Le Veau d’Or Is Excellent Again

Since 1937, Le Veau d’Or has sat squat and immobile on East 60th Street across from Bloomingdale’s, whose perfume spritzers might well have begun their spritzing primarily to combat the drifting waft of garlic. Le Veau d’Or — the Golden Calf, at 87 surely the world’s oldest — has always been a testament to Frenchness served froggy, even before the sizzling cocotte of legs arrives at your table. In the middle of the 20th century, its heyday, it served the lusty French country cuisine that was still the mark of nonpareil sophistication — blanquette, escargot, kidneys — to the city’s grandees; the old Le Veau was the sort of place where “Dave” Selznick would be spotted dining with Jennifer Jones, for whom he had recently left Irene Mayer.

As the decades slid by, new trends and cuisines supplanted the dominance of French, but Le Veau d’Or soldiered on, impervious. It has always had its acolytes (“If you are condemned to eat in but one restaurant in this city for the rest of your life, choose the legendary Veau d’Or,” this magazine wrote in 1978) and its fed-up detractors (“The myth, apparently, is outliving the reality,” Mimi Sheraton had sniffed in the Times the month before), but while the restaurant cycled through owners — most recently Catherine Tréboux, who took over from her father, Robert — they all upheld its traditions and menu. Its latest stewards, the neo-bistro specialists Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson of Frenchette and Le Rock, seem committed to doing the same. “My grandma used to go there!” cried one of my dinner guests when I extended an invitation. She accepted, with a warning: “If this painting isn’t still hanging in there,” she said, texting a photo of a sleeping calf nestled under covers (“le veau dort”), “I’m leaving.”

It is. The dining room has undergone a few touch-ups, but on the whole the décor is remarkably faithful to Le Veau of yore. The waiters’ tuxedos have been swapped for blush pink chore coats, yet otherwise it’s the same checkered tablecloths, the same cigar-colored glow. And the menu, served table d’hôte style, as one veritably French waitress put it (we’d call it prix fixe), is much as it ever was — not for the faint or unmedicated of heart: organ meats and snails, duck and sausage, île flottante.

In recent years, the restaurant’s shine had dimmed, joining the ranks of those institutions whose quality stands in contrast to — even in inverse proportion to — their belovedness. But I am delighted to report that Le Veau d’Or is once again excellent; even in a moment when French cuisine is ascendant, it more than justifies itself in a re-crowded market.

I’ve enjoyed Nasr and Hanson’s cooking without necessarily loving their establishments, which often felt to me either hyped-up or propped-up, more about the machinations around them than the places themselves. But something about the anachronistic strictness of Le Veau d’Or is working. The chefs are familiar with ersatz homage — alongside Keith McNally, they opened Balthazar, an ode to Paris’s time-stained brasseries so loving it was easy to forget it was a pure-spun fantasy and not the thing itself; and helped bring back Minetta Tavern. As at Minetta, they are reviving, rather than reconstituting. The results are magic.

In this current phase of the restaurant, three courses and a salad (served, in the classical French way, between plats principaux and dessert) go for a reasonable-these-days $125. There are no supplemental upcharges or wine pairings; there is, instead, Jorge Riera, Nasr and Hanson’s longtime wine counterpart, circling the dining room, recommending from the all-French, compact, surprisingly well-priced list. Riera is a longtime natural-wine proselytizer, and the all-natural list is probably the biggest amendment to the restaurant’s traditionalism, but trust him — we found none of the chuggy, grape-soda Beaujolais that crowds natural-wine lists elsewhere, and loved the organic La Sœur Cadette from Juliénas.

The food menu spans 17 entrees, nine mains, and seven desserts. I’m not prepared to say there are no wrong turns, but the restaurant can accommodate a wide range of Francophiles, from Louis XV–style gourmands seeking beefy oeufs en gelée or a mustardy fricassee of veal kidneys, sweetbreads, and a tidy square of calf’s liver, to the latter-day Pastisiennes here for oysters and hanger steak. (The oysters are served, as they are at Frenchette, with little chipolata sausages.) Having commandeered samples of all my table’s choices, I would recommend starting with the pâté en croûte, a thin slice of crumbly, porky bits in a burnished crust, rather than the destined-for-Instagram pommes soufflées caviar rouge à la crème, which, though a feat of engineering, are more or less spherical potato chips with dip. “Super Bowl food,” one of my companions said when they arrived, “and more rouge than caviar.” What really should be Super Bowl food are the frogs’ legs, which come cross-legged and parsleyed, tasting a bit like shrimpy chicken wings. Ask nicely and you can get a shared platter à la carte for the table.

Among the mains, high marks went to the lobster, served cold in its shell on a bed of diced-vegetable macédoine, and a medallion of scallops with sauce vierge, both of which counted as healthy relief in a tablescape of pure saturated fat. But you come for the clog: The offal trio was a pleasure well worth the visit to the confessional afterward, as were thick slices of red, rare lamb. If I had to choose one entrée, it would be the duck breast with cherries, a version of which has been on the menu for decades, here given a crust so crackling and peppered it resembles edible sandpaper.

As the meal wears on and your paper tablecloth becomes stained with grease, a server will come by to lay one of the restaurant’s red-and-white checkered bistro towels over the offending sections, as many as required — true success is a complete quilt. Then comes the light salad and, if you’ve ordered wisely, a cold, intensely fruity soupe de melon and a floating island, a crenellated mound of meringue in a sea of rich, eggy crème anglaise. Like 80 years’ worth of dazed patrons before me, I stumbled to the door, drowsy as a calf.