BENOIT is better — a lot better. After a bleak first year, Alain Ducasse’s midpriced Midtown bistro is finally a place you want to revisit. Executive chef/partner Pierre Schaedelin has modernized the menu and mostly tamed the kitchen’s errant ways. And how about that $19 two-course lunch deal?
That’s right, $19 — a number almost impossible to grasp, even in a time when eateries are coming up with every peanutsy offering they can to fill half-empty dining rooms.
The combos I had were anything but stingy, and included hearty country pâté and puff pastry-crusted salmon that was nothing like its often-wintry coulibiac cousin, thanks to a sunny layering of julienned vegetables and tarragon sauce.
Another time, it was a bright summer salad of crisp Boston lettuce, baby tomatoes, green beans, lima beans and cucumber, followed by slow-baked pork butt — a moist, boneless hunk with mustard-spice crust and mustard sauce for good measure. Maybe the best lunch bargains around, they’re a good introduction to what the recharged kitchen can do.
By now everyone knows poor Benoit’s saga. It opened in spring of 2008 soon after the well-received launch of Ducasse’s much pricier Adour, but delivered none of Adour’s fireworks — only plodding interpretations of French bistro classics and of war horses from La Cote Basque, which once occupied Benoit’s space.
Turgid write-ups from all corners and slow business drove Ducasse to blame the floperoo on “journalists” who didn’t “educate” locals about French bistro cuisine. But deep down he knew something was wrong, and he took the more constructive step of bringing in Schaedelin last December.
Schaedelin, who was once the head chef at Le Cirque, gave Benoit its pride back. The menu still has quenelles, but no longer cassoulet that no one ordered even in January. Limp french fries “L’Ami Louis”-style gave way to plain french fries, thin and crisp in the American way. Baffling desserts like “Mister Mystere” were guillotined for sweet and
sensuous vanilla millefeuille and nougat glace.
Best of all, the French and American menu has more than a whiff of the season. There’s color, too, especially in appetizers — among them, an engaging “tatin tart” of red and yellow tomatoes and ricotta, encircled by fava beans and black olive tapenade. Crab “salad” is nearly all-crustacean, with lump meat in delicate citrus dressing atop celery remoulade.
Dishes like these would be right at home at Gotham Bar & Grill or Aureole. They’d be more at home at Benoit if you could see them; even with mirrors all around, the blur of blond wood, brass trim and red velvet banquettes is gloomily under-lit, and it’s a mystery why they don’t turn the juice up on those pretty sconces and chandeliers.
As is true at many restaurants today, Benoit’s pricing is all over the map. The $19 two-course lunch and $35 three-course dinner options are a steal. But a dinner entree like smallish Colorado lamb chops — good enough but hardly special — is, at $36, a steal in favor of the house.
And at night, the floor team sometimes undercuts the kitchen. While greeters, floor managers and sommeliers are warm and poised, the guys who actually take your order seem greener than the fava beans. When a waiter began talking up the specials, we politely told him we were still waiting for the fourth diner in our group; but he plowed right ahead reciting the list as if such breaking news couldn’t wait.
But the big news out of Benoit is on the plate. Let’s hope New Yorkers haven’t been so turned off to the place not to give it another try. And at lunchtime, the ticket of admission is all of $19.
scuozzo@nypost.com