, but their marine minerality astutely sharpened.

Astute is exactly how I would describe most of the food. Inspired? Not really. But smart and perceptive, certainly. Raclette, a cheese too often confined to blanketing potatoes, ennobles a very good brisket burger at lunch. Muscat grapes, like capers, are used to great effect, as in a perfectly prepared dorade, where they cameo in an update of sauce veronique, or at lunch, where they top little grilled shrimpies and are studded with capers. (Capers and grapes are the biggest culinary coups here.)

And Mr. Carmellini does land as well as he does sea. The steak frites, which came tremendously undercooked and almost raw, was salvaged by the fries, pick-up sticks of crispy cholesterol. And the excellent foie gras terrine, accompanied minimally with rhubarb and brioche, is beyond reproach.

In the final analysis, the food isn’t anything to write home about, for the same reason letters from the front can’t capture the horrors of war. They just can’t be quarantined from their context. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t—for better or for worse—transcendent. At Lafayette, it’s for the better. Lafayette is the three-legged stool of food, space and time. Knock out one leg and, like Shoeless Joe in Field of Dreams, the place becomes insubstantial when ex situ. But it’s that shimmering elusiveness that assures immortality.

As in many sanctified spaces, the ghosts of Time past still rumble around Lafayette. Years ago, at Fez, I remember seeing the Mingus Big Band. Sue Mingus, Charlie’s snow-haired, severe-looking widow, would call changes from the banquette.

Those guys knew something about space, and they knew about keeping time. Baritone sax player John Stubblefield used to weave his way between tables with his big horn around his neck, blowing the booming first notes of the classic Mingus tune “Moanin’”. The line starts on an A that falls precipitously to a low and almost silly-sounding B-flat.

Stubblefield died in 2005, shortly after Fez closed. But, as I sat among the blessed of the world in their fairytale France of Lafayette, I remembered that at that time, in that space, all his notes sounded true, even the flat ones.

Illustration by Victor Juhasz.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment New York’s fascination with pork turned into a fascination with pigs. Though similar, the difference between pig and pork is vast. It’s the difference between life and death. Pigs are undead pork. Pork is a former pig.

Nevertheless, in recent years the object of the food scene’s affection has undeniably shifted from post- to pre-mortem. Once we contented ourselves with the worship of pork belly, the Omniscient Meat Xenu, and to ape Roman indulgence with gout-inducing meatopias.

But even in our most fervent bacchanal, the focus was on the animal after he had crossed the threshold from life unto death, from a breathing being to an eaten thing. But these days, mere meat isn’t real enough. Chase it back up to the gates of the abattoir. Undead it. It’s pig we’re after.

Pigs and New York, of course, have had a long and rich history. The New York Police Department was formed in 1845 ... Kidding. I’m kidding. Hogs famously roamed the city’s squalid streets up until the mid-19th century. “Pigs were,” writes Henrick Hartog in his seminal text Pigs and Positivism, “an ordinary part of the American urban landscape.”

Until around 2002, however, pork was not present on the menus of “the right crowd.” The first pork fetishist of the modern era is a matter of some debate. Some say it was David Chang at Momofuku Noodle Bar in Manhattan, others say the honor belongs to Zak Pelaccio at Chickenbone Café in Brooklyn. April Bloomfield certainly had something to do with it. Lady loves a good sow.

Unlike chicken tenders, which have been on menus since time immemorial yet have failed to ignite an ardent passion among foodies, pork in the modern age started a meatwave. Photographs of chefs posing with dead pigs became a meme. Chang did it. So did Bloomfield. Andrew Carmellini draped a pig across his shoulder as he rode a bicycle. Seamus Mullen held his pig, eyes closed sweetly, a little piggie smile fixed in death on its snout. Call it the Abu Ghraib moment of food porn.

For pork, unlike chicken, beef and certainly fish, has developed around it an ineffable sexiness. Eating trotters and nibbling on a crispy pig ear has become a debauch, the a table equivalent of finger-cuffs. There’s a reason Babe was a pig and not, say, turbot.

Two new restaurants illustrate the breadth of this fascination. Swine, a pig-and-wine bar in the West Village; and Pig and Khao, a Thai/Indonesian restaurant in the Lower East Side.

These new pig temples share an aggressively proletarian spirit, even as they charge bourgeois prices. Both also contain some element of word play in their names. Perhaps coincidentally—but I suspect there is a correlation—the quality of each restaurant is directly proportional to the quality of the pun in its moniker. Swine, which is properly written with a minuscule s and majuscule W, is the best in show. Pig and Khao—khao is a Thai for rice and sounds vaguely like English for “cow”—places a distant second.

