The Omnivorous Fish

I actually wrote this on a different site a while back, but I saw it today, and it’s not bad, so here it is:

Being, as I am, a leftist, Northeastern, bleeding heart, working-class pseudo-intellectual, it will come as no surprise that I lived in France for a while. Nearly anyone who has spent much time there often spends their restaurant-going efforts once home trying to replicate the delicate and deliberate relationship that the French have with restaurants. Especially for those of us who spent time in the countryside, which is fast disappearing in Western Europe, there is a long tradition of bistros and cafes who lack a menu. This is not the authentic history of a degustation: they only make one thing. In his seminal tome, “The Lutece Cookbook,” Andre Soltner recollects the sign in the window of the cafe in town he and his mother ate at when they went into town: Tarte a l’oignon pret a quatre heures (Onion tart ready at four o’clock). When I was in Annecy, there was more than one restaurant that sold almost entirely cheese. You went to one to have raclette, the other specialized in tartiflette. I had a friend who was Jewish, and we had to call ahead to get a special tartiflette made for her without bacon. There was nothing else on the menu.

Other restaurants were almost dining rooms to a home kitchen where local specialties were executed with the same attention to detail and authenticity that they had been for- in some cases- hundreds of years, largely without much technological innovation, although I will never understand the French preoccupation with the electric knife.

People rarely are able to find that experience stateside, largely because most of the people who understand that aesthetic and are willing to invest in that kind of relationship with their customers file towards the upper echelons of the dining world. The attention to detail and love of the craft of cooking, in addition to an understanding and appreciation of truly good ingredients remains by and large within the realm of quasi-elitist “fine dining” establishments. Since it is often, especially in New York, so expensive to gather the talent and products necessary for sublime cooking, from a business perspective it just makes sense to add white tablecloths and silver flatware and charge more.

Occasionally, however, you find a restaurant desirous of providing its customers with a magnificent meal in a comfortable, but not luxurious, setting at price that’s appropriate for an occasion no more enthralling than, say, a day ending in “y.” One such restaurant is Le Singe Vert (the green monkey). Located in good, old Chelsea, it is one of a series of sidewalk-tabled bistros along Seventh Avenue. Nothing about it makes it stand out especially, although its dark-wood exterior signals it as something different from the high-concept designs of most of the places nearby.

The menu is simple, elegant and straightforward. There are some fresh ideas, but the list is grounded in old favorites. The website claims that the food has Senegalese influences, but the only meaningful evidence of that is the restaurant’s name, which is borrowed from a bistro in Senegal (unless a renaissance of soy sauce has taken place in West Africa that I am unaware of). The wine list, around a hundred bottles, is entirely French with one sparkling Spanish exception. It is a geographically thorough list with a few values, and although it’s not a list of bargains, it’s hardly overpriced. At least a third of the wines are available by the glass, and the selections beg experimentation, especially for the oenologically curious (Cahors, red Sancerre, Bandol).

In addition to the printed menu, there are almost always specials, usually seasonal. On a recent visit they included a substantial but not overly filling salad of beets, haricots verts (green beans, but very fine, narrow, excellent green beans) and roquefort, built into a little vegetal blockade around some mache, garnished with toasted walnuts, all dressed with an unadorned, marvelously traditional vinaigrette. A few weeks before, poached leeks with the same vinaigrette shared a plate with its classical accouterment: chopped hardboiled eggs. This may not seem especially earth-shattering, but I assure you it was a memorable marriage of classic tastes, expertly prepared. From the regular menu, the snails are the textbook Burgundian style snails of many expat dreams. Served, thankfully, without the ceremony of their shell- which is entirely disingenuous; the vast majority of snails eaten in restaurants around the world are canned- they emerge from their buttery depths to deliver a meaty, chewy burst of salt, garlic and butter and can reduce most sensible people, myself among them, to bread-mopping troglodytes. The pate is very good, but unremarkable as pates go, and the charcuterie plate, whose components are plentiful and well-intentioned, were not all alike in quality. It consisted of prosciutto, rosette de lyon (a dry salami made from pork shoulder), garlic saucisson (fattier, softer) and duck rilletes (leg meat cooked in fat, shredded and served like a spread). It had a few olives scattered around, with a small salad and a little ramekin of (forgettable) dijon mustard. I felt it would have benefitted from a few of the inexplicably absent cornichons,

The main courses were no less bread-reachingly inspiring. There was a duck breast, with leg confit, just on the medium side of medium-rare, with a rich fig sauce and sauteed potatoes. Several beef dishes were uniformly excellent, a hanger steak, bloody and luscious, a shell steak frites with excellent fries and salad would scratch any francophile itch. On a visit several weeks ago, when the weather was more in tune, a leg of lamb was sliced into beautiful pieces of dense flesh with a crust of herbs, laid out on a stew-like bed of tender beans. Fish is equally represented, although that will have to be a separate review (no one has felt much like fish, recently, for some reason). They have also expanded into oysters, which will be reported on subsequently as well.

Desserts, also, will be absent from this review. Although mildly curious about a coconut creme caramel, the only thing that can be definitely said is avoid the creme brulee. It isn’t bad so much as unworthy of its calories.

The restaurant is a double storefront, with a long dark wood bar along the wall. A lot of things are dark, like the room itself. So dark, at times, that the table’s candle was handy for perusing the menu and wine list. A little more light would also be convenient for deciphering the hand signals necessary to communicate, since after a certain hour the music can get, er, intrusive. Although I have heard complaints about this in regard to this restaurant in the past, in truth we only experienced this once, later in the evening on a weekend. The crowd varies a lot; it is a neighborhood place to be sure and it is utterly without ceremony (in a good way). The service is good, when it’s there, but we estimated there were as many as ten tables for each waiter. Tellingly, on three visits in three different sections of the restaurant, we had the same waitress. The thin stretching of the waitstaff led to things like having to ask about the specials, a slightly frantic ordering process and a noticeable delay from seating to server. People who eat in Manhattan restaurants all the time, however, may be so used to this that it becomes invisible.

At the end of the day, Le Singe Vert is not like the dining room in someone’s country house. It makes more than one thing, and there is no doubt that it is anywhere but New York, but it offers its customers a quality meal, at moments even a sublime meal, in an approachable setting and at a price that can let everybody get a taste of it.

Le Singe Vert

160 7th Ave
Bet. 19th & 20th St

Phone: 212-366-4100
Fax: 212-366-9570