The thing about Paris is that it never ages — like great cheese, it is pre-aged. Innovation burbles where it finds a foothold, and the city is no more immune to fads than anywhere else (voilà, the squeeze-bottle avant-gastronomy championed by the sages of Le Fooding or the scruffy little caves along the Canal Saint-Martin offering fizzy jugs of natural wine), but the dominant mode remains one of august and justly self-confident history.
For years, when I covered the fashion industry, I went to Paris regularly and was never not surprised at the way even hundred-year-old institutions still compelled regular visits. I had some of the great meals of my pre-critic life at bistros like Benoît (b. 1912) and Le Voltaire (which started life as a café in the 1800s), where the late princess Lee Radziwill, rising regally from the next table over, accidentally tried to take my raincoat.
New York is nearly a newborn by comparison, and our attentions tend to focus on the new. This can be terrifically exciting and also terrifically exhausting. Once in a while, you long for a little must and fust.
Le Chêne (the Oak Tree) is a new restaurant with an old soul. Its proprietors, the married couple Alexia Duchêne and Ronan Duchêne Le May, relocated from Paris, where Alexia cooked at echt establishments like Allard (b. 1932) and appeared, a bit more modernly, on the French Top Chef. (She also had her own well-received restaurant, Datsha Underground, in the Marais, a COVID casualty.) In New York, Duchêne originally ran the kitchen at Margot in Fort Greene but parted ways after a month or two as the restaurant pursued a direction with a more contemporary slant. Le Chêne clearly revels in anachronism. Its menu groans with history. There aren’t, after all, too many places in the city that offer up a pithivier, a meat pie first introduced in Loire sometime in the early modern era.
A contemporary of mine sharply termed Duchêne’s style “nouvelle stodginess,” and while I’m hard-pressed to disagree, I’m also inclined to see this as a welcome thing. The restaurant is so resolutely uncool that it feels like a relief in the chaotically faddish restaurant scene. Duchêne gave her own name to the restaurant, but it’s a name with a particular thrust. Oaks can live 100 years or more, and Le Chêne mounts an ambitious campaign for permanence. Like a pair of aubergistes, Duchêne and Le May, who serves as the restaurant’s GM, live right upstairs.
Duchêne’s cooking, and Le May’s wines, are unapologetically French classic in all its statin-requiring glory. The Age of Ozempic has no purchase here. Foie gras abounds — whether encrusted as pâté en croûte, served cold as a slice of terrine, hugging an unblinking eye of artichoke, or making up the bedding beneath a perfectly rare platter of squab — and a regular côte de boeuf weighs in at around three pounds, for a Louis XIV–ish $350. (Fries are included.) Even dishes more country than court are dressed up. A dessert of cherry clafoutis, must be ordered, like a soufflé, at the outset of the meal. I wondered aloud whether Duchêne left her cherries unpitted; French cooking lore has it that the cherry stones lend a bitter-almond flavor to the finished pudding. “My grandmother would have,” said one of our servers, who, like each that I encountered, was a Frenchman with accent intact, “but this is a restaurant.”
And how. Anyone looking for the more New York style of bistro, with a bavette steak-frites and a few cracked-open oysters, has plenty of other places to look. Duchêne begins instead with a full section of amuses-bouches, little bites richer — in price and in heft — than many appetizers. A tiny baton of brioche is piped with uni, bone marrow, and a daub of red-pepper purée. A nugget of cod cheek is fried fish-and-chips crisp and crowned with a heap of caviar. Of these small indulgences, my favorite was a pair of shrimp tartlets, in crisp shells with crème fraîche and an unexpectedly sweet whisper of maple.
Clockwise from top left: The dining room’s impressive artwork, a pithivier, trophy empties at a service station, steak. Hugo Yu.
Clockwise from top left: The dining room’s impressive artwork, a pithivier, trophy empties at a service station, steak. Hugo Yu.
Among the larger dishes, it’s not uncommon to find sauces and accoutrements that suggest days of effort: bouillabaisse beneath halibut and a scallop quenelle, hoisin-textured huckleberry sauce with lamb ribs. Some are fabulous, like a cognac-sticky glaze on rare squab or the burnt-grapefruit conserve alongside the foie terrine, while others are effortful without obvious reward. I appreciate the homemade “beetroot condiment” that comes with the pithivier, a softball-size dome of puff pastry layered with potato, smoked eel, and minced pork farce, but I wondered at the point of reverse-engineering something to taste so exactly like McDonald’s barbecue sauce.
I didn’t love every dish I had at Le Chêne, but I did admire them all, as well as the fervor with which Duchêne has been swapping them in and out, tweaking until she’s satisfied. (The halibut, for instance, no longer comes with its scallop quenelle and bouillabaisse; instead, it gets a scattering of chanterelles and Romano beans.) There’s something admirable about such tenaciousness — maybe even alluring, to judge from the number of couples I saw fully making out at their tables. Or that may owe as much to the book-length wine list compiled by Le May and his team of sommeliers, whose efforts seem as much the draw of the restaurant as Duchêne’s. I don’t know how often a wine list of this continental seriousness has been seen on Carmine Street, much less next door to a Wingstop.
Many tables had ordered deep enough into the crus to earn their own decanters, and a central table in the dining room is dedicated to displaying the night’s ordered bottles, while a murderers’ row of big-dick empties circles the dining room as décor. If you want back vintages of Dujac, Roulot, Rayas, and Haut-Brion, they are here, matched in grandeur by the scrotal magnificence of a ten-liter demijohn of 20-year-old Mas Amiel Maury brought round on request with dessert.
That’s not to say you have to drink so unreachably to enjoy yourself; in all of my visits, Le May and his team never failed to point me to something delicious and (comparatively) affordable, whether that was a 2017 Chardonnay from Bodega Chacra, Roulot’s side hustle in Argentina, or a 2019 non-AOC Syrah from the Rhône icon Jean-Paul Jamet.
The lofty spirit, nevertheless, pervades. Let them drink natural wine, to borrow a phrase. At Le Chêne, I drank Chenin Blanc grown — I kid you not — in the vineyards of Versailles.
Big-Deal Décor
The art in the dining room — Basquiat, Warhol, Dubuffet — is courtesy of one of the restaurant’s investors, a gallerist who prefers to remain anonymous.
And a Teeny-Tiny Bar
The front room is dedicated to a demilune bar, which serves the full menu and in the future will have its own specials. (Le May mentioned Duchêne has been playing with the idea of a “fish burger.”)
See All