Swine occupies the old bi-level space in the WestVillage that used to be Ruby Foo’s. (Pan-Asiatics are the latest victims of rampaging pigs.) The insides are all beat-up ersatz dive bar. The plaster has been painstakingly aged by Jason Volenec, who also designed Tertulia, into a scuffed palimpsest of manufactured past. Posters for rock concerts you haven’t been to hang on the wall. Sure, it’s all fake, but what past isn’t mitigated by what we wanted it to be?

John McNulty, who owns the restaurant along with an entertainment lawyer from Oklahoma named Cris Criswell, told me, “I’ve always wanted to have a dive bar with a great wine list.” He finally has his dream.

The word “swine,” he said, does double duty. It connotes a certain uncouthness, and it indicates how seriously the place takes its charcuterie. Another indicator of seriousness is the Berkel meat slicer in the open kitchen downstairs—a slightly quieter retreat from the jauntily chaotic main dining room. “It’s the Ferrari of meat slicers,” Mr. McNulty boasted.

The chef manning the slicer is Phil Conlon, formerly chef de cuisine of nearby Cafe Cluny. This might explain why so delicate a hand is manifest in the cooking, despite the rough milieu. The pork rillettes are tremendously porky without being aggressive. They are served, in an indication of thoughtfulness, with apricot mustard. The pork belly, in which crispness and unguent fat exist in perfect proportion, is accompanied by sweet chili glaze and offset by spicy pickled cabbage, a five-point-palm exploding heart technique of flavor. And the burger—a bone marrow and brisket outlier in a local burger landscape dominated by aged ground beef—proves Mr. Conlon’s touch isn’t confined to swine.

The food, in short, is familiar yet delightful. The service, however, is familiar to the point of impertinent. The first thing the server, a scruffy man with a lip piercing named Steven, said as he approached us—my wife, who was drinking a glass of grenache, one of the four wines on tap; a friend named Karl who drank a Bronx Ale and me, sipping a perfectly round and lightly oaky pinot noir—was “Hey, where’s the nursing convention?”

I was confused, since St. Vincents had closed. Karl thought he was alluding to breast-feeding, the topic of conversation at the moment. (We’re into it.) Only my wife had the wherewithal to realize Steven was obliquely criticizing the rate at which we were drinking. “People grow to like me?” said Steve, with doubt-tinged hopefulness.

As for Pig and Khao, perhaps the less said the better. The chef there, Leah Cohen, the former Top Chef contestant who partnered with the Fatty Crew, has become so enamored by the idea of extreme pig preparation she’s forgotten to make good food. Like Euripides’s Agave, who in her Dionysian derangement slaughters her own son, Pentheus, Ms. Cohen is so deranged with idea of pig slaughter, she winds up doing a real hatchet job on what she purports to love most.

The menu boasts pig face, which arrives sizzling with liver and a waiter bearing an egg. The egg, cracked upon a skillet tablesideand mixed in, is the best part. The menu also boasts grilled pig jowls, small inedible discs of pure gelatinous fat pared with overly salty chicharon and watermelon. And the pièce de résistance is a crispy pata, chunks of pork leg fried so excessively they could be just about anything—Werner Herzog’s shoe, deadstock Ho-Hos, tubes of lip balm—and it would taste the same. There are other similarly ill-considered items on the menu. Quail adobo, for instance, in which the bone-to-flesh ratio is so high as to render the labor-to-enjoyment ratio infinitesimal.

The error isn’t so much in the execution here, or the unbalanced flavor profiles, but in the perverted vision of what and why we serve pig.

I suspect that the pork-to-pig movement was a well-founded reaction against both commodity meat and fussy dining that resulted in a renewed focus on the whole hog (as opposed to endless plastic-wrapped tenderloins). Initially, it was couched in the language of sustainable farming and championed by chefs like Fergus Henderson at London’s St. John. But at a certain hazy point, this laudable aim began to mutate into an unseemly fascination with offal and off-cuts, couched in the language of machismo.

First there were The Spotted Pig and Momofuku. Then there were Traif and Fette Sau. Then Swine. Pig and Khao is the end game, the reductio ad absurdum. The object of macho disregard was once the pork, but now it’s the pig—as if being cavalier about the life of a pig is somehow honoring the animal’s spirit.

I eagerly await the arrival of boutique slaughterhouses, where discerning locavores can spend a Friday night trying their hand at hacking through the carotid arteries of pasture-raised piglets. They’ll let the animals bleed out all over their Alden boots and pretty No.6 clogs, then repair to the dining room to devour their handiwork, high-fiving and smugly tweeting: #Squeal

Dante Camara (not Alighieri) is the maître d’ at A Voce (which means “word of mouth”), a new Italian restaurant near Madison Square Park. The team behind this venture is impressive. Chef Andrew Carmellini cooked for six years at Café Boulud, where he earned a Michelin star and two James Beard awards (including being named best chef in the city last year). The sommelier, Olivier Flosse, is also from Café Boulud, as is Mr. Camara. And the pastry chef, April Robinson, worked at Alain Ducasse and Café Gray.

