Is there room for one more cookie-cutter French brasserie in this brasserie-addled town? That’s the question I wearily asked myself as I sat down to dinner at Benoit, the latest addition to the city’s vast, relentlessly expanding herd of escargot-serving, profiterole-peddling ersatz steak-frites joints. With me were a group of leather-stomached brasserie veterans, bilious curmudgeons who’d consumed bargeloads of frisée salad and whole oceans of onion soup during the course of their dining careers, and were as heartily sick of the genre as I was. I’d been able to coax them out of their caves for one reason, and one reason only. Benoit is Alain Ducasse’s latest New York restaurant, and Ducasse is the most decorated French chef in the world. The space, on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 55th Street, once housed Jean-Jacques Rachou’s very good brasserie, LCB, and, before that, Rachou’s fabled monument to haute cuisine, La Côte Basque. So here at last was a brasserie conceived by Parisians for Parisians. Here, at last, was the real thing.
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