French Restaurant Review: Le Crocodile, New York City

Step inside Le Crocodile, NYC’s best French brasserie blending Parisian charm with bold flavour combinations.

Allow me to shock you with a surprising revelation. Believe it or not, my favourite brasserie isn’t in Paris or Strasbourg or any French, or even European, city for that matter. Instead, it occupies the ground floor of a sturdy brick-and-timber building that was once a cooperage producing barrels for the adjacent sugar refineries that lined the riverfront in Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighbourhood that’s one of the liveliest ones in New York City.

Today, this formidable building has become the lovely Wythe Hotel, a good-value choice for visitors to New York City – like this whole quarter, since it’s just a single subway stop from Midtown but has lower prices and a lot more atmosphere. On its ground floor, the Wythe also has Le Crocodile, one of the best French restaurants in New York City and also one of the town’s most beautiful tables.

I discovered this terrific place last autumn thanks to my adored niece, Nora, a brilliant 20-something who lives in Brooklyn (where else?), and I have been back several times since. On the Indian summer night Nora and I met up, we began our evening at Bar Blondeau, the Wythe’s rooftop bar, which has stunning views of Manhattan across the East River, a brilliant mixologist (loathe that term, but that’s what they’re called in New York) and a moreish bar menu running to coronation chicken toast, Galician octopus and cacio pepe orzo (these small plates would make a nice supper, if you weren’t terribly hungry).

As a restaurant idiom, the Parisian brasserie had its origins in the simple taverns that flanked breweries in Alsace, Belgium and other beer-loving countries. These places served simple food to accompany the suds they brewed, and they entered the international gastronomic mainstream when Alsatians fleeing the German occupation of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war brought the brasserie to Paris.

The booming city responded well to these expedient, affordable restaurants, which subsequently got all dressed up for the International Exposition of 1900, when brasserie owners outdid themselves to give their restaurants glamorous décor.

Unfortunately, during the 1980s, most brasseries in Paris were bought up by a pair of blessedly now-defunct chains whose sharp-pencilled accountants savaged the quality of the food they served. Things have improved a bit since then. In Paris, I like Au Pied de Cochon, Vaudeville and La Coupole, but to my utter astonishment, none of these tables come anywhere near the quality of the cooking that chefs Jake Leiber and Aidan O’Neal send out at Le Crocodile. In fact, the menu is such a full flight of temptations that Nora (who’s as avidly gastronomic as I am) and I had a torturous time making our choice. Finally we decided to share a slice of the highly-recommended mushroom pâté with black truffles. For my first course, I chose a Waldorf salad, a wondrous composition of apples, celery, walnuts and Stilton and a profoundly indigenous dish, since it was originally created in the kitchen of New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, while Nora had a steak tartare. Then came the black truffle sausage with pomme purée and Calvados sauce for me, and steak frites for her.

Throughout our meal in this very beautiful dining room with its high ceilings, chandeliers of clustered milk-glass globes, exposed brick walls and excellent service, the quality of the produce was spectacular, and the cooking was as impressive for its precision as it was for its perfectly judged flashes of creativity.
The unctuous mushroom purée, a sort of super-concentrated duxelles, immediately became part of that gallery of dishes I crave when I’m very hungry, as did the intriguing Calvados sauce with the sausage – it would never have occurred to me to associate Normandy’s famous apple brandy with this constellation of produce, but the high-proof fruit distillation kissed the pork, teased the tuber and cuddled up with the purée like an old friend.

Desserts were superb as well, including maple crème brûlée and a sublime hazelnut and chocolate malt cake. Almost as importantly as the food it serves, Le Crocodile has that metropolitan thrum of an intriguingly diverse clientele having an absolutely wonderful time, that ambient noise level of chatter and fork and knives on plates regularly pierced by laughter. This wonderful restaurant also serves breakfast, brunch on the weekends, lunch, and an afternoon snack menu.

Le Crocodile, 80 Wythe Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11249, United States.

Tel. 1-718-460-8000

Average à la carte $80.

From France Today Magazine