LCB Brasserie Rachou

I should be careful what I wish for, I guess: when I turned up unannounced on Friday night and asked for a table for four at Chubo, we were told that the restaurant was booked solid. So instead we hopped in a cab and went uptown, to another great yet underappreciated NYC restaurant, LCB Brasserie Rachou.

When my friend Simon was looking for a nice romantic place to celebrate his wife's 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago, I thought of LCB Brasserie; he went, and came away raving about it. Maybe slightly more expensive than a typical upscale French bistro, he said, but with vastly better food and service.

Frank Bruni gave it two stars back in 2004, and I'd recommend that he return, since it's certainly better now than it was then. Cheaper, too: the choucroute he complains about paying $30 for is now $24. The main courses are just as wonderful as the ones Bruni had and raved about, but the desserts, which Bruni was unsure about, are now divine – especially the soufflé. The words "the best dessert I've ever had" were uttered. And I'm not going to forget my pike quenelles any time soon – they were just gorgeous. Better, I have to say, than the ones I had at La Caravelle just before it closed.

LCB Brasserie, just like its stuffier predecessor La Côte Basque, specialises in traditional French cuisine. So while it's always fun to be adventurous in a restaurant, I'd highly advise the opposite here: the more old-fashioned the dish, the better it's likely to be. It doesn't need to be posh – the choucroute was amazing – but it certainly can be: I can't imagine going anywhere else for Dover sole meurniere.

And while the wine list is predictably heavy on the Bordeaux, it's also reasonably imaginative and surprisingly low-priced: at the high end, bottles can go for hundreds of dollars less than they would cost at, say, Veritas, while at the low end there's a lot of interesting stuff in the $30 to $70 range, including some fantastic Bordeaux. We had a stunning New Zealand pinot noir which, I was gratified to see, came with a screw top: the more that grand restaurants serve great wine from screw-top bottles, the less of a stigma will be attached to them, and the sooner we can do away with anachronistic and unreliable corks for the vast majority of our wine.

LCB Brasserie is not as popular as it deserves to be, which is a shame. Certainly, anybody who loved La Côte Basque or who never got around to going there or who was put off by its prices or its dress code should head to its successor forthwith. The food is just as good, and the interior, the biggest change in the restaurant, is in many ways improved. Plus, you don't need to wear a tie. If there were any justice in this world, a large chunk of the lunch crowd at Michael's, on the same block, would move a few doors down the street and start getting much better food at much lower prices. But Jean-Jacques Rachou will never emphasize healthy, low-calorie dishes, even if his salads are excellent. Thank God.

Posted by Felix at 17:18 EST