Le Veau d’Or Makes a Thrillingly Old-Fashioned Comeback

There are no add-ons at Le Veau d’Or, no sneaky little ways the restaurant tries to boost the price of your meal. There’s something perversely democratic about this, in a town full of restaurants smearing supplemental caviar on ice cream willy-nilly. On my first visit, I was fascinated to notice myself trying to somehow game the menu, strategically selecting the dishes that might get me the most bang for my buck. Why would a person choose to begin their evening with a petite omelette or a tomato salad when she could have the much ritzier pâté en croûte, or pommes soufflés with crème fraîche and trout roe? The answer, I realized, within the oddly liberating confines of the fixed-price format, is simply because she wants to: pleasure is its own (not insignificant) form of value. The omelette is silken and exquisite, a showpiece of technical precision, though the pâté is, too: savory and well-spiced in its pastry frame, shot through with golden veins of jellied consommé. The pommes, like three-dimensional potato chips, paper-thin and hollow inside, are awfully fun to snap open and pile with the cream and ruddy fish eggs.

This feeling of having entered a perfectionist time machine carries through to the next course. Crisp-skinned, pepper-crusted, perfectly tender magret de canard—the breast of a duck whose liver has gone for foie gras—is presented atop a pile of sweet and tangy stewed cherries, pink on pink. The chicken en cocotte, braised with cream and savory vin jaune from the Jura region, is one of those swoony classics that are both rustic and opulent at once; it comes alongside a dish of buttered Carolina Gold rice pilaf, a pairing so unexpectedly antiquated, so self-confidently out of style, that it circles around to fresh and silly and brilliant, straight out of an Alice B. Toklas dinner party. A one-and-a-half-pound lobster is poached to a satin texture and served chilled, in its shell; its accompanying macédoine, a salad of finely diced vegetables, gives it the air of something you might be offered at the most elegant possible luncheon (not lunch, luncheon). There’s a nice little steak, your choice of au poivre or with bearnaise, with nicely golden fries, but I would advise exploring the gigot of lamb instead: thick, ruby-rare slices with the tenderness and intensity of prime rib, next to a pile of pearlescent white beans fragrant with rosemary and tarragon.

This sort of old-fashioned food, in this sort of old-fashioned room, inevitably brings a certain air of pomp to the proceedings. But the most marvellous thing about Le Veau d’Or is how human and welcoming it feels. Despite the dapper pink jackets worn by the staff, there’s little starch to be found. Service is attentive, but in the way that friends are attentive. Jorge Riera, the restaurant’s wine director and, to my mind, a true oenophilic genius, wanders the puzzle-piece dining room dispensing splashes of this and that from his all-French list and offering tips for how best to get the caviar rouge to stay on a shattered pomme soufflé. The drinks menu includes a strikingly inventive Martini “our way” (it’s a two-in-one: a desert-dry gin cocktail, and a Sidecar spritzer of vermouth and Vichy Catalan), a take on the Marie Antoinette that’s titillatingly garnished with an inverted raspberry, and an unimpeachably genteel list of shots. When it’s time for dessert (overseen by the pastry chef Michelle Palazzo), trays emerge bearing grand old classiques like strawberries sabayon and a soupe de melon that features orbs of the fresh fruit in an airy blancmange, with a quenelle of sorbet. But nearly every table seems to understand the necessity of ordering the île flottante (floating island), a laborious confection of ancient pedigree, and one of Le Veau d’Or’s longtime signatures. It’s a swirly whip of meringue drizzled with caramel and studded with slivered almonds, adrift on a puddle of sweet, smooth crème anglaise. It’s been around for ages, it’s few people’s idea of a good time, it was nearly forgotten—but, in the right hands, a stodgy classic becomes a giddy delight. ♦