Tom Douglas

Le Pichet/ by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor

We followed a French theme last night- first dinner at Le Pichet, and, after that, Candide at the Fifth Avenue Theater. (Candide is, of course, based on a work by the famous French Enlightenment writer, Voltaire; the music for the show was written by the great Leonard Bernstein.)

Whenever I eat at Le Pichet, I have the same thought: why don’t we eat here at least once a week?  First we enjoyed a small plate of mixed charcuterie which included a smooth chicken liver pate and lovely slices of Serrano ham.  Slices of beef tongue were also on the plate, but Frank ate them all before I could get a bite.  With our little pitcher of a French red and a plate of sliced baguette, we were pretty happy already. We also tried the whitefish rillettes tartines on a pea and red and white endive salad.  The creamy fish mixture on top of two toasts was very nice, but I liked the lively and tangy dressing on the crisp salad even better.  I was in the mood for the steak frites, which came with a delicious sauce of shallot, favas, and port, finished with duck liver butter, and Frank ordered the special, a tasty lamb brochette on couscous with radishes.

As always, the food at Le Pichet is satisfying and good. But that’s not even the main thing I like about the place.  Everything here looks and feels exactly as it should- the slim waitresses with the air of sophisticated gamines, the tiled floors, the chalkboard topped tables- all make me feel like I’m leisurely whiling away an evening in a real French bistro in Paris.

Sam Sifton, in Wednesday’s New York Times review of Prime Meats (why didn’t we eat there? We were in Brooklyn only a few weeks ago!) says, “the best restaurants give us a taste of the life we aspire to have.”  I might amend “the best” to “my favorite,” and that’s why sometimes all I want is to slouch into one of those tightly spaced tables at Le Pichet.

May 28th, 2010