At Chez Ma Tante in Brooklyn, the first restaurant Aidan O’Neal and Jake Leiber ran together, early press reports portrayed Mr. O’Neal as the executive chef and Mr. Leiber as his second in command. But in interviews they gave — always in tandem — it was clear that they were equal partners and that they agreed about everything from their preferred cooking surface (Teflon) to the ideal art to hang in the dining room (none).
They share the job of executive chef at their second restaurant, Le Crocodile, also in Brooklyn. This is probably fortunate for them, given how popular the place has become since it opened in December. It is definitely fortunate for us, because another thing Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Leiber apparently agree about is how the food at a modern New York brasserie should look and taste.
The menu’s long, single page cascades from one category of appetizer to the next, from shellfish to snails, before arriving, about midway down, at Entrées. That’s a head fake: the word is used in the French sense, and denotes more appetizers. Ten main courses follow, under Plats Principaux, and then come a dozen desserts that more or less describe themselves: profiteroles, chocolate pot de crème, a cheerfully sour lemon tart. There are so many dishes you’re not quite sure at first whether two guys whose best-known creation is a pancake will be able to keep up. They do that and then some. Nearly everything I’ve had at Le Crocodile has made me want to come back for more.
This is not the easiest feat in a genre as thoroughly pawed-over and cliché-ridden as brasserie food, although to be precise we are dealing here with New York City’s peculiar notion of brasserie food. In a New York brasserie you almost never see choucroute, but you may well see Jonah crab salad, which at Le Crocodile, is stirred with yuzukosho mayonnaise and sits on a cushion of avocado purée. It’s delicious. So are other cold things from the raw bar: sea scallops in a spicy green pool of parsley juice, herbs and lemon; Wellfleet oysters, their deep pearly cups holding a splash or two of bay water.
Despite this distinctly broad-minded understanding of brasserie cooking, though, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Leiber do get in a lot of recipes that either come from France or make you think of it. Onion soup is mandatory in a place like this, but Le Crocodile makes it pull its own weight. The broth is almost velvety, fortified by lardons, and there are good crunchy mouthfuls of toasted sourdough croutons instead of the usual limp blobs of drowned bread.
Pickled mussels, plump and orange, nod distantly to the plate of herring at every other brasserie in France, down to the pickled onions and carrots that ride along. Cold leeks in vinaigrette make an appearance, too, though they’ve undergone a little remodeling: trimmed into bite-size segments that are stood on end in a foundation of ravigote sauce and then covered with toasted hazelnuts.
There’s a sort of salade lyonnaise — I say sort of because the lardons you’d find in Lyon have been replaced by smoked eel. The idea is great; the salad is smokier than the original, and with the wonderful added oily softness of the eel. In its framework, it is not too different from the smoked-herring Caesar found at M. Wells Steakhouse, and before that at the original, too-pure-to-last M. Wells in a stainless-steel diner.
Mr. O’Neal cooked in the diner, and was later put in charge of M. Wells Dinette inside MoMA PS1. His cooking still has that half-crazy gleam in its eye, but the characteristic M. Wells urge to drive every dish to the edge of a cliff and then step on the gas is not much in evidence at Le Crocodile. He and Mr. Leiber, whose formative years as a cook were spent at Barbuto under Jonathan Waxman, are at home making food that seems perfectly normal and ordinary right up until you taste it.
Le Crocodile slithered into the empty shell in the Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg that was left behind last year when Reynard closed. The industrial bones are the same: the double-height ceilings, well-worn floor planks, big arched windows punched through fortress-thick brick walls. But the interior was altered, hiding the open kitchen that used to dominate the room behind light wood paneling, replacing the bentwood cafe chairs with more comfortable models and adding some round leather booths.
The results are dramatic; the room has a little more style and sense of purpose, and a lot more energy. It’s a place where people, or at least Brooklynites, want to sit and stay. Even after 10 on a school night, there are salty stacks of pommes frites on every table. These are piled next to either the steak au poivre or the roasted chicken, in which case the poultry and the fries will be slowly soaking up a warm helping of chicken jus and fresh herbs.
The bar is still in place, with a new marble top. Also left over from Reynard is an impressive trove of natural wines compiled by Lee Campbell, who was more than a few steps ahead of the pack. Rafa García Febles now has the keys to the cellar, and has built judiciously on the legacy of Ms. Campbell and her successor, Basile Al Mileik.
There’s no way to mention natural wines, a modern New York brasserie and a pair of coequal chefs without summoning thoughts of Frenchette. Remarkably, there is very little overlap between them. Le Crocodile looks less McNallyish, and the kitchen is less entranced by organ meats, although somebody back there knows how to prepare sweetbreads, which are puffy and creamy on a small hill of potato purée, set off by charred onions and a fistful of lardons. (They must be on loan from the salade lyonnaise.)
Both restaurants sell a lot of frites. The ones at Frenchette are better, but it’s close.
Both take the science of charcuterie seriously, but Le Crocodile, with almost half a dozen terrines and pâtés to try on any given night, gets the edge. Even the mushroom pâté, smooth as foie gras and held together by what must be a small mountain of butter, is superb.
The food at both places shows great skill and self-assurance with very little preening and self-consciousness. You can tell when you eat at Le Crocodile that Mr. Leiber and Mr. O’Neal are cooking things they’d eat if they ever sat down in their own restaurant. That’s rarer than you’d think.
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