A relaxing, affordable, hit-the-spot restaurant in Midtown: much harder to find than it should be. But I’ve decided the holy grail, or at least one of them, is at Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote. This cumbersomely named but brilliantly simple spot opened a few months ago as the belated NYC branch of a 50-year-old Paris bistro that also has branches in London and Barcelona. The concept is as streamlined as it gets: Walk in, sit down, and watch as the food starts arriving at your table. No menu hassles, and no waiters constantly interrupting your conversation to ask if you’ve made any decisions yet. You might have to wait a bit for a table, since the restaurant doesn’t take reservations. But other than that, zero headaches.
There are pretty much no decisions to make here. You start with a green salad with walnuts and a mustard-spiked vinaigrette (the only appetizer available here), and follow that with the restaurant’s signature—and only—main course: sirloin steak-frites, served sliced and coated in a luscious, buttery-herby “secret recipe sauce,” along with crispy thin fries piled high. The price for the two-course meal: $24. No point in coming here if you’re a vegetarian, obviously, but for carnivores the combo of flavors and textures here is hard to argue with: meaty, buttery, creamy, salty, juicy, crunchy, you get the picture. Only decisions you’ll have to make are how you want the steak cooked, and what you want to drink.
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay for Food & Wine lamenting the fact that most restaurants insist on handing out menus. Why not just let us hang out in peace, bring out a few delicious things the chef is making that day, and be done with it? The whole business of reading through the menu and puzzling over what to order can get in the way of actually relaxing, catching up with friends, and enjoying the food—just my humble opinion. I realize most restaurants aren’t going to dispense with menus—and most readers right now are asking, “What the hell is she talking about? I love menus!” I won’t get into this argument too much here, since my thoughts on it are all in that F&W piece (above). I’m just glad Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecote is forging ahead with their so-far enormously successful no-menu plan (at the Europe branches, lines are usually out the door). Judging from the full dining room here, enough people in NYC seem to want to eat this way too, at least once in a while.