The menu, from the French chef Marie-Aude Rose, who additionally runs La Mercerie, is old school within the au-courant approach. A preprandial demi-baguette is laid straight on the tablecloth—no board, no basket, no plate; nothing is chicer, or extra beautiful, than beautiful nonchalance. (A puck of butter is complimentary, although you possibly can degree as much as a smear of Bordier, which, made in Brittany, is reputed to be the most effective butter on the earth, for an additional 5 {dollars}, and additional loaves of bread will price you twelve.) Rose performs her Frenchiness to the hilt, with respectable renditions of bistro staples like roast hen, frogs’ legs, escargot, and a ladylike composition of chilled shrimp and grapefruit supremes. However her kitchen is healthier when it’s being a bit bizarre. A starter of oeuf mayonnaise options the eggs sliced hasselback-style, their scored openings piped with salty aioli and pink waves of watermelon radish as ruffly and surreal as a pair of nudibranchs. A dish of chilled beef terrine in aspic is extra hanging nonetheless, with cross-sections of carrot and leek organized in cool geological strata round a layer of chilly beef barely fuzzy with chilled fats. The gelée round it, made with muscat-grape juice and beef consommé, is tart and savory, and a horseradish cream is neatly sharp, if not fairly bracing. A scallop crudo is made appealingly unusual with smoked crème fraîche and chunky slivers of pickled citrus zest that carry an herbaceous, virtually resinous chew.
Nonetheless, most of what I attempted at Marcel was pretty unremarkable, and some dishes had been downright bleak. Poireaux et Poires Poivrés is a delight to say (God, I like ingredient wordplay), however relatively much less of 1 to eat—a free stack of braised leeks with tender poached pears in a murky, muddy-brown truffle French dressing. A boilerplate steak tartare is served with gaufrette chips which might be curiously not fairly crisp. A primary course of poulet au paprika, a nod to Marcel Breuer’s Hungarian origins, is solely a head-scratcher: a deboned leg atop a skinny, bitter paprika sauce, with a dollop of sauerkraut and a strewing of uncooked bell pepper. With its joyless austerity, the dish bears virtually no resemblance to precise hen paprikás, which is boisterous and dense and, crucially, ought to contain a substantial portion of hearty starches to sop all of it up. (A majority of the restaurant’s primary programs, notably, eschew carbs.)
Desserts are the standout. The madeleines are baked to order in precise scallop shells, and served with a aspect of jam.
Then there’s the Lobster Giverny, a Chef Rose invention that’s distinctive to Marcel, that includes a roasted lobster tail in a stupendous ginger-scented cream sauce constructed on a base of intense lobster inventory, with bits of roast pineapple and tart leaves of nasturtium. What this has to do with Giverny, the place Monet lived and painted, I have never acquired a clue, nevertheless it was the savory menu’s most assured presentation, as fairly as a portray. The cocktails are fantastic, however their vessels are even higher: a Kir Royale in a swish flute with a flared bubble on the backside, a smoky Rosita in a multi-hued cut-glass tumbler. I’ve been ordering Cosmos in all places currently—they’re having a second, and I’m embarrassingly nostalgic—and I almost fell off my mohaired banquette when Marcel’s model arrived in glassware straight out of a nineties Michael Gravesian fever dream, its bowl tulip-lipped, its stem almost a foot excessive.
The true star of a meal at Marcel is dessert, the area of the pastry chef Rae Gaylord. Her madeleines are baked to order in precise scallop shells, they usually arrive nonetheless steaming, tender of crumb and barely candy, with a small pot of tea-scented jam. A dish of pedigreed, ruby-like strawberries comes with a long-legged coupe of Chantilly cream. However this isn’t a restaurant constructed for restraint; flip your attentions to Les Grands, a collection of jumbo desserts, every large enough to feed a quorum. There’s a whole salad bowl of chocolate mousse, completely bitter and wealthy, and a Paris-Brest the circumference of a tricycle wheel, with monumental puffs of hazelnut mousse and a dripping seam of blackberry jam. I almost ordered the mille-feuille, which is available in cinderblock-sized hunks, till a neighboring desk caught my companion and me eyeing theirs and pantomimed an emphatic no. Loads of drama, however apparently much less payoff. On my approach out, I paused to admire a sixty-seven-million-year-old T. rex tooth that rests in a glass case by the door: it’s yours to buy at public sale, for an estimated forty to sixty thousand {dollars}, in Sotheby’s upcoming Pure Historical past sale. There’s one thing refreshing, in a resigned kind of approach, about discovering your self in a restaurant that is aware of the worth of every thing—and the value, too. ♦
