Dated was the word one friend used after going to Benno, and if you’ve eaten there, too, you’ll know why. It’s as if the past 15 years in food never happened. The menu seems to be stuck in some time between 1994, when Thomas Keller bought the French Laundry, and 2004, when he opened Per Se with a young Jonathan Benno leading the kitchen.
The restaurant will probably be a tough sell to those diners who expect all restaurants to fall on a continuum between Noma and the Salt Bae place. But I prefer it to any number of newer, self-consciously modern restaurants, some of which are so determined to be of the moment that they might as well have a time stamp. Benno is not trying to be contemporary. It’s trying to be delicious. And it is, from start to finish, almost without exception.
Benno is the third of three dining operations that Mr. Benno opened last year in the Evelyn Hotel, on East 27th Street. It is the one where the prices, and presumably the stakes, are highest. We know it is a statement restaurant because Mr. Benno has put his name on it, for the first time in his career. Whatever the statement is, it is not forward-looking.
Most of the statement is in French (barigoule, mousseline, tête de veau, béarnaise), a significant part is in Italian (carnaroli risotto, garganelli verde, pecorino ginepro) and not one word is in Danish or Mandarin. The statement has a lot to say on the topics of stocks and purées and accurate chopping and patient skimming; it is entirely silent on the subjects of fermented vegetables, or foraging, or immigration, or food deserts, or hashtags.
The statement is delivered in a windowless hotel dining room to people sitting comfortably on black-leather chairs or velvet banquettes the color of a pinot noir from the Loire Valley. It takes the form of a fixed number of courses, three or four or five, your choice. One will be dessert and one a main course. None of them is a small plate meant for sharing. None is a large-format plate either, unless you count the veal sirloin chop that arrives on a silver platter in slices that are as pink and delicately shaded as the cheek on any blushing young aristocrat Fragonard ever painted.
French dishes like duck, foie gras and brik pastry, with pistachio-date filling, have an easy inevitability.CreditCaitlin Ochs for The New York Times
The presentations are not overly dramatic. They can be disarmingly modest, like the cold slice of fish terrine that appeared before the appetizers one night looking pale and somewhat lost. I barely noticed it. Then I tasted fennel and other bouillabaisse flavors and — excuse me, what was your name again? — I started to pay attention.
It is not news that the liquid yolk of an egg tastes good trickled over baby leeks, fingerlings, black-truffle froth and pioppini mushrooms the size of shirt buttons. But just how good it is makes an interesting item.
Lamb saddle, with grill marks that could come from a steakhouse, is served with fairytale eggplant and Thumbelina carrots. Each vegetable in this miniature garden is planted in a purée or a reduced essence of itself. Each is very good, and the carrots are fantastic. Alongside them sits lamb breast that has been pressed into a rich little brick coated in bread crumbs. One corner of this brick sits in a dark-green spread that tastes like gremolata. Not one combination of flavors on this plate is original, and it doesn’t matter at all.
The Italian food that Mr. Benno made at his last restaurant, Lincoln Ristorante, could be impressive, but I sometimes had the sense that he was cooking from the outside in, trying to unlock the flavors of Italy through process and method. The results didn’t always match the evident effort.
I still got a bit of that feeling from his food at Leonelli Taberna, in the back of the Evelyn lobby. It’s supposed to be the hotel’s casual Italian restaurant, and it would be if you didn’t sometimes catch the food trying to relax. Only a lasagna with green noodles below a dark field of browned béchamel seemed completely comfortable with itself. (On the streetside end of the hotel is a pastry shop and bakery selling two-foot-long flatbreads called focaccia that have more in common with Roman pizza al taglio.)
The cooking at Benno, overseen by Justin Skribner, the chef de cuisine, doesn’t appear to be plagued by a similar anxiety. The French ideas, like a drum of pig’s trotter under a fried quail egg with flageolets and other beans, or the darkly seared duck breast with melting foie gras and a savory triangle of duck leg, dates and pistachios in brik pastry, have an easy inevitability.
Pasta is unlikely to become the thing Benno is known for. Still, when the kitchen stretches to Italy, nice things happen. Lobster fra diavolo, with the bent shells called lumache, is a tribute to an American pop hit made over, in the Thomas Keller tradition, with maximum clarity and precision.
Spaghetti made with grano arso, or burned-wheat flour, tasted pleasantly toasted rather than incinerated as it soaked up the liquor of tiny hard-shell clams and a soft mass of very fresh sea urchin roe.
Technique never overplayed its hand in these dishes. The only time it came up short was when a drum of steelhead salmon poached in olive oil arrived slightly mushy and underdone. A week later, the fish was cooked more successfully.
The scope of the Evelyn’s dining operation is big enough to support a full-time baker (Lisa Kalemkiarian, responsible for Benno’s needle-tipped mini-baguettes, among other items) and pastry chef (Lindsey Bittner, whose desserts include a rosemary flan with candied cranberries that I ordered every time I went, so I could watch other people try it for the first time).
You couldn’t call the wine list dated, with its unwashed, uncombed natural types among other groomed, sedate numbers, and some fine values between $50 and $75 tiptoeing among the super-Tuscans and 2005 Bordeaux.