Back to Pastis for a Second Helping of Nostalgia

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/13/dining/pastis-review.html

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In the fall of 1980, Patrick Clark, the first chef at Keith McNally’s first restaurant, the Odeon, helped introduce nouvelle cuisine to New York when it was all the rage in Europe. Nearly every place Mr. McNally has built since then has been a firm rejection of all that is fashionable in food, and each one has been, at least in its first few months, the most fashionable restaurant in town.

The one he opened in early June in the meatpacking district, Pastis, was assembled partly from the salvaged bones of a nearby restaurant he closed five years ago, Pastis. (He salvaged the name, too.) The onion soup, the meaty snails sloshing around in the divots of a black iron snail pan with what must be half a pint of garlic butter, and a few other old war horses from the original menu have been summoned for one more joust on the battlefield. In short, the new Pastis takes almost everything straight from the old Pastis, which in turn took almost everything from the stodgiest, least trend-conscious sort of French cafes and brasseries. Needless to say, reservations are harder to come by than at any other New York restaurant that’s opened this year.

The paradox of this is that Pastis is really meant for those nights when you decide to cancel your reservations at the little nine-seat tasting counter where the menu is inspired by Kieslowski’s “Decalogue.” It is for those times when you get an urge to eat a Gruyère omelet after 10 p.m., cooked medium-rare, flecked with herbs, skillfully rolled and staunchly backed up by a cold white from the Savoie. Urges like that do not typically announce themselves three weeks in advance, and they don’t tend to survive exposure to rooms filled with people who have read about Pastis on the blogs but haven’t yet figured out what it is for.

For much of his life, Mr. McNally has been chipping, cracking, distressing and weathering interiors that are the architectural equivalent of rumpled sweaters two sizes too large. Perhaps the largest and certainly the most rumpled of all is Pastis. It doesn’t have the corner entrance it had at its former address, or the long communal table that sliced through the front room like a surfboard. And the shelves of cigarette packs are definitely gone. (You could still smoke in restaurants in 1999, when Pastis opened.) But the magazine racks are back, along with the overhead fans turning steadily below a stamped tin ceiling. Once again the walls are covered with chipped subway tiles, white, framed by black grout. The chairs still don’t match.

The ambient light is the color of a Scotch and soda and makes everybody look the way they do after you’ve drunk one. On an antique mirror, or one that looks like an antique, someone has scrawled a menu of desserts, almost none of which Pastis actually serves. You can, however, get an energetically whisked dark-chocolate mousse under shaved curls of chocolate, or a baba au rhum so drenched in booze that it might spontaneously combust if it weren’t being restrained by a white dune of whipped Chantilly cream.

The most significant change from the first Pastis to the second happened offstage. Mr. McNally, who had a stroke two years ago, has brought on the restaurateur Stephen Starr as a partner who, essentially, manages everything except the design. Familiar faces from La Mercerie and other Starr enterprises work alongside loyal retainers from the McNally empire. The McNally troops are exquisitely poised, self-assured, able to spot a misplaced butter knife from across the street. The Starr cadre is more casual, and occasionally a server will ask your opinion of “the flavors so far,” a question that has surely never been uttered at Minetta Tavern.

Mr. Starr has oversight of the wine list, which is less conservative than a typical McNally lineup, and of the food, which has not been a strong suit of the McNally organization since the chefs Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr went out on their own. Pastis’s chef, Michael Abt, was until recently in charge of the kitchen at the Washington restaurant Le Diplomate, which Mr. Starr owns. Better qualifications would be hard to conjure, given that Le Diplomate is essentially an imitation McNally restaurant.

Taking his cues from the old days, Mr. Abt is putting out simple, unadorned, hunger-obliterating French cuisine drawn from the era before supermarkets and fast food. The salad of pickled herring and carrots with boiled potatoes might come straight from Brasserie Lipp.

The country pâté is laden with chicken livers and riddled with soft white pork fat in gobs the size of gumdrops, although it could stand more salt, and I’d be happy to trade the slab of butter that comes with it for a pot of mustard. The pâté is made in house, as is the gorgeously smooth boudin blanc. With the boudin, you want puréed potatoes that are almost liquid. That is what you get.

You might argue that, when it offers chilled king crab legs to be dipped in aioli, this unextravagant cafe breaks character. Does the same apply to garnishing sardines served in the can with an ingot of prized, costly butter made by Jean-Yves Bordier? Maybe. I thought, in any case, that the sardines and the olive oil they are packed in tended to talk over the butter.

The half roast chicken is not in the same class as the birds that Antoine Westermann cooked when he was still at Le Coq Rico, but it is probably as good a roast chicken as any normal restaurant can produce. The duck in olives, though, is misconceived; the sauce is thin, acrid and one-dimensional instead of head-spinningly rich, the way it is at Allard in Paris.

The seafood — the trout amandine with its sautéed skin taut beneath its armor of toasted almonds; steamed mussels in a lemon broth that’s satiny with melted butter; an entire steamed branzino with enough crisp summer vegetables to make a salad — is very appealing, though that won’t stop the people who are going to get steak frites without even a glance at the menu. Those people may get fries that are crunchy and golden, or they might end up with a limp, oily batch, or they may get both in the same night, as I did.

At the length of 20 years, memories are untrustworthy, but I’m reasonably sure the food at Pastis is better than it used to be. The wine is certainly more interesting.

What’s gone, and won’t be back now that the surrounding addresses have been taken over by shops like Loro Piana, Sephora, Hermès and RH, is the pure downtown electricity Pastis once generated. Sharing real estate with meat cutters in blood-smeared aprons and prostitutes in dresses as tight as the skins on a boudin blanc, Pastis did a drop-dead perfect imitation of the coolest restaurant in France. The French part was fake, but the cool was real.

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