What Marcel Is Selling

The menu, from the French chef Marie-Aude Rose, who also runs La Mercerie, is old-fashioned in the au-courant way. A preprandial demi-baguette is laid directly on the tablecloth—no board, no basket, no plate; nothing is chicer, or more exquisite, than exquisite nonchalance. (A puck of butter is complimentary, though you can level up to a smear of Bordier, which, made in Brittany, is reputed to be the best butter in the world, for an extra five dollars, and further loaves of bread will cost you twelve.) Rose plays her Frenchiness to the hilt, with respectable renditions of bistro staples like roast chicken, frogs’ legs, escargot, and a ladylike composition of chilled shrimp and grapefruit supremes. But her kitchen is better when it’s being a little weird. A starter of oeuf mayonnaise features the eggs sliced hasselback-style, their scored openings piped with salty aioli and pink waves of watermelon radish as ruffly and surreal as a pair of nudibranchs. A dish of chilled beef terrine in aspic is more striking still, with cross-sections of carrot and leek arranged in cool geological strata around a layer of cold beef slightly fuzzy with chilled fat. The gelée around it, made with muscat-grape juice and beef consommé, is tart and savory, and a horseradish cream is neatly sharp, if not quite bracing. A scallop crudo is made appealingly strange with smoked crème fraîche and chunky slivers of pickled citrus zest that carry an herbaceous, almost resinous bite.

Still, most of what I tried at Marcel was fairly unremarkable, and a few dishes were downright bleak. Poireaux et Poires Poivrés is a delight to say (God, I love ingredient wordplay), but rather less of one to eat—a loose stack of braised leeks with soft poached pears in a murky, muddy-brown truffle vinaigrette. A boilerplate steak tartare is served with gaufrette chips that are curiously not quite crisp. A main course of poulet au paprika, a nod to Marcel Breuer’s Hungarian origins, is simply a head-scratcher: a deboned leg atop a thin, bitter paprika sauce, with a dollop of sauerkraut and a strewing of raw bell pepper. With its joyless austerity, the dish bears almost no resemblance to actual chicken paprikás, which is boisterous and dense and, crucially, should involve a considerable portion of hearty starches to sop it all up. (A majority of the restaurant’s main courses, notably, eschew carbs.)

Then there is the Lobster Giverny, a Chef Rose invention that’s unique to Marcel, featuring a roasted lobster tail in a stupendous ginger-scented cream sauce built on a base of intense lobster stock, with bits of roast pineapple and tart leaves of nasturtium. What this has to do with Giverny, where Monet lived and painted, I haven’t got a clue, but it was the savory menu’s most assured presentation, as pretty as a painting. The cocktails are wonderful, but their vessels are even better: a Kir Royale in a graceful flute with a flared bubble at the bottom, a smoky Rosita in a multi-hued cut-glass tumbler. I’ve been ordering Cosmos everywhere lately—they’re having a moment, and I’m embarrassingly nostalgic—and I nearly fell off my mohaired banquette when Marcel’s version arrived in glassware straight out of a nineties Michael Gravesian fever dream, its bowl tulip-lipped, its stem nearly a foot high.

The real star of a meal at Marcel is dessert, the domain of the pastry chef Rae Gaylord. Her madeleines are baked to order in actual scallop shells, and they arrive still steaming, soft of crumb and barely sweet, with a small pot of tea-scented jam. A dish of pedigreed, ruby-like strawberries comes with a long-legged coupe of Chantilly cream. But this is not a restaurant built for restraint; turn your attentions to Les Grands, a selection of jumbo desserts, each big enough to feed a quorum. There’s an entire salad bowl of chocolate mousse, perfectly bitter and rich, and a Paris-Brest the circumference of a tricycle wheel, with enormous puffs of hazelnut mousse and a dripping seam of blackberry jam. I nearly ordered the mille-feuille, which comes in cinderblock-sized hunks, until a neighboring table caught my companion and me eyeing theirs and pantomimed an emphatic no. Plenty of drama, but apparently less payoff. On my way out, I paused to admire a sixty-seven-million-year-old T. rex tooth that rests in a glass case by the door: it’s yours to purchase at auction, for an estimated forty to sixty thousand dollars, in Sotheby’s upcoming Natural History sale. There’s something refreshing, in a resigned sort of way, about finding yourself in a restaurant that knows the value of everything—and the price, too. ♦