Steve Cuozzo

Steve Cuozzo

Food & Drink

Rotisserie Georgette something new to cluck about

Rotisserie Georgette brings joyful, fat­dripping excess to the preening zone around Barneys, where pencil-waisted shoppers swapping selfies at Nello, Philippe and Le Bilboquet suddenly have a three-star interloper. Not for trend-chasing entrail-eaters, this suave, sexy brasserie proudly stands up for the old values in a culinary climate saturated with all things gelatinous and obscure.

I was skeptical when Georgette Farkas left her job as Daniel Boulud’s head flack to launch her own pricey restaurant — a honey trap that consumed many before her. But she’s launched Manhattan’s first great French-style rotisserie spot since short-lived, Gascony-inspired D’Artagnan, way back in 2001.

Customers who are neither critics nor celebrities may struggle to score tables at normal hours, like my neighbors who were snootily told they “don’t take” bookings between 8 and 10. While some waiters know the dishes and wines well, others haven’t a clue, asking if everything’s “all right” when you leave a morsel on your plate.

Farkas can get to the finer service points later. Her designers need no lessons. In the stately, high-ceilinged dining room aspiring to a Louis XV mood, structural girders, a 100-year-old brick wall and steel tables are softened by carpeting, sound-muffling upholstery and cognac leather banquettes.

Wall mirrors channel a mellow sheen from lampshade and candelabra sconces. They flatter faces and fashions not uniformly chic: Many hail from ZIP codes beyond body-mad 10021.

It’s best to order in advance the restaurant’s mushroom-stuffed “poule de luxe” for two, since it’s wildly popular.Gabi Porter

Farkas and chef David Malbequi wisely dispense with any “regional” claim, which usually interests the kitchen more than customers. The best starters cue the rotisserie pleasures to come. Skip smoked salmon for octopus grenobloise ($19) that’s nothing like the brown-butter cliché, but grilled with fingerling potatoes, tomato confit, lemon capers and croutons, each shining with laser precision through an olive oil mist.

The rotisseries — branded as “Grandes Flammes Millennium,” if you must know — gleam through a back-wall opening. The monsters are tough to master: All over town, birds twirl before your eyes into parched, flavorless oblivion. Malbequi says he brines chickens overnight to let them retain moisture inside while draining it from the skin. Since others make the same claim with little to show for it, we’ll credit his success to the mysterious alchemy behind the contraptions’ brass trim.

Roast half-chicken, a $24 bargain bird, made no impression on my first visit. A few weeks later, it drifted in on a fragrant Provençal breeze of marjoram, rosemary, thyme and oregano, floated up to heaven with wine, mushroom and bacon sauce.

It’s a worthy little sister to mushroom-stuffed “poule de luxe” for two ($72) that gives The NoMad’s exalted $79 bird a run for its precious feathers. The voluptuous specimen “must involve breast augmentation,” my wife giggled. The house has used chickens from different farms, but all achieved a tantalizing tension between moist breast and leg and crisp, greaseless skin.

The stuffing of wild mushrooms, panko breadcrumbs and herbs registers nearly as rich as NoMad’s foie gras and truffles. It occasionally runs out — a group next to mine half-cheerfully lamented, “We came from Ohio for it” — so I urge you to ­pre-order when booking.

Lemon confit brought an unaccustomed citric complexion to crackling-crusted lamb loin ($32). I expected whole loup de mer ($34) to flop after a long, slow ride in metal baskets attached to the rotisserie. Instead, perfectly filleted, it proved to be impossibly lush and uniformly tinted with olive and thyme from end to end.

Pastry chef Sohla El-Waylly’s charmingly decadent desserts include an ethereal, chilled citrus-and-mint number and a tarte tatin caramelized near-black.

Oddly, although served piping-hot twice before, our tarte tatin arrived cold on my last visit. But it was reassuring to know that the people in the kitchen are human, unlike their mysterious machines, which can do no wrong.