A Voce is on the ground floor of an office building on 26th Street. It’s a very noisy place because it’s all hard surfaces—or as one friend put it, “The only soft surface here is us.” The dining room, done up in chocolate and vanilla with stainless steel, is minimally decorated in a modern, corporate style, with a maple floor, moss-green, leather-topped tables and swiveling leather Eames chairs. It feels like a staff cafeteria for the upper echelon.

Picture windows down one side of the room offer a view onto the street where, come summer, tables will be set out on a piazza landscaped with lemon trees and plants in tubs. The additional seating, enough for 80 to 100, should be a saving grace for A Voce.

Lining one wall of the L-shaped dining room is an art installation, backlit with a pink glow, constructed out of more than a dozen towers of Lincoln Log–like blocks. A blue painting that looks like a computer screensaver decorates another wall.

At our request, Dante sat us in a corner where it was somewhat quieter than the main section. But the overhead lighting here was bright enough for interrogation. It couldn’t be turned down, he explained apologetically, because it was controlled by a computer. “The lights don’t dim until 10 o’clock.”

Why?

We turned our attention to the wine list. It’s superb, ranging in price from $18 a bottle to $9,500 for a bottle of 1947 Pomerol for that special occasion. Half the bottles are Italian; the rest are from France and America. Forty percent are less than $80. The waiters, dressed in bright blue shirts, are as enthusiastic, confident, knowledgeable and interested a group as I’ve come across in a while.

Mr. Carmellini cooked mainly French food at Café Boulud, but he’s not new to Italian cuisine. He worked for two years at San Domenico and spent a year studying in Italy. At A Voce, he’s serving straightforward, rustic Italian dishes such as tripe, braised lamb shank, grilled pork chop and chicken cacciatora. There are also novelties, like duck meatballs with dried cherry sauce and ramps with spaghetti. The menu is printed daily and reflects the seasonal produce available at the market.

If you go to the Union Square greenmarket these days, you’ll see chefs lining up to buy ramps—small wild leeks that are piled up in gritty heaps. These ramps, to paraphrase P.G. Wodehouse, cause the sap to rise in a chef’s veins. They have a subtle, garlicky taste, and Mr. Carmellini tosses them with strips of speck in a bowl of spaghetti coated with a creamy sauce of Parmesan and olive oil. This dish couldn’t be simpler or more delicious.

The duck meatballs are on the level of some of the fancier stuff Mr. Carmellini turned out at Café Boulud. They’re soft and satiny, mixed with foie gras and pork, and served on puréed celery with a dark cherry sauce. Quail saltimbocca is so tender under its crisp skin you don’t need the steak knife that’s offered. It’s rare, on a bed of lentils, with a rich fig sauce. Duck glazed with fennel and honey is sliced in meaty, pink pieces and garnished with duck sausage, chopped sugar snap peas and a bracing olive sauce.

Much of the food at A Voce is good without knocking your socks off. Grilled octopus was tender and nicely charred, with peperonata, tomatoes, lemon and tiny pieces of chorizo. Steak tartare is seasoned with truffle oil and mixed with walnuts. It arrives Italian-style, with Parmesan and arugula, and it was pleasant but bland. The squid-ink risotto, topped with a cuttlefish stuffed with shrimp, was bland too, although perfectly cooked. But tripe with borlotti beans and spring vegetables was excellent, light and clean-tasting. I also liked the rigatoni with broccoli rabe, chickpeas and tiny, spicy pork meatballs in a subtle tomato sauce.

Halfway through dinner, the lights dimmed. I checked my watch: 10 o’clock. But by now the restaurant was so noisy we had to shout to make ourselves heard.

One of my friends said he’d once sat next to Charlton Heston in a Hollywood restaurant. “When he spoke,” my friend said, “his voice sounded as though the sky had opened and the tablets had been given to Moses.”

A Charlton Heston voice is required here.

Desserts are uneven. A ring of pineapple, topped with ice cream, is far too sweet. Lemon sorbet, on the other hand, is pleasantly tart. Tiramisu, served in a brandy snifter and sprinkled with shavings of chocolate, is cloyingly sugary and doused with too much liquor. Chocolate cake isn’t the molten kind but a hearty sponge, subtly flavored with amaretto.

At A Voce, Mr. Carmellini is serving some very good food, but I won’t come back until I can eat outside under the lemon trees, and have a conversation sotto voce.