There was a time, not so very long ago, when ambitious French haute cuisine restaurants opened with a splash in prominent skyscrapers and hotels all over midtown Manhattan. But as the shadowy, slightly opaque name suggests, La Silhouette is an haute cuisine restaurant for our new, post–haute cuisine era. It’s technically in midtown, but to find it, you’ll have to trudge several blocks from the subway to the borderlands of Hell’s Kitchen. The bar serves $15 cocktails and $97 bottles of Gevrey-Chambertin, but it’s barely big enough to seat six people. There are no linens on the tables, and the menus have a laminated sheen. The tiny, sunken dining room in the back is manned by professional waiters wearing neatly pressed vests, but it feels pokey and austere, like something you’d find in suburban Miami or off the lobby of a provincial European hotel.
But once dinner begins, the mood in the matchbox-size dining room begins to change. “This looks lovely,” muttered one of the grizzled Francophiles at my table as he examined an old-fashioned torchon of Hudson Valley foie gras, which was smooth as proverbial silk and served with two disks of Melba toast and a spoonful of delicately chopped pear chutney. The risotto appetizer I enjoyed one evening was wreathed in a vividly green parsley foam and scattered on top with boutique mushrooms (hen-of-the-woods) and a handful of crisped, garlicky snails from Burgundy. My neighbor’s beet salad was constructed in delicate layers, in the familiar Alfred Portale style, and if you order the pappardelle at this outwardly unassuming establishment, you’ll find that the flat, chewy noodles are rolled fresh every day, and smothered in a rich, faintly gamy wild-boar ragù.
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