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Benoit is Alain Ducasse’s restaurant, and Ducasse is the most decorated French chef in the world. The space, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th Street, once housed Jean-Jacques Rachou’s very good brasserie, LCB, and, before that, Rachou’s fabled monument to haute cuisine, La Côte Basque. So here at last was a brasserie conceived by Parisians for Parisians. Here, at last, was the real thing.

But we hadn’t been in our chairs for more than three minutes before the grumbling commenced. All New York brasseries are, by nature, fakes. But astonishingly, Benoit is faker than most. The old La Côte Basque space has been chopped up to accommodate a dimly lit bar room, the walls of which are plastered in black and white stripes like the bathrooms on a riverboat casino. The cramped dining room is paneled with what looks like blond laminated siding, and the ceiling has been painted with blue sky and clouds in a desperate attempt to create a sense of light and space. The banquettes are covered with crushed red velour, as you would expect, but the tiny chairs look like they’ve been heisted from a second-rate Parisian railway café. There is no wine rack in evidence, no raw bar piled high with overpriced oysters and recently unfrozen shrimp. “I feel like I’m at the casino at Paris, Las Vegas,” said one of the grumps at my table. “I feel like I’m at the Hyatt,” said another.

Do they serve onion-soup gratinée at the Hyatt in the same dun-colored crockery that your grandmother used to admire? I bet they do. Ducasse went to great lengths to adapt his upscale restaurant, Adour, to the fickle New York palate, but the tedious, connect-the-dots menu at Benoit makes Balthazar seem like a hotbed of culinary invention. The little crock of onion soup tastes, well, like onion soup, and the escargot are shell-less and capped with possibly too much chopped parsley (“nursery-school escargot,” one of the grumps called them). The charcuterie platter contains a few pallid flaps of ham and prosciutto, while the presentable wheel of foie gras confit is served with nothing but a slice of toasted brioche. Foie gras makes only one other appearance (in between layers of veal tongue, as part of an ancient, unappetizing dish called “Lucullus-style langue du veau”), and the only pâté is a classic en croûte recipe (good, coarse country pâté, specked with pistachios and sealed in a bread-and-aspic crust), which, the menu proudly tells us, was invented in 1892.

— Adam Platt

Pâté en croûte, duck à l’orange, tarte Tatin.

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New York Magazine Reviews

• Adam Platt's Full Review (7/14/08)
• Gael Greene's Full Review (5/12/08)