Cafe Cluny

Few restaurants fit as neatly into their neighborhoods as this competent, tidy, almost amusingly just-so little West Village bistro, which Lynn Wagenknecht and her partners opened several years back on the cobblestone corner of 12th and West 4th Streets. Wagenknecht’s casual, French-accented menus rarely vary (she still runs the Odeon, which she founded with her former husband, Keith McNally, along with its uptown doppelgänger, Café Luxembourg), and this restaurant has clearly been conceived as a more petite, stylish cousin to those established bookends, with a reliable daily breakfast service (yes, an acai bowl is served), a perpetually crowded (and stylish) weekend brunch service, and neighborly, moderately updated versions of old brasserie favorites (steak tartare, salad frisée aux lardons, steak-frites) for lunch and dinner.