How French Should a Restaurant Be?

The onslaught of intensity works, thanks to choices the restaurant makes in portioning (not overlarge) and service (not over-rushed), which gives the palate a bit of time to regroup between happy sighs. In this respect, Chateau Royale is evocative of Libertine, Pruitt’s other restaurant, a sexy, cream-worshipping West Village bistro where I’ve often felt that diners ought to receive a complimentary handful of Lactaid pills along with the bread and butter. As at Libertine, Chateau Royale offers virtually no detours from the richness, even when you might think you’re ordering something light. An endive salad, for example, is tossed in a decadent anchovy dressing, and further enriched with a snowfall of shaved Mimolette cheese. The sauce for the duck a l’orange, bright with bergamot and calamansi, is sticky and glossy. A scallop crudo gets swaddled in plush, thanks to a sauce grenobloise, made of brown butter with capers, funked up a bit with miso, and thick as peanut butter.

There is one jarringly American intrusion into all this Frenchness, a perhaps unnecessary flourish on a menu whose extravagances are otherwise more discreet: the beggar’s purse, a one-bite canapé in which crème fraîche and osetra caviar are bundled up inside a chewy crêpe and tied with a ribbon of chive. While it is often, apocryphally, said to have originated in France, it’s a New York icon through and through: in the eighties and nineties, the beggar’s purse was the signature morsel of the Quilted Giraffe, the era’s most sizzling-hot restaurant. (As it happens, Chateau Royale’s executive chef, Brian Young was a cook at the Quilted Giraffe back then.) Thanks, perhaps, to its insouciant, class-warface-inciting name, the beggar’s purse became a sensation, helped, no doubt, by its face-melting price tag: when the item débuted, in 1981, the Quilted Giraffe charged thirty dollars apiece; by the end of the decade, it was fifty dollars. Chateau Royale’s beggar’s purses run thirty-nine dollars per ping-pong-ball-size bundle—depending on how you look at it, this is either a scandal or a hell of a deal.