LONG AGO, the city's French restaurants busied themselves with haute cookery and haute ambience. These days, they've ceded much of the white-tablecloth territory to other cuisines and disguised ambition under scruff at all manner of bistros and bars à vin: Claud, Place des Fêtes, Le Dive, the list goes on. The newest and perhaps most eagerly hyped arrival in this overcrowded genre is Libertine, tucked in a petrol-blue corner about as far west as the West Village goes, where the Hudson stands in for the Canal Saint-Martin. Its menus are movable chalkboards, just as they would be in any low-ceilinged hideaway in the 11th; its patron libertine is Serge Gainsbourg, peering down from above a prime table.
Since it opened in May, the restaurant has gone from a whispered tip among those who know to a near-impossible booking for those who can. The best reservation I could manage during a sleepy week in dog-day August was for 5:30 p.m., an hour that doesn't incline to libertinism. On the upside, if you're eating the kind of bistro cooking that requires an alp-size mound of butter like the one that is clearly visible over chef Max Mackinnon's shoulder in the open kitchen, you may cherish the extra time to digest.
Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin September 11 - 24, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye New York magazine dergisinin September 11 - 24, 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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