When the writer Robert Gerber moved to New York in 1979, he met an artist named Andy Warhol and a wealthy socialite named James Mellon Curley. The three of them, always looking for a good party, became fast friends.
Their evening routine included a drink in the Plaza hotel, dancing at Studio 54 and dinner at Le Veau d’Or, a jewel box of a French restaurant on the Upper East Side covered in wood panels and a homey painting of a sleeping calf. There were more famous French restaurants nearby, like La Grenouille and La Caravelle, yet this one drew guests like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Orson Welles.
Le Veau d’Or, which opened in 1937, “was much smaller and much less pretentious,” recalled Mr. Gerber, 69. “You could go here and have a great French meal for much less money.”
As the bistro scene moved downtown, Le Veau d’Or became more passé than posh — until this past July, when it was reopened to great fanfare by the chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, best known for their dynamic, perennially packed neo-bistros, Frenchette and Le Rock. I recently met Mr. Gerber at the new Veau d’Or, where he was excited just to be back.
It was the same, low-slung dining room, he observed, but with shinier red banquettes, crisper checked tablecloths and cute touches like calf-shaped creamers repurposed as miniature planters. He loved the duck, whose skin crackled like a potato chip and sang with peppercorns, and the lobster, served chilled in its shell with tiny cubes of radish and fennel. But the place somehow felt different, he said. It wasn’t as quiet. He didn’t see many people he knew.
Le Veau d’Or wants to be timeless: a restaurant both for its former regulars and for those who have never heard of it until now. And the owners say they hope to achieve this not by overhauling the place, but by restoring it. The wood panels have been refurbished. The checkered floor pattern from the 1950s is back. Even the food comes from menus past, and includes those classically French dishes that have fallen out of fashion in modern bistros, like tripes à la mode, drenched in a lush Calvados and cider sauce, or tête de veau ravigote, poached calf’s head with a tart, mustardy sauce.
“We wanted to keep it intact but refresh it,” Mr. Nasr told me. “Give it a little buff, a little shine and let it breathe.”
How does one measure a restaurant against its predecessor without having visited the original? I tracked down several former patrons, dined with them at the new Veau d’Or, and asked them what made the old one so special.
“It felt like eating in a little bistro in Paris,” said Daniel Halpern, a poet and book publisher. “It didn’t overstep itself.” Louise Grunwald, a former Vogue editor, said she loved the informal, “clubhouse” feel. Graydon Carter, the former editor in chief of Vanity Fair, said the restaurant was “always half-full, in a nice way.”
And the food? “Old-fashioned,” said André Bishop, the producing artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. “Good but not fancy, but comforting.”
The new Le Veau d’Or is certainly not the same as the old Le Veau d’Or.
For starters, thanks to Mr. Hanson and Mr. Nasr’s cachet, the restaurant has become a hot reservation. Tables fill up weeks in advance. Dinner is not cheap: $125 per person for a prix-fixe menu of three courses and a salad (a wonderful one, with plenty of herbs and a sharp vinaigrette).
The food, overseen by the chefs Jeff Teller, Charlie Izenstein and Michelle Palazzo, is more than just good — it’s precise and often fancy, with all the technical finesse these restaurateurs are known for. Your steak will never be overcooked, the béarnaise will always be glossy, and the escargots — bouncy, pastry-topped receptacles for garlic and herbs — will be as satisfying as any you’ll find in a Parisian restaurant. And just try not to be delighted when the lemon butter-soaked frogs’ legs arrive at your table, sizzling like a plate of fajitas. Or when the île flottante, an airy swirl of meringue suspended in cream, tastes like a superlative bowl of Lucky Charms.
The wines are anything but old-fashioned. All are organic and French, and most are young, and the succinct list by Jorge Riera will make even the wine-clueless feel clued in.
But there’s a palpable tension between the old-school sensibilities of the restaurant and the modern sensibilities of the restaurant group running it. At times, Le Veau d’Or feels too youthful for its older diners, and too old for its younger ones.
Mr. Halpern said the new version “seems stiffer and kind of self-conscious of being the new Le Veau d’Or.” Mr. Carter said he couldn’t stand the noise in the dining room, which was so packed the night we ate together that I had to nudge people out of the way to reach the restroom.
Even as a staunch Francophile, I could have lived without some of the more wistful dishes — like the oeuf en gelée, a soft-boiled egg suspended in a cylinder of gelatinized consommé that seemed more antique than exciting. Or Les Délices “Veau d’Or,” a trio of kidney, liver and sweetbreads saturated in a mustard and Cognac-spiked jus whose overall effect was unrelentingly rich.
The prix-fixe menu — a nod to the old format and an effort to build more financial certainty into dinner service, Mr. Nasr said — allows diners to choose all three courses, but also means that a table of four ends up with 12 sizable and often heavy dishes, not including salad and bread.
The service aims to be as intimate and charming as in a Paris bistro, and it often is. I appreciate how the servers drape napkins over your errant drips and spills on the table, like a playful scolding. But when the staff is really bustling, you may be forgotten. On one visit, we had to ask for our wine glasses to be refilled, and flag a server twice to get ice.
I admire Mr. Hanson and Mr. Nasr’s desire to bring back a restaurant where you can linger leisurely without being hustled out, where the servers remember your name and the atmosphere is both stylish and serene. That restaurant sounds wonderful to me.
Here is the reality: Because of all those lingering guests, the compact dining room often teems with people who have no place to wait. And it might be difficult to become a regular unless you’re willing to camp out on the restaurant’s reservations website.
Le Veau d’Or has all the makings of a joyful and much-needed escape to a bygone era. Maybe when the buzz calms down, it can settle into the role.
Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.
The post Can Le Veau d’Or Turn Back Time? It’s Trying. appeared first on New York Times.